Of course we can say that anyone who cites the paper deserves ridicule, but this sort of thing can cause real harm to people's livelihood.
And that is bad because? Someone who would cite that paper (other than in it's role as a spoof) is clearly in the wrong livelyhood.
Personally, I think Sokal would have done everyone, and especially the readers of Social Text, a huge favour by not publishig the retraction until a couple of years later. That would have allowed it to act as a net to fish out some deadwood.
it was (and still is) considered intellectually dishonest to permit the thing to go to publication
That is very unclear. (not that it is considered... anything is probably considered anything by someone, but you know what I mean).
Where is the dishonesty in not saying anything? Sokal's paper was vacuous, so he was really doing no more than encouraging Social Text to publish some blank sheets of paper.
I had forgotten that ST was a target because they had abandoned peer review, so in fact the randomised paper did just as well as Sokal.
This paper would fail the first rule, if you don't understand it, reject it. Either it is drivel, or it is submitted to the wrong conference/journal/whatever or you should not be a referee for this. Since the last is someone else's decision, you can happily behave as if they know what theya re doing.
Of course, this kind of scam works on the reluctance of accademics to just say they don't understand something.
So it's hardly supprising it wasn't rejected. That people orgaising conferences will accept papers just because no one can be arsed to read them is, of course, a different matter.
The queen was the Borg's attempt to recognize that there was indeed power in individuality.
They had nearly taken out the federation with one ship. Clearly power was not a problem for them.
Besides, the queen reduces the level of individuality in the collective, giving them a single will and so a single point of failure.
The borg as originally concieved were terribly individualistic. Each drone and each little bit of a cube was an individual threat, to deal with even a single cube you have to nail every single little bit to the ground and beat it to death.
What the borg lacked was diversity. You don't increase diversity by creating a centralised control.
Once they became just another interstelar empire that was inevitable. It is a fundamental Trek assumption that the heroic captain and his/her crew can take down the evil empire (or at least knock it back and win the day).
The Borg were the outstanding creation of TNG because they were truely alien. They weren't just a competitor or alternative to the federation, they were a threat to it's nature. For Iain Banks fans, they were an Excession.
It's clear that the writers and producers of later Treks just completely missed the point, to them the borg were just Klingons or Romulans but more powerful. It's as if they started from the conept of a movie about the battle against AIDS in Africa and created a movie where Arnie fights his way up the Congo with guns and grenades to a big fight with the head HIV virus in it's secret base inside a volcano.
But presumably the same people were making the choices. That they chose to destroy the only truely great concept to come out of post TOS Trek in a big splash in cinemas rather than in an embarassed moment on the small screen just underlines the lack of clue.
Serenity was two decades old, and kept falling apart.
But at least it probably worked originally. I'd rather by flying around in an old but tested ship than an experimental prototype.
Both premises give the writers the opportunity to have things go wrong at the drop of a hat (there is a third, used on Blakes 7, where you are on a ship you don't understand).
You are aware that currently NO anti-spyware tool covers 100% of all worms and trojans? Even a combination of all the tools will not guarentee protection.
And no windscreen wiper removes 100% of the H20 from all corners of the windscreen. Doesn't mean you shouldn't know how to turn them on.
The point, surely, is that if your box gets compromised, you need to fix it and secure it before using it again. Having someone there to pull the plug is a Good Thing. If you are compromised by an attack for which you have no available defence, then you need to stay off the internet until you do have a defence.
Of course, the implecations of this for internet updated anti-virus databases are obvious and severe.
Of coure, that was what Enterprise was supposed to be. The first venture of human beings beyond their close neighbourhood where they have been sheltered by the Vulcans, with long established groups like the Klingons and Romulans out there should have resulted in the most under under-dogs imaginable.
It could have been an incredably good premise with them in deep shit every week, no back up from home and no magic technological get-outs for the writers. The first couple of shows where the Klingons were to Earth the kind of threat the borg were for TNG were actually promising. If they could have develped along that line they could have gotten a must-see series.
