^^ This guy gets it. But next time man, stick with the traditional car analogy. If you mention penis, the discussion goes one of two ways after; Either everyone giggles and spends the next ten minutes exchanging awkward looks before one of them says penis again, ad nauseum... or someone assumes you insulted the size of their penis and WWIII breaks out, resulting in downmods and bitchiness all around. Also, anyone who has even 3 girlfriends a year obviously has commitment issues... let alone 14, at which point I start to question your credibility.
The end. There is no "but"; Either it's a correct statement, and you need to admit your original was mistaken and try again, or it's not, in which case no 'but' is required. All that using the word 'but' means is that your pride was hurt. While I sympathize, please stop using your busted argument.
No one really knows at the outset if they've got what it takes,
"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." -- Carl Sagan
No, people do know. It takes the ability to observe natural phenomenon, form conclusions based on that, then test them until you can get the same result multiple times. That's it. As I said before -- animals do this all the time. Not just people. So you don't need to climb mountains and risk death to be a scientist. Maybe you do to get paid, but science is something anyone can do.
But that's not the same thing as "doing science" the way Einstein did,
Are you saying you can't pick up a piece of chalk and write on a blackboard? That you can't stare into space having a good think on something? Are you suggesting you're incapable of looking with fascination at something happening around you and say "I think I would like to know more about that." Because that's what Einstein did, he just happened to do it particularly well.
Look, at this point you're arguing just for the sake of argument; Science is the light of reason. It is something available to all. You don't have to pay for it. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to put on a lab coat, or get a PhD, or climb mountains, or risk death. All you really need is to be observant and enough mental capacity to see how your own interactions with the environment change it. Everything on top of that is just extra.
There is no reason why we cannot all be scientists. I get that you wanna hero worship Einstein because you feel that your own intelligence should be rewarded and acknowledged, at least in some small measure, like his was. But drop the emotional neediness here and look at the big picture: The pursuit of science is its own reward. You don't need recognition or publication to benefit from your own pursuit of knowledge.
That isn't true at all. Perpetual motion is an innate property of the universe itself on many scales.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
On the macro scale there is the constant expansions and contraction. All energy and particles are in a state of perpetual motion. The only reason anything ever appears to not be moving is because the scale you are focusing on is moving at a rate comparable or slower than the rate your energy is moving at on that scale.
No, it's because I understand the first and second laws of Thermodynamics. The fact that things are in motion does not change the fact that (a) energy can be neither created nor destroyed, and (b) the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium; which is to say... it stops moving. All that motion you're describing is part of an open system, not closed. And even it will eventually stop; See also -- heat death of the universe.
If your body and mind moved at the speed of rock the landscape would be bubbling (rock moves like a fluid, rising when heated, sinking when cool, and yes I'm referring to the 'solid' stuff) and erosion on a mountain might appear to be sand being blown off a dune. People might look like sparks or possibly move so fast as to not be observable.
Look, if you want to play games with optical illusions and relativistic effects, rock on with your socks on... but no physical laws are being broken here. Your perpetual motion machine... can't exist.
Now, if you have some proof that the laws of thermodynamics are broken, the second law in particular... please step forward and collect about 50 consecutive Nobel Prizes. Otherwise, you need to accept that perpetual motion machines... are a scientific impossibility. The end.
Citation needed. Please show me a study where someone who becomes curious about something becomes more intelligent. Conventional thinking right now is that intelligence is primarily genetic, and while it can be influenced by environment, it is largely fixed from birth. There are no cases I'm aware of where a person who was firmly tested and found to be of average or below average intelligence, by some later life experience, became a genius. This is real life, not Flowers for Algernon.
I would argue that [...] he was better able to benefit from his curiosity and to be more satisfied and captivated by its fruits.
Curiousity is a personality trait. Intelligence is an ability. You can be curious and stupid, or disinterested yet intelligent. One has no bearing on the other. The fact that he was curious and intelligent also is no proof that he was more satisfied by its fruits. A king losing his crown and a child losing her doll means the same to each. A person's level of emotional satisfaction has to do with past experience and temperament, rather than the abstract measure of impact the event had.
Now I know what you were trying to say here; But what you actually said is bogus. People who are intelligent generally are also more open-minded. Which means they're generally more curious, more prone to analytical thinking, and generally more likely to embrace science, etc. But this is true of groups; We can say nothing with confidence about any individual on the basis of having observed one of these two traits.
However, that doesn't change the fact that Swartz was dangerously naive, and I don't think anyone with a clue can honestly dispute that.
