I say there's a lot of things that science cannot know and even doesn't want to know.
IAAS, and I will be the first to admit that science does not, and cannot, know everything.
However, science is indisputably the best tool that humans have developed to understand the universe.
Even in the hard sciences, if it's not already established it gets labeled "pseudoscience" saving everyone the bother of looking at it, and that's no way to learn anything truly new. So I say it's science that's the culprit here.
To challenge 'established' science, you need only provide evidence. What gets labeled 'pseudoscience' is sloppy, dishonest work that doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Science is not the culprit that stands in the way of new knowledge. Ignorance is.
Scientists are humans, and humans have a finite time on this earth. Yes, they endeavor to be open-minded, but they are not obliged to suffer fools who spout nonsense.
So if there's something here, then science is going to have to be more open minded than it's been in the last decades by several orders of magnitude before it'll have half a chance to discover the thing. Unless it gets flat-out forced into some new reality, of course, but those happenings are rare. Proper application of the scientific method can do it, iff you know where to look. "Science" as we currently conceive the notion, cannot, because it doesn't even try to look.
Wow. Just about everything in this paragraph is wrong.
Science is open-minded. All you need to make your case is evidence and a rational analysis of it. Can scientists be stubborn? Of course. They're human. But eventually evidence-based truth wins. Scientific revolutions can take time to happen. To quote physicist Max Planck: "Science advances one funeral at a time." And in the broad arc of its history, it never stops looking.
Wait, how does a nuclear reactor get used as a nuclear bomb again?
When it gets dropped from an airplane.
If you could even drop a nuclear reactor from an airplane, all you would get is a radioactive mess. Certainly bad, but almost certainly no catastrophic mushroom cloud.
Nuclear bombs are carefully designed to put fissile material into a critical-mass state very rapidly, to release a great amount of power over a short time-period. Nuclear reactors are designed to do it very slowly, to release a moderate amount of power over a time-scale of months or years.
If you dropped fissile material from an airplane, it would have to hit the ground just so for it to go critical, and even then, it's more likely to just 'go splat' sideways. You need to contain the material from all sides as it compresses. I think that's implausible.
Publish or perish. Beats getting a real job though.
As opposed to produce or perish?
A university researcher's job is just as "real" as anyone else's. There are deadlines, budgets, evaluations, deliverables, conferences, reports, meetings, and so on.
It's not easy to get a job doing university research. The pay is low compared to industry. People do it for the love of knowledge more than for the money.
In his popular book, The God Particle, he mentioned that he wanted to major in chemistry, but decided it was "too hard." So he switched to physics. I can relate.
Until petro-exports started to make money, the USSR was trading potatoes. Reagan, for all of his crap, outspent the USSR and sucked up its resources in military spending.
The uprisings were the result of not being able to feed people, crappy bureaucracy, and horrific infrastructure. There was no money, the common denominator towards the equivalent of a $2.50/hr wage. Great masses of people were just fed up with it.
This. The USSR fell because it was broke. Of course, so was the USA, but it had better credit standing.
Reagan may not deserve the credit, but one must give a nod to him and Gorbachev for shaking hands and ending the Cold War. I think that helped.
I think the Canadians are fooling themselves. Hackers like a challenge.
White-hat hackers perhaps. But black-hat hackers (aka crackers) are thieves, and generally thieves are lazy.
The entire point is that Uber is framing itself as neither of the parties of the contract. If Uber is writing the contract, by your own statement it is one of the parties.
Yes, this was my point, and I realize now that I could have made it clearer. Thanks for the improvement.
In Uber's mind, it is neither the contractor (driver) nor the contractee (rider) -- it just writes the contract for the two.
But the drivers claim they are employees, because their work is an integral part of Uber's business, not some smaller component out of many.
This employee-or-not debate has been going on for awhile with taxi companies as well. I don't think it's over.
"I also generally don't have my plumber sign a contract before beginning to work for me."
