Many excellent biologists will hoard their work out of enlightened self interest. There will of course be individuals who see farther than that.
One of the nice points of the current scientific system is that there's no (academic) reward for hiding your results or failing to disclose some special secret technique you invented. No results = no publication. No publication = no reputation. No reputation = no grant funding and no tenure, or at least inglorious obscurity if you're already tenured;-)
Of course, once money is involved, there's a tendency to want to keep everything under wraps until it's patentable. And to be sure, often labs will withhold their data from competitors until it's been submitted to a journal. But that's only fair, and even competitors will usually cooperate on some level in "academic" science. I remember a friend saying how her lab and another lab agreed to publish their very similar papers in the same issue of a journal, so neither one was "scooped". As a result, they reinforced each others' credibility instead of fighting over it.
This comment holds weight if and only if people *must* have sex. *Must* they? No, sex is never a necessity for individual survival.
I don't know about you, but I consider sex to be a very important part of being a human being, whether it be solitary (ie. masturbation) or with one or more partners. As well as the obvious mechanism of reproduction, it's part of how we pair-bond with romantic partners, as well as being a simple source of physical pleasure. I can "survive" in a concrete cell, wearing a burlap sack and eating a slurry of proteins, vitamins, carbohydrates and fiber, but life is more than survival. *This* life is more than just a morality test to see if we're going to be allowed into heaven. At least that's what I believe. As for you, have fun praying and cowering in your "cell".
Please. I never read that 5|-|17 anyway. anybody who uses 5p33k that l33t isn't worth listening to anyway, even if they're trying to tell you their proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. And you'll get fragged while you stand around trying to decode all their cool trash talk.
If you're american, and I suspect you are (if I'm wrong, I'll eat a bug), the political "Left Wing" in your country is a joke, which exists solely to "buy votes from the poor" (a purchase paid for in empty promises and lip service to social justice) as you quite correctly put it. Hell, the Left up here in Canada is pretty much a joke too, ineffectual, poorly-led and torn with internal struggles between Labour and Green elements. It's no wonder we haven't got a person on Mars yet, the hands holding the purse strings are tied to eyes so short-sighted they can barely see to the end of a 4-year mandate.
Not because of any paranoid mistrust of the Russians. Not because of any BS about spending the money on the earthbound poor.
Well as far as I can tell, the money for a crewed Mars program is squandered every year by the US gov't, catering to the earthbound rich. And any "paranoia" about Russia is probably partly a strong, founded suspicion that they can't really afford to contribute significantly. So I wouldn't shed any tears for those putative Mars organisms right now. It'll be a while before anyone sets foot on the red planet.
Shed tears for them later. When resource extraction companies and venture capitalists reach Mars, they're f*cked, just like every other "indigenous population" in the history of human exploration and colonization.
No offense buddy, but I hesitate to place too much credence in a movie assessment by somebody who knows what Raquel Darrian's boobs looked like *before*... (I do now, thanks Google Image Search:-D)
Ok, I'm referring to the country currently known as "Myanmar", but I refuse to grant the torturing, fascist limp-dick fucks in SLORC the dignity of using their chosen name.
Basically, from what I've heard, 10% of the adult population of Burma are secret police informants, either willingly or through coercion. You can never be sure who your real friends are, and no activity involving more than one person can be secure. More importantly (to this discussion), unlicensed possession of a modem is severely punished. So, in Burma, stego, crypto, and traffic analysis are all effectively obsolete. Only "trusted" people and organizations get internet access, with the understanding that they will be watched closely. Everyone else lives in medieval isolation (except for working for PepsiCo), cut off from the rest of the world, with far fewer human rights than even the citizens of China.
1. It's fun. It's enjoyable to watch, by and large. 2. It has attractive, intelligent and complex characters, especially compared to a lot of lesser "fantasy" type shows like "Charmed". 3. It's generally well-written. Ok, maybe the characters are a little more well-spoken and witty than most people are in Real Life, but who isn't on TV? 4. The production values are superb, the special effects are innovative and believable, and the action sequences are exciting.
I'd say those are good reasons to watch a TV show. Any deeper arguments about tapping into cultural mythos, teenage identity crisis etc. may be debatable, but are really just a bonus.