Of course, we're then left to question whether naitivity is a problem with the individual, or society. We're saying he was ignorant, not stupid. That he was young and lacked crucial knowledge about the world that may have enabled him to overcome this obstacle, instead of smashing him into the rocks where a lighthouse should have been present, but wasn't. I don't think someone being naive is the fault of the person; It implies you simply don't know something, and we all have been there. To imply he should have known better, or should have known better at his age, or should have known better because... well... how can you say that? With the enormity of variance in personal experience, there is undoubtedly a few things you don't know that "everyone" else does.
Which leave us with the prosecutor, who wasn't naive and knew full well what he was doing. When you threaten someone with decades in jail, massive fines, and basically ending life as they know it, there's always the possibility they will lose their composure. The biggest badasses on the street are still the ones that cry like little girls in the back of squad cars as it dawns on them how screwed they are. If you can break a man who's got "Fuck the police" hot sauced across his forehead, what do you think some wet-behind-the-ears kid in MIT is going to do when you threaten the same?
The prosecutor knew better. There is no 'if' here, it's his job. He did know. He had to have known. So that means he did it intentionally and with full view of the potential consequences... he did it with a blatant disregard for the well-being of others. He doesn't just deserve to be fired, he deserves to be in jail for being the proximate cause of another's death; He deserves a criminal record.
Of course, fortunately for him, our legal system doesn't work that way. No matter how much shit you lay out on someone, how much abuse you give them, how many times you beat them to a pulp, to the point that they're reduced to ash... as long as they're the one that pulls the trigger and not you; You are not responsible for their death.
Swartz is dead, and nothing can change that. But what we can change is the people employed by the state prosecution -- we can remove this man's name and ensure he can never harm anyone like this again, and then start talking about reforming the system and putting audits in place so that this kind of prosecutorial misconduct is dealt with swiftly and evenly. Because while Swartz took the ultimate get out of jail card, there's plenty of innocent people in jail because they opted for the more reasonable approach of pleading guilty to crimes they were innocent of, because the odds were not in their favor and the charge sheet was long and would have kept them in jail for life if they lost a bet they already had bad odds on.
If we're going to assign blame, if we're going to point fingers... then I'd say it's 95% the prosecutor, 5% the kid. Ignorance may be no excuse from the law, but it's not an excuse for the law to abuse people either.
Curiosity is necessary for a great scientist (or even a not-so-great one) but it's not sufficient.
No, sorry, but this is a fractally wrong statement to make. With sufficient curiousity, you will be dedicated to learning as much as you can. The drive to learn will push you where you need to go. Intelligence merely sets the speed by which you'll arrive. Your over-emphasis on intelligence is elitism; It's suggesting that if you can't be "smart enough", you shouldn't be in science.
I disagree. Firmly. Anyone can be a scientist. It is a method, a way of learning about the world. Almost every human being on the planet is capable of this. Even non-sentient animals have demonstrated an ability to use tools and experiment with their surroundings to gain understanding. If birds, wolves, monkeys, dolphins, and other animals can manage to do science, your argument of high general intelligence being necessary is totally and completely busted.
I stand by what I said before: You just need to be passionately curious. Even Einstein said as much, so if you want to argue the "you need to be smart too!"... you're going up against someone who, by your own measure, is the smartest person to ever have lived. Good luck.
I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty and I know what I'm doing, but I want as close to zero maintenance as possible."
DD-WRT. Pick a good router with a fast cpu in it if you plan on running P2P with it. My high-end Asus 'black knight' (one of the recommended high-end dd-wrt models) shits itself if you have more than about a 800 or so simultanious connections, because the CPU isn't fast enough. I would not recommend using a 'netbook' with a wifi card simply because it consumes a lot of power and you'll make up in lower power consumption costs what you'd spend on a purpose-built router in about 15-18 months.
It only shows he had this difference; not that it was a factor in the public's perception that he is deemed intelligent.
While arguing about logical fallacies you've failed to address the original point entirely; A sample size of one is a problem, guys. It can't disprove the null hypothesis. It doesn't matter how many observations you make in the control group; At the very best, the ideal case, you'll succeed in identifying properties of this brain not present in all those other brains, but what you could be identifying may have absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. It could just as easily be another property, like his love of Justin Bieber (hey, if we're going to allow a sample size of one to be scientifically valid, I'm bringing time travel back -- so no bitching).
A little over a hundred years ago, people thought that humans could never fly because science proved it with the knowledge of the era. And yet when people work on so-called "perpetual motion" machines, they're called idiots just because our current understand of physics says it's not possible. And when you ask a scientist to explain gravity, all he can offer is a formula to calculate its value because all the current theories can't quite explain gravity itself and even those who try see their theories destroyed at smaller scales.
While your comment is massively off-topic, it hits on a topic near and dear to my heart, and it pains me greatly to see anyone misunderstand how science works, even an anonymous internet punter.