In most states, a licensed plumber is required to have you sign a work order that contains a list of what is to be done and an estimate of the cost. It is a contract.
yes. Peculiarly enough though, the contract virtually always protects the contractor to the disadvantage of the home or business owner.
This, for the love of FSM.
Uber wants to fashion itself as a contract facilitator between the contractor and the contractee. But it is Uber, not the driver, who specifies the terms of the contract. IMHO, that makes Uber an employer, and the drivers employees, not contractors.
But alas, the SCOTUS decided that employee arbitration agreements were not one of them, despite federal labor law. Maybe a different law needs to be passed. Maybe Uber drivers need to unionize (yes, I know that is another kind of challenge.) The point is that employers don't have unfettered power to dictate terms to employees. Other elements of society must be able to balance the power of employers. Without that, we're all serfs.
It works both ways. Science learned a great deal from the invention of the steam engine. But the resulting development of the science of thermodynamics has led to many advances in technology. As one example.
What we do know is that quantum mechanics works. It is one of the most successful theories of the physical universe that humanity has ever devised.
But only when expressed mathematically.
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers. -- James Clerk Maxwell
Science is all about expressing how the universe behaves mathematically.
Government doesn't work that way. They don't decide on the services they want to provide, and then set the tax rates accordingly. Instead, they look at the pile of money they have, and then decide what to spend it on.
No. Governments have sovereign authority (granted by their electors) to decide what to spend and what to tax. Both have, and will, go up and down.
The list of spending options is always bigger than the money pile.
We agree on that.
You really think they are going to see the money coming in from the telcos and say, "Hey, we can use this to reduce other taxes"?
Well, maybe. Wouldn't that be in the interest of their taxpayers?
5G deployment is in the interest of the public. It is a silly thing to tax. It is even sillier to add pointless bureaucratic delay.
Neither the FCC nor the 5G providers should be the only deciders here. There are competing interests that local governments want to protect. Timely processing of applications is reasonable, but arbitrary caps on fees are not.
And as for 5G being a "silly" thing to tax -- it's not silly to tax it so as to balance public and corporate interests. It won't be the first time that has been done.
I'm impressed that MZ (as he likes to be called) chose to fly artists into space with him. That's a sharp departure from previous efforts.
Yes, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield was a capable musician and brought space to the commoner in a unique way, as have others. But a moon-flyby crew chosen for artistic merit above all else? I for one can't wait to see what becomes of this.
I agree that people who work for Bezos deserve to be paid fairly, and not subsidize space tourism. But that has little connection with Musk. Tesla is not exactly a cash cow for SpaceX.
To paraphrase a comment I heard recently from Neil deGrasse Tyson, we'll have human presence on other planets at the moment some nation sees a military or political advantage from it.
If military/political advantage is not a factor, it will just happen more slowly.
This is the whole value of CoCs: It discourages the active contributors from contributing to opensource projects.
No one will code for free if they have to obey a CoC. They are not slaves.
Wha...? How does a CoC "enslave" open-source contributors? They have to agree to other conditions to contribute to a project (such as licenses.) CoCs are hardly a stretch.
White men are morons though and allow their projects to be infiltrated by classic divide and conquer techniques decades to millennia old. Socially; very stupid people. (Which is why they allowed the right to marry female children to be taken away from them).
Slashdot Mirror
I say there's a lot of things that science cannot know and even doesn't want to know.
IAAS, and I will be the first to admit that science does not, and cannot, know everything.
However, science is indisputably the best tool that humans have developed to understand the universe.
Even in the hard sciences, if it's not already established it gets labeled "pseudoscience" saving everyone the bother of looking at it, and that's no way to learn anything truly new. So I say it's science that's the culprit here.
To challenge 'established' science, you need only provide evidence. What gets labeled 'pseudoscience' is sloppy, dishonest work that doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Science is not the culprit that stands in the way of new knowledge. Ignorance is.