Of course, that would have involved work for the writers, and so it was much easier to fall back on old lazy habits. Aparently you can disable a Klingon ship by throwing a rope at it.
particularly the "Augments" trilogy.
producer
Panic! We're going down the S bend! What can we do?
writer
Well, I suppose we can pinch some ideas from Wrath of Khan, the fans liked that one, and how about if we throw in one of the actors from the next generation? And half dressed women in bedroom scenes of course.
producer
Great! We're Saved! That kind of thinking will get us 4 more seasons!
You just assume that the people will suffice by installing (purchasing?) some equivalent to a windscreen wiper such as antivirus software but that won't be enough for the really nasty ones.
If someone targets you for a sophisticated attack, you are probably not a normal internet user (eg you're commercial or a political site or something), you need professional IT support and shouldn't be using a normal retail ISP.
Th threat to normal customers is generic worms and trojans and so on. Things which the basic security everyone should be usig will protect against. Just the equivalnt of using windscreen wipers when it is raining.
IIRC my ISP supplies some kind of firewall/antivirus package for all customers. (I've had my connection since before this kind of thing became really necessary and don't connect from Windows, so I've never investigated what they are offerring). I can't imagine why any ISP would not do that -- the saving in customer support calls alone would more than pay for it.
Well, there is no need to *disconnect* the computer if all you have to do is block the problematic port.
I think for 99.9999% of a residential ISP's customers, having their access to DNS blocked would not be noticably different from disconnection.
Besides, is someone has an infected PC, disconnection is a friendly action. It kicks them up the arse so they have to find out what is going on, and it prevents them being zombied.
We have a collective problem that many many people have PCs on the internet but don't have the kind of basic understanding we demand before we'd allow them onto the road in a car. Sending them back to the garage for a day or two with a hint to learn what the windscreen wipers are for is good for everyone.
Which, of course, means `on the whim of an individual police officer'.
This reads very like the stop-and-search powers of UK police which have always caused a stink. Indeed, from news coverrage I've seen from France, they have the same problem with ID checks we have with suss laws -- somehow the likelyhood of these laws being applied to you corrolates remarkably well with skin colour.
Star Trek was originally about teaching us about ourselves without being condescending, pious, or boring.
And green skinned orion slave girls:-).
If you don't think Star Trek was condescending, pious and boring when it tried to do morals, you must have a very high tolerance for being condescended to. Even as a kid I felt I was having my inteligence insulted by things like the people who were half black, half white.
[...] a bunch of pansy-ass default bad guys that drove around in blocks and spheres.
Bad girl you mean. The give away that they had lost all clues was the queen. That personalised the borg. Originally the borg weren't a military/imperial force, they were something more like a disease. They couldn't be fought just by sending in more and more powerful ships, and they couldn't be negotiated with. That was a real threat.
It's clearly not _necessary_ in a business sense to take care of the environment etc
Exactly. To say that it is necessary is to say that everyone will do it, or they won't survive for you to worry about.
In fact most environmental controls are `merely' extremely desirable. They are choices we make because we don't want to live in a shit hole or die young of black lung.
But we have to pay for that choice. We can pay by working harder for a given quality of life or we can, temporarilly, pay by exporting jobs to places where those luxury choices have not been made, and so effectively thrusting fellow citizens into poverty.
What we can't do is expect to work like the people without the environmental benefits but keep those benefits.
Now, there is a difference between India and China WRT all this. India is a democracy, they have the same choices. China is not, the state there is playing a remarkably good game of simulating the effects of an open society WRT their economy, without actually opening up, but its unlikely they can keep that up indefinitely.
The US and EU shouldn't be helping China play that game, but the US government needs somewhere to sell the countries future to, and Europe needs a temporary export market quickly.
India though is another matter, they are just waking up and playing the game which got the US and EU where they are now, and hoping to tempt us into goging down the road they followed from independence to recently which would hand them a walk-over.
The point is that the "great deal of money" I am paid is only a "great deal of money" in other countries where the cost of living is lower
Tough. Blame your parents. The cost of living adjusts to the income level.
To keep ahead you have to keep getting better, or allow the local economy to collapse to drop incomes and expenses back a bit. Your choice.