And they're also where my roomate hunts catgirls ^_^
And y'all wonder why more women don't go to anime conventions...:-P (though I suppose anyone who attends dressed as a catgirl is probably an attention-seeker)
Personally, I liked the approach in "Repo Man" - they couldn't get any product placement $, so all products in the film were given generic labels: for example, "BEER".
I think they were expecting a bunch of dog-boy Recombinants, on the run from the sinister government agency which was breeding them to be super-soldiers. But all they found was a hot brunette chick with puffy lips and a barcode on her neck. She told them to pull their heads out of their asses, and do something useful, like write a halfways decent piece about the homeless.
A female employee was FIRED for having "lesbian porn in her home folder"?! While everyone else's porn was just deleted? I really hope this is way out of context, because otherwise your company are assholes, and sue-able assholes at that. In fact, if you found the lesbian porn and set this all in motion, rather than just deleting it, you are an asshole too. Well, actually I suspect you're just a troll, but the point needs to be made.
I don't think LucasArts wants to re-release SCUMM "Monkey Island" with an updated engine. I think it's a great game, but it's still played partly because there's a nostalgia element to it. It hearkens back to the days when super 3D graphics weren't needed for great gameplay.
If LucasArts releases a new Monkey Island title, it'll obviously be a whole new game, with AI NPC's, an immersive 3D world, and so on. I don't expect they're too worried about competition from the pixely, 2D 10 year old original...
"Certainly, sir. I hope you didn't need that credit card, car loan, job, health insurance... etc." In such ways do they steal our freedom, one "need" at a time... In order to follow the philosophy in my.sig file, a LOT of sacrifices must be made, to the point of being unbearable. That's the way the system is designed. More power to you if you can fight it.
I'm surprised nobody else has compared this to the "Esper" device used in Blade Runner, which allowed Deckard to "see around corners" in static images. Though, to be fair, I can't think of any *possible* way this could be done using only one image - unless the machine was extrapolating from extremely subtle shadows and reflections on other objects on the picture. Even then you'd get a very crude image of unseen objects at best.
No, but with a few of these in vitro-grown thymuses (thymii?) implanted in your body, you'll develop a Wolverine-like super immune system and live to be a bitter, violent 150-year old amnesiac super hero.
In "Star Wars Episode I: A New Hope", the heroes mistake the Death Star for a moon, suggesting that it is about 0.2-2x the size of Earth's moon (for argument's sake). However, no statements are made about the mass of the Death Star!
In Return of the Jedi, we get a brief view of what the inside of the DS looks like. Its centre is a huge hollow chamber containing "the main reactor"*. I would argue that the mass of the DS is quite small for its size, simply because 1)constructing a solid object that size would be a staggering undertaking even by Imperial standards, and 2) there's no need for it to be "solid" - even if the habitable area only extends a couple of hundred feet below the surface, there's still bucketloads of room for untold legions of Stormtroopers, Imperial Navy troops, droids, TIE fighters, Wookiee laborers, Twi'lek pleasure girls, and all their life support and maintenance machinery to reside in spacious comfort!
So why is the DS so big? Well, the station is essentially a spacegoing platform housing an incredibly powerful energy weapon, and an incredibly powerful hyperdrive. That "main reactor" is probably pumping out some serious wattage. Perhaps the station is a large sphere to maintain the habitable area at a safe distance from the reactor to protect the crew from whatever radiation is being produced there.
* just because the tunnel the Millenium Falcon flies down to reach the reactor is jammed with pipes and conduits, doesn't mean the whole station interior is like this. This may just be a "service tunnel" surrounded by empty space.
eBay would be an excellent target for this proposed measure. The RIAA would simply force them to add a fee to each CD transaction which would cover the "royalties". This is because, like Napster, eBay has a central organization which can be legally targeted.
Now, the obvious remedy to this is a decentralized P2P system, where there is no single entity to attack. However, eBay provides certain CRITICAL services without which buying online would be much less appealing. When somebody you bought from over a P2P network rips you off, what are you going to do? Leave negative feedback? Get their account banned? Who will ban them? People are willing to buy things from complete strangers on eBay because the central corporation provides a measure of control, reliability and trust to the buyer and seller. Without that, you send your $ and take your chances.