Scientists are humans, and humans have a finite time on this earth. Yes, they endeavor to be open-minded, but they are not obliged to suffer fools who spout nonsense.
So if there's something here, then science is going to have to be more open minded than it's been in the last decades by several orders of magnitude before it'll have half a chance to discover the thing. Unless it gets flat-out forced into some new reality, of course, but those happenings are rare. Proper application of the scientific method can do it, iff you know where to look. "Science" as we currently conceive the notion, cannot, because it doesn't even try to look.
Wow. Just about everything in this paragraph is wrong.
Science is open-minded. All you need to make your case is evidence and a rational analysis of it. Can scientists be stubborn? Of course. They're human. But eventually evidence-based truth wins. Scientific revolutions can take time to happen. To quote physicist Max Planck: "Science advances one funeral at a time." And in the broad arc of its history, it never stops looking.
Wait, how does a nuclear reactor get used as a nuclear bomb again?
When it gets dropped from an airplane.
If you could even drop a nuclear reactor from an airplane, all you would get is a radioactive mess. Certainly bad, but almost certainly no catastrophic mushroom cloud.
Nuclear bombs are carefully designed to put fissile material into a critical-mass state very rapidly, to release a great amount of power over a short time-period. Nuclear reactors are designed to do it very slowly, to release a moderate amount of power over a time-scale of months or years.
If you dropped fissile material from an airplane, it would have to hit the ground just so for it to go critical, and even then, it's more likely to just 'go splat' sideways. You need to contain the material from all sides as it compresses. I think that's implausible.
Publish or perish. Beats getting a real job though.
As opposed to produce or perish?
A university researcher's job is just as "real" as anyone else's. There are deadlines, budgets, evaluations, deliverables, conferences, reports, meetings, and so on.
It's not easy to get a job doing university research. The pay is low compared to industry. People do it for the love of knowledge more than for the money.
Which in fact, why even have a camera? They shall be even bolder to not even have a camera and pictures are subsumed from the ethos that surrounds.
This. No camera, FTW.
What would that take? Courage.
In his popular book, The God Particle, he mentioned that he wanted to major in chemistry, but decided it was "too hard." So he switched to physics. I can relate.
Fuck everything, we're going to five cameras.
Until petro-exports started to make money, the USSR was trading potatoes. Reagan, for all of his crap, outspent the USSR and sucked up its resources in military spending.
The uprisings were the result of not being able to feed people, crappy bureaucracy, and horrific infrastructure. There was no money, the common denominator towards the equivalent of a $2.50/hr wage. Great masses of people were just fed up with it.
This. The USSR fell because it was broke. Of course, so was the USA, but it had better credit standing.
Reagan may not deserve the credit, but one must give a nod to him and Gorbachev for shaking hands and ending the Cold War. I think that helped.
I think the Canadians are fooling themselves. Hackers like a challenge.
White-hat hackers perhaps. But black-hat hackers (aka crackers) are thieves, and generally thieves are lazy.
That wasn't my point, but I like your view of it too, maybe even more.
The entire point is that Uber is framing itself as neither of the parties of the contract. If Uber is writing the contract, by your own statement it is one of the parties.
Yes, this was my point, and I realize now that I could have made it clearer. Thanks for the improvement.
In Uber's mind, it is neither the contractor (driver) nor the contractee (rider) -- it just writes the contract for the two.
But the drivers claim they are employees, because their work is an integral part of Uber's business, not some smaller component out of many.
This employee-or-not debate has been going on for awhile with taxi companies as well. I don't think it's over.
"I also generally don't have my plumber sign a contract before beginning to work for me."
In most states, a licensed plumber is required to have you sign a work order that contains a list of what is to be done and an estimate of the cost. It is a contract.
yes. Peculiarly enough though, the contract virtually always protects the contractor to the disadvantage of the home or business owner.
This, for the love of FSM.
Uber wants to fashion itself as a contract facilitator between the contractor and the contractee. But it is Uber, not the driver, who specifies the terms of the contract. IMHO, that makes Uber an employer, and the drivers employees, not contractors.