You will notice that other options will be being proposed to you by politicians. They are getting payed a hell of a lot of money, and their main aim is to keep you confused, so they can keep getting payed, so when things go pear-shaped they will be safe on their estate surrounded by armed guards.
If you think that is a problem, stop doing it. You don't need self destructive protectionist state controls, you just need to do something different when you shop.
In fact, the main problem with the US economy currently is that you re-elected a don't-tax-but-spend-anyway government and so are selling the whole place to China at bargain prices to stave off total fiscal collapse for a few months more.
Slashdot Mirror
The DaVinci Code is fiction. To use it as an example of work in the humanities is like using Harry Potter as an example of work in physics.
And that is bad because? Someone who would cite that paper (other than in it's role as a spoof) is clearly in the wrong livelyhood.
Personally, I think Sokal would have done everyone, and especially the readers of Social Text, a huge favour by not publishig the retraction until a couple of years later. That would have allowed it to act as a net to fish out some deadwood.
That is very unclear. (not that it is considered... anything is probably considered anything by someone, but you know what I mean).
Where is the dishonesty in not saying anything? Sokal's paper was vacuous, so he was really doing no more than encouraging Social Text to publish some blank sheets of paper.
I had forgotten that ST was a target because they had abandoned peer review, so in fact the randomised paper did just as well as Sokal.
Of course, this kind of scam works on the reluctance of accademics to just say they don't understand something.
So, this doesn't come close to the sucess of Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity which got into a peer reviewed journal.
No! You don't say!
Congratulations on manageing to be even more condescending and insulting than even the original writer managed.
They had nearly taken out the federation with one ship. Clearly power was not a problem for them.
Besides, the queen reduces the level of individuality in the collective, giving them a single will and so a single point of failure.
The borg as originally concieved were terribly individualistic. Each drone and each little bit of a cube was an individual threat, to deal with even a single cube you have to nail every single little bit to the ground and beat it to death.
What the borg lacked was diversity. You don't increase diversity by creating a centralised control.
Well, we have had computer viruses so long, it was inevitable we'd end up with nerdy bacteria.
Once they became just another interstelar empire that was inevitable. It is a fundamental Trek assumption that the heroic captain and his/her crew can take down the evil empire (or at least knock it back and win the day).
The Borg were the outstanding creation of TNG because they were truely alien. They weren't just a competitor or alternative to the federation, they were a threat to it's nature. For Iain Banks fans, they were an Excession.
It's clear that the writers and producers of later Treks just completely missed the point, to them the borg were just Klingons or Romulans but more powerful. It's as if they started from the conept of a movie about the battle against AIDS in Africa and created a movie where Arnie fights his way up the Congo with guns and grenades to a big fight with the head HIV virus in it's secret base inside a volcano.
But presumably the same people were making the choices. That they chose to destroy the only truely great concept to come out of post TOS Trek in a big splash in cinemas rather than in an embarassed moment on the small screen just underlines the lack of clue.
But at least it probably worked originally. I'd rather by flying around in an old but tested ship than an experimental prototype.
Both premises give the writers the opportunity to have things go wrong at the drop of a hat (there is a third, used on Blakes 7, where you are on a ship you don't understand).
And no windscreen wiper removes 100% of the H20 from all corners of the windscreen. Doesn't mean you shouldn't know how to turn them on.
The point, surely, is that if your box gets compromised, you need to fix it and secure it before using it again. Having someone there to pull the plug is a Good Thing. If you are compromised by an attack for which you have no available defence, then you need to stay off the internet until you do have a defence.
Of course, the implecations of this for internet updated anti-virus databases are obvious and severe.
Of coure, that was what Enterprise was supposed to be. The first venture of human beings beyond their close neighbourhood where they have been sheltered by the Vulcans, with long established groups like the Klingons and Romulans out there should have resulted in the most under under-dogs imaginable.
It could have been an incredably good premise with them in deep shit every week, no back up from home and no magic technological get-outs for the writers. The first couple of shows where the Klingons were to Earth the kind of threat the borg were for TNG were actually promising. If they could have develped along that line they could have gotten a must-see series.