Um, why did your mom think Linux was eeeeeeeeevill just from seeing you use it? Why would anyone? I don't understand. (kudos for recognizing that your users just need a basic box to DO things with, by the way!)
:-) Yeah, Dickens... Do you really think his books suck? (it's been ages since I read any, I can't remember much) I suspect Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were paid for by the word too, and they don't suck. Both great authors, who, to be fair, were writing in the style of their time. Jane Austen was verbose too. 19th century folks liked their novels the way they liked their women - with just a little extra padding.
I'm not sure that serialized books "don't work", so much as that people are so accustomed now to their serialized entertainment being televized weekly (or even daily!) that waiting for only 2 installments a month might not be very appealing to that many people. {loser}This is just my gut feeling, based on how long a week can feel when you're waiting for a new episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to hit the tube{/loser}. Add to that the reluctance of many people to pay for electronic text (Hell, even Stephen King couldn't make that work!) and this venture had a lot going against it. Too bad, because I really like the idea of authors being able to sell their work online, even if half the readers end up not paying them to read it. After all, I'm sure many authors get lots of new fans via second-hand book sales and libraries!
I would love to buy things in online auctions - except that invariably, some obsessive-compulsive type halfway across the continent is willing to bid half their net worth for whatever it is I'm looking for. My upper bidding limit (and I don't think I'm being cheap) is often a fraction of what the latest top bid is...
The good thing of course, is that this benefits sellers, and thus encourages a thriving auction market. If I can't afford to bid on an item that I can't get locally anyway, I guess nobody's hurt by that. The downside, as you say is that the often financially risky proposition of running a "brick-and-mortar" physical storefront somewhere is not as compelling for would-be retailers. So collectible items like comic books etc. may become completely unavailable, except online and in very large cities. One of the two local gaming/comic shops in my city just closed down to become a strictly online business (putting at least one fangirl out of work in the process...)
The nurses obeyed; but... at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock... the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased."
Sounds like the Catholic church would be more interested in this than the RIAA/MPAA...;-)
(Also, let this be a lesson in the value of selective quotation, to any of you out there doing your homework right now!)
Moshe Bar: We know the world created itself a few billion years ago and not 5762 years ago (according to the Jewish counting). We know that evolution is the culprit for that inexplicably destructive and increasingly contradictory thing called the human, the human was not made directly by G-d.
shawnmelliot: Actually, we scientifically don't know. because we have not actually witnessed it. We had a hypothesis which has become a theory. But we don't know.
Mr. Bar is a wise man, since he can apparently accept both science and religion without compromising either. We may not "know" these things in the sense of having visually witnessed it ourselves, but there is a VAST collection of indirect evidence which leads us to accept that this is what happened. Science is the business of using (often indirect) evidence to determine what is happening in the universe around us. This is why we are quite confident that we understand the fusion processes which cause the sun to shine, for instance. There may be subtleties which we do not know of yet, or we may be radically wrong, but so far, all evidence collected by many different researchers using different methods, suggests the current model is correct, EVEN THOUGH WE CANNOT DIRECTLY OBSERVE THE INTERIOR OF THE SUN. None of this has any bearing on wheither there is a G_d or not.
Please Please Please people, before you must say that we all evolved or that the earth is millions of years old and that those who say otherwise are incorrect remember that you are no more correct than they as far as science is concerned
You, however, are not a wise man. Like most Creationists who claim that the earth is "young" and evolution is an incorrect theory, you have no genuine, rigorous scientific basis for your claims. As far as science is concerned, your only "proof" for your beliefs is... The Bible. A book written by people, supposedly divinely inspired. On the other side, we have years of experiments and observations in the fields of astronomy, physics, evolutionary and molecular biology, and paleontology. See the talk.origins website for a detailed explanation of why Creationism is NOT science. Personally, I'm sick of futilely explaining it to people who really just want to impose their Christian origin myths on the rest of the world, using the word "Science" as a bludgeon.
I am ready to receive the flames I'm certain I will get for my statement but I felt it necessary and felt it to be on topic
Slashdot Mirror
Many excellent biologists will hoard their work out of enlightened self interest. There will of course be individuals who see farther than that.