Fortunately for all of us, there are rights that you cannot sign away, even if you sign a contract to that effect. If it were otherwise, we would all be living in a hellscape dystopia.
But alas, the SCOTUS decided that employee arbitration agreements were not one of them, despite federal labor law. Maybe a different law needs to be passed. Maybe Uber drivers need to unionize (yes, I know that is another kind of challenge.) The point is that employers don't have unfettered power to dictate terms to employees. Other elements of society must be able to balance the power of employers. Without that, we're all serfs.
I'll just leave this right here.
BTW, I happen to think that Basquiat's painting is amazing.
There's a great movie that was made about him. Worth a look.
It works both ways. Science learned a great deal from the invention of the steam engine. But the resulting development of the science of thermodynamics has led to many advances in technology. As one example.
What we do know is that quantum mechanics works. It is one of the most successful theories of the physical universe that humanity has ever devised.
But only when expressed mathematically.
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers. -- James Clerk Maxwell
Science is all about expressing how the universe behaves mathematically.
Government doesn't work that way. They don't decide on the services they want to provide, and then set the tax rates accordingly. Instead, they look at the pile of money they have, and then decide what to spend it on.
No. Governments have sovereign authority (granted by their electors) to decide what to spend and what to tax. Both have, and will, go up and down.
The list of spending options is always bigger than the money pile.
We agree on that.
You really think they are going to see the money coming in from the telcos and say, "Hey, we can use this to reduce other taxes"?
Well, maybe. Wouldn't that be in the interest of their taxpayers?
5G deployment is in the interest of the public. It is a silly thing to tax. It is even sillier to add pointless bureaucratic delay.
Neither the FCC nor the 5G providers should be the only deciders here. There are competing interests that local governments want to protect. Timely processing of applications is reasonable, but arbitrary caps on fees are not.
And as for 5G being a "silly" thing to tax -- it's not silly to tax it so as to balance public and corporate interests. It won't be the first time that has been done.
What we do know is that quantum mechanics works. It is one of the most successful theories of the physical universe that humanity has ever devised.
If the world's tallest building were demolished, it would no longer be the world's tallest building. Some other building would be.
If the tallest building in history were demolished, it would still be the tallest building in history, until someone built a taller one.
I'm impressed that MZ (as he likes to be called) chose to fly artists into space with him. That's a sharp departure from previous efforts.
Yes, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield was a capable musician and brought space to the commoner in a unique way, as have others. But a moon-flyby crew chosen for artistic merit above all else? I for one can't wait to see what becomes of this.
I agree that people who work for Bezos deserve to be paid fairly, and not subsidize space tourism. But that has little connection with Musk. Tesla is not exactly a cash cow for SpaceX.
The heaviest rocket system in the world, not in history. The Saturn V, for all its merit, is not a current player.
Thanks Captain Obvious. That would have slipped by if you hadn't pointed it out.
To paraphrase a comment I heard recently from Neil deGrasse Tyson, we'll have human presence on other planets at the moment some nation sees a military or political advantage from it.
If military/political advantage is not a factor, it will just happen more slowly.
Art is anything you can get away with. -- Marshall McLuhan
Therapy is needed by people that suffer. You are using that word as an euphemism for *reeducation*. They are not the same.
Therapy can also be used to manage or change a dysfunctional behavior. From Linus' own words, it sounds like that's exactly what he's doing.
This is the whole value of CoCs: It discourages the active contributors from contributing to opensource projects.
No one will code for free if they have to obey a CoC. They are not slaves.
Wha...? How does a CoC "enslave" open-source contributors? They have to agree to other conditions to contribute to a project (such as licenses.) CoCs are hardly a stretch.
White men are morons though and allow their projects to be infiltrated by classic divide and conquer techniques decades to millennia old. Socially; very stupid people. (Which is why they allowed the right to marry female children to be taken away from them).
I got no words. That's just nuts.