Of course, that would have involved work for the writers, and so it was much easier to fall back on old lazy habits. Aparently you can disable a Klingon ship by throwing a rope at it.
If someone targets you for a sophisticated attack, you are probably not a normal internet user (eg you're commercial or a political site or something), you need professional IT support and shouldn't be using a normal retail ISP.
Th threat to normal customers is generic worms and trojans and so on. Things which the basic security everyone should be usig will protect against. Just the equivalnt of using windscreen wipers when it is raining.
IIRC my ISP supplies some kind of firewall/antivirus package for all customers. (I've had my connection since before this kind of thing became really necessary and don't connect from Windows, so I've never investigated what they are offerring). I can't imagine why any ISP would not do that -- the saving in customer support calls alone would more than pay for it.
I think for 99.9999% of a residential ISP's customers, having their access to DNS blocked would not be noticably different from disconnection.
Besides, is someone has an infected PC, disconnection is a friendly action. It kicks them up the arse so they have to find out what is going on, and it prevents them being zombied.
We have a collective problem that many many people have PCs on the internet but don't have the kind of basic understanding we demand before we'd allow them onto the road in a car. Sending them back to the garage for a day or two with a hint to learn what the windscreen wipers are for is good for everyone.
Which, of course, means `on the whim of an individual police officer'.
This reads very like the stop-and-search powers of UK police which have always caused a stink. Indeed, from news coverrage I've seen from France, they have the same problem with ID checks we have with suss laws -- somehow the likelyhood of these laws being applied to you corrolates remarkably well with skin colour.
And green skinned orion slave girls:-).
If you don't think Star Trek was condescending, pious and boring when it tried to do morals, you must have a very high tolerance for being condescended to. Even as a kid I felt I was having my inteligence insulted by things like the people who were half black, half white.
Bad girl you mean. The give away that they had lost all clues was the queen. That personalised the borg. Originally the borg weren't a military/imperial force, they were something more like a disease. They couldn't be fought just by sending in more and more powerful ships, and they couldn't be negotiated with. That was a real threat.
If you think they are making unsustainable decisions, then at worst they are a short term problem.:-)
Indeed, you might say they will follow suit or die. What a good phrase, where have I read it recently?
Exactly. To say that it is necessary is to say that everyone will do it, or they won't survive for you to worry about.
In fact most environmental controls are `merely' extremely desirable. They are choices we make because we don't want to live in a shit hole or die young of black lung.
But we have to pay for that choice. We can pay by working harder for a given quality of life or we can, temporarilly, pay by exporting jobs to places where those luxury choices have not been made, and so effectively thrusting fellow citizens into poverty.
What we can't do is expect to work like the people without the environmental benefits but keep those benefits.
Now, there is a difference between India and China WRT all this. India is a democracy, they have the same choices. China is not, the state there is playing a remarkably good game of simulating the effects of an open society WRT their economy, without actually opening up, but its unlikely they can keep that up indefinitely.
The US and EU shouldn't be helping China play that game, but the US government needs somewhere to sell the countries future to, and Europe needs a temporary export market quickly.
India though is another matter, they are just waking up and playing the game which got the US and EU where they are now, and hoping to tempt us into goging down the road they followed from independence to recently which would hand them a walk-over.
Tough. Blame your parents. The cost of living adjusts to the income level.
To keep ahead you have to keep getting better, or allow the local economy to collapse to drop incomes and expenses back a bit. Your choice.
You will notice that other options will be being proposed to you by politicians. They are getting payed a hell of a lot of money, and their main aim is to keep you confused, so they can keep getting payed, so when things go pear-shaped they will be safe on their estate surrounded by armed guards.
How silly of me to think that necessary meant necessary.
If you think that is a problem, stop doing it. You don't need self destructive protectionist state controls, you just need to do something different when you shop.
In fact, the main problem with the US economy currently is that you re-elected a don't-tax-but-spend-anyway government and so are selling the whole place to China at bargain prices to stave off total fiscal collapse for a few months more.