;-)
One of the nice points of the current scientific system is that there's no (academic) reward for hiding your results or failing to disclose some special secret technique you invented. No results = no publication. No publication = no reputation. No reputation = no grant funding and no tenure, or at least inglorious obscurity if you're already tenured
Of course, once money is involved, there's a tendency to want to keep everything under wraps until it's patentable. And to be sure, often labs will withhold their data from competitors until it's been submitted to a journal. But that's only fair, and even competitors will usually cooperate on some level in "academic" science. I remember a friend saying how her lab and another lab agreed to publish their very similar papers in the same issue of a journal, so neither one was "scooped". As a result, they reinforced each others' credibility instead of fighting over it.
This comment holds weight if and only if people *must* have sex. *Must* they? No, sex is never a necessity for individual survival.
I don't know about you, but I consider sex to be a very important part of being a human being, whether it be solitary (ie. masturbation) or with one or more partners. As well as the obvious mechanism of reproduction, it's part of how we pair-bond with romantic partners, as well as being a simple source of physical pleasure. I can "survive" in a concrete cell, wearing a burlap sack and eating a slurry of proteins, vitamins, carbohydrates and fiber, but life is more than survival. *This* life is more than just a morality test to see if we're going to be allowed into heaven. At least that's what I believe. As for you, have fun praying and cowering in your "cell".
Please. I never read that 5|-|17 anyway. anybody who uses 5p33k that l33t isn't worth listening to anyway, even if they're trying to tell you their proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. And you'll get fragged while you stand around trying to decode all their cool trash talk.
If you're american, and I suspect you are (if I'm wrong, I'll eat a bug), the political "Left Wing" in your country is a joke, which exists solely to "buy votes from the poor" (a purchase paid for in empty promises and lip service to social justice) as you quite correctly put it. Hell, the Left up here in Canada is pretty much a joke too, ineffectual, poorly-led and torn with internal struggles between Labour and Green elements. It's no wonder we haven't got a person on Mars yet, the hands holding the purse strings are tied to eyes so short-sighted they can barely see to the end of a 4-year mandate.
Not because of any paranoid mistrust of the Russians. Not because of any BS about spending the money on the earthbound poor.
Well as far as I can tell, the money for a crewed Mars program is squandered every year by the US gov't, catering to the earthbound rich. And any "paranoia" about Russia is probably partly a strong, founded suspicion that they can't really afford to contribute significantly. So I wouldn't shed any tears for those putative Mars organisms right now. It'll be a while before anyone sets foot on the red planet.
Shed tears for them later. When resource extraction companies and venture capitalists reach Mars, they're f*cked, just like every other "indigenous population" in the history of human exploration and colonization.
No offense buddy, but I hesitate to place too much credence in a movie assessment by somebody who knows what Raquel Darrian's boobs looked like *before*... (I do now, thanks Google Image Search :-D)
Ok, I'm referring to the country currently known as "Myanmar", but I refuse to grant the torturing, fascist limp-dick fucks in SLORC the dignity of using their chosen name.
Basically, from what I've heard, 10% of the adult population of Burma are secret police informants, either willingly or through coercion. You can never be sure who your real friends are, and no activity involving more than one person can be secure. More importantly (to this discussion), unlicensed possession of a modem is severely punished. So, in Burma, stego, crypto, and traffic analysis are all effectively obsolete. Only "trusted" people and organizations get internet access, with the understanding that they will be watched closely. Everyone else lives in medieval isolation (except for working for PepsiCo), cut off from the rest of the world, with far fewer human rights than even the citizens of China.
1. It's fun. It's enjoyable to watch, by and large.
2. It has attractive, intelligent and complex characters, especially compared to a lot of lesser "fantasy" type shows like "Charmed".
3. It's generally well-written. Ok, maybe the characters are a little more well-spoken and witty than most people are in Real Life, but who isn't on TV?
4. The production values are superb, the special effects are innovative and believable, and the action sequences are exciting.
I'd say those are good reasons to watch a TV show. Any deeper arguments about tapping into cultural mythos, teenage identity crisis etc. may be debatable, but are really just a bonus.
And they're also where my roomate hunts catgirls ^_^
:-P (though I suppose anyone who attends dressed as a catgirl is probably an attention-seeker)
And y'all wonder why more women don't go to anime conventions...
Personally, I liked the approach in "Repo Man" - they couldn't get any product placement $, so all products in the film were given generic labels: for example, "BEER".
I think they were expecting a bunch of dog-boy Recombinants, on the run from the sinister government agency which was breeding them to be super-soldiers. But all they found was a hot brunette chick with puffy lips and a barcode on her neck. She told them to pull their heads out of their asses, and do something useful, like write a halfways decent piece about the homeless.
A female employee was FIRED for having "lesbian porn in her home folder"?! While everyone else's porn was just deleted? I really hope this is way out of context, because otherwise your company are assholes, and sue-able assholes at that. In fact, if you found the lesbian porn and set this all in motion, rather than just deleting it, you are an asshole too. Well, actually I suspect you're just a troll, but the point needs to be made.
I don't think LucasArts wants to re-release SCUMM "Monkey Island" with an updated engine. I think it's a great game, but it's still played partly because there's a nostalgia element to it. It hearkens back to the days when super 3D graphics weren't needed for great gameplay.
If LucasArts releases a new Monkey Island title, it'll obviously be a whole new game, with AI NPC's, an immersive 3D world, and so on. I don't expect they're too worried about competition from the pixely, 2D 10 year old original...
"Certainly, sir. I hope you didn't need that credit card, car loan, job, health insurance... etc." .sig file, a LOT of sacrifices must be made, to the point of being unbearable. That's the way the system is designed. More power to you if you can fight it.
In such ways do they steal our freedom, one "need" at a time... In order to follow the philosophy in my
I'm surprised nobody else has compared this to the "Esper" device used in Blade Runner, which allowed Deckard to "see around corners" in static images. Though, to be fair, I can't think of any *possible* way this could be done using only one image - unless the machine was extrapolating from extremely subtle shadows and reflections on other objects on the picture. Even then you'd get a very crude image of unseen objects at best.
If Kevin Poulsen was still up to his old tricks today, this would be exactly the sort of setup that would ensure he was busted very quickly...
No, but with a few of these in vitro-grown thymuses (thymii?) implanted in your body, you'll develop a Wolverine-like super immune system and live to be a bitter, violent 150-year old amnesiac super hero.
In "Star Wars Episode I: A New Hope", the heroes mistake the Death Star for a moon, suggesting that it is about 0.2-2x the size of Earth's moon (for argument's sake). However, no statements are made about the mass of the Death Star!
In Return of the Jedi, we get a brief view of what the inside of the DS looks like. Its centre is a huge hollow chamber containing "the main reactor"*. I would argue that the mass of the DS is quite small for its size, simply because 1)constructing a solid object that size would be a staggering undertaking even by Imperial standards, and 2) there's no need for it to be "solid" - even if the habitable area only extends a couple of hundred feet below the surface, there's still bucketloads of room for untold legions of Stormtroopers, Imperial Navy troops, droids, TIE fighters, Wookiee laborers, Twi'lek pleasure girls, and all their life support and maintenance machinery to reside in spacious comfort!
So why is the DS so big? Well, the station is essentially a spacegoing platform housing an incredibly powerful energy weapon, and an incredibly powerful hyperdrive. That "main reactor" is probably pumping out some serious wattage. Perhaps the station is a large sphere to maintain the habitable area at a safe distance from the reactor to protect the crew from whatever radiation is being produced there.
* just because the tunnel the Millenium Falcon flies down to reach the reactor is jammed with pipes and conduits, doesn't mean the whole station interior is like this. This may just be a "service tunnel" surrounded by empty space.
eBay would be an excellent target for this proposed measure. The RIAA would simply force them to add a fee to each CD transaction which would cover the "royalties". This is because, like Napster, eBay has a central organization which can be legally targeted.
Now, the obvious remedy to this is a decentralized P2P system, where there is no single entity to attack. However, eBay provides certain CRITICAL services without which buying online would be much less appealing. When somebody you bought from over a P2P network rips you off, what are you going to do? Leave negative feedback? Get their account banned? Who will ban them? People are willing to buy things from complete strangers on eBay because the central corporation provides a measure of control, reliability and trust to the buyer and seller. Without that, you send your $ and take your chances.
Um, why did your mom think Linux was eeeeeeeeevill just from seeing you use it? Why would anyone? I don't understand. (kudos for recognizing that your users just need a basic box to DO things with, by the way!)
:-) Yeah, Dickens... Do you really think his books suck? (it's been ages since I read any, I can't remember much) I suspect Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were paid for by the word too, and they don't suck. Both great authors, who, to be fair, were writing in the style of their time. Jane Austen was verbose too. 19th century folks liked their novels the way they liked their women - with just a little extra padding.
I'm not sure that serialized books "don't work", so much as that people are so accustomed now to their serialized entertainment being televized weekly (or even daily!) that waiting for only 2 installments a month might not be very appealing to that many people. {loser}This is just my gut feeling, based on how long a week can feel when you're waiting for a new episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to hit the tube{/loser}. Add to that the reluctance of many people to pay for electronic text (Hell, even Stephen King couldn't make that work!) and this venture had a lot going against it. Too bad, because I really like the idea of authors being able to sell their work online, even if half the readers end up not paying them to read it. After all, I'm sure many authors get lots of new fans via second-hand book sales and libraries!
I would love to buy things in online auctions - except that invariably, some obsessive-compulsive type halfway across the continent is willing to bid half their net worth for whatever it is I'm looking for. My upper bidding limit (and I don't think I'm being cheap) is often a fraction of what the latest top bid is...
The good thing of course, is that this benefits sellers, and thus encourages a thriving auction market. If I can't afford to bid on an item that I can't get locally anyway, I guess nobody's hurt by that. The downside, as you say is that the often financially risky proposition of running a "brick-and-mortar" physical storefront somewhere is not as compelling for would-be retailers. So collectible items like comic books etc. may become completely unavailable, except online and in very large cities. One of the two local gaming/comic shops in my city just closed down to become a strictly online business (putting at least one fangirl out of work in the process...)
The nurses obeyed; but... at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock... the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased."
;-)
Sounds like the Catholic church would be more interested in this than the RIAA/MPAA...
(Also, let this be a lesson in the value of selective quotation, to any of you out there doing your homework right now!)
Moshe Bar: We know the world created itself a few billion years ago and not 5762 years ago (according to the Jewish counting). We know that evolution is the culprit for that inexplicably destructive and increasingly contradictory thing called the human, the human was not made directly by G-d.
:-)
shawnmelliot: Actually, we scientifically don't know. because we have not actually witnessed it. We had a hypothesis which has become a theory. But we don't know.
Mr. Bar is a wise man, since he can apparently accept both science and religion without compromising either. We may not "know" these things in the sense of having visually witnessed it ourselves, but there is a VAST collection of indirect evidence which leads us to accept that this is what happened. Science is the business of using (often indirect) evidence to determine what is happening in the universe around us. This is why we are quite confident that we understand the fusion processes which cause the sun to shine, for instance. There may be subtleties which we do not know of yet, or we may be radically wrong, but so far, all evidence collected by many different researchers using different methods, suggests the current model is correct, EVEN THOUGH WE CANNOT DIRECTLY OBSERVE THE INTERIOR OF THE SUN. None of this has any bearing on wheither there is a G_d or not.
Please Please Please people, before you must say that we all evolved or that the earth is millions of years old and that those who say otherwise are incorrect remember that you are no more correct than they as far as science is concerned
You, however, are not a wise man. Like most Creationists who claim that the earth is "young" and evolution is an incorrect theory, you have no genuine, rigorous scientific basis for your claims. As far as science is concerned, your only "proof" for your beliefs is... The Bible. A book written by people, supposedly divinely inspired. On the other side, we have years of experiments and observations in the fields of astronomy, physics, evolutionary and molecular biology, and paleontology. See the talk.origins website for a detailed explanation of why Creationism is NOT science. Personally, I'm sick of futilely explaining it to people who really just want to impose their Christian origin myths on the rest of the world, using the word "Science" as a bludgeon.
I am ready to receive the flames I'm certain I will get for my statement but I felt it necessary and felt it to be on topic
On topic, yes.