1. This is technically a true statement. Humans still cannot fly. We stuff ourselves in giant metal cans with wings on them, and the machines fly. We just sit inside them, continuing to stubbornly obey basic biology.
But I get your point. I notice you said "people thought," not "scientists thought". As far back as roman-greek times, people were dreaming about flying. Davinci was inking flying machine after flying machine. People who were studied in science never claimed it was impossible because they regularly observed birds flying. They knew they simply lacked sufficient understanding to do it, and set to the business of gaining that understanding.
2. Perpetual motion is idiotic; There has never been a case of it being observed. I'll explain in a minute just why scientists consider these people abject morons.
3. When you ask a scientist to explain gravity, he explains it on the basis of observation; Drop an apple, and it hits the ground. We can measure it very precisely. We have a great many theories that have allowed additional experiments to be carried out to observe it in more detail. The fact that it cannot be explained at the very tiny scale of quantum mechanics is not proof the theories are broken, but rather that some crucial observation is missing to tie it all together.
4. On the issue of scale, if I took your car engine and shrunk it to about 1/5th scale, it wouldn't run anymore, despite being exactly correct in every proportion. It's been long-understood that various physical forces only balance each other out at certain points and times. You can't create nuclear fission, for example, until you've gotten enough fissile material in the same place and close enough together. You can't just scale down beyond a certain point -- the machine will fail to function. This isn't a problem with "can't quite explain gravity", but rather a misunderstanding of fundamental physical laws.
When I see people write things like you just did, it makes me sad. Science is about empirical observation. It is the essence, the core, upon which everything else is built. You do not have to understand something to have it become scientific knowledge -- that's just extra. If you can observe something happening repeatedly and explain to others how to observe the same thing, and consistently get the same result, then you have science. Note that I didn't mention a theory, or an understanding, about what is being observed. All I mentioned were the elements of independent observation and the ability to reproduce the results. Understanding only comes in the context of research -- this is where we look at other observations and try to find similarities and common themes and patterns, that might allow us to construct a theory to explain what's going on. And theories can, indeed must, change whenever we find new observations that contradict it. But this is not instantanious. Observation does not automatically lead to theory.
We must experience first, then understand. It has always been this way. This is not science; This is life.
And yes, his other brain differences were know for a while, so this seems to be a new revelation based on new evidence of the correlation and the discovered photos.
All this ignores a rather glaring problem: The sample size is one.
If Einstein were alive, he would have told you, as he told them when he was still alive -- he wasn't particularly intelligent, only passionately curious. That's paraphrasing a direct quote. He probably would have also told you to stand outside utterly fascinating by water drops falling out of a fountain instead of going to accept your award for being so smart, and run around town in your loafers not giving a fuck what anyone else thought of you.
Maybe it's not intelligence per-se that we need to encourage, but non-conformity and the ability to embrace new ideas without pre-judgement.
Well, Hal, if this is what it takes to let you sleep at night despite your and your school's part in Swartz's persecution
You'd think MIT's psychology department would have pointed out the obvious flaw in this logic, but I'm guessing management had something to do with that. But I'm sure it's an isolated case. You can't have an entire school convert to fascism overnight without its students noticing something was going horribly wrong. I mean, if something is very, very obviously wrong and you see everybody else doing it, you wouldn't just go along with it.
What people object to is the fact that it only applies to students with rich parents who are able to afford the $30000 analysis, irrespective of the student's own ability or potential.
It doesn't cost $30,000 to do a psych test. Hell, it doesn't cost more than $5 for pencil and paper to take a test on this. Learning styles aren't rocket science.
But Alec Ross, a senior advisor on innovation at the U.S. State Department, worries this would create a new class of haves and have-nots.
Please fire this advisor without delay. He apparently doesn't understand process optimization. This is nothing new; Educators have been aware for decades that everyone has their own learning style, and therefore curriculum is tailored to try and use as many of those methods as possible for mass education. However, it is highly inefficient -- someone who learns best from hands-on is sitting bored out of their skull while the teacher asks everyone to copy what's on the blackboard into their notebooks to help the people who learn best by doing that. And both groups are bored to tears during the Q&A where you invariably get those two people that need to talk their way through the material to understand it.
By tailoring curriculum individually and/or grouping students by learning style, the teacher wastes less time, the students remain more engaged and retain more of the material, and the overall program costs go down as the grouped students are able to learn faster. It's a dirty little secret that most of public education is busywork... homework doesn't work for many people, but because it helps "enough" people, everyone gets it.
So you have students being forced to learn in a way that is unnatural and awkward -- it's like forcing a left handed person to write right handed. Schools do this, and it causes neurosis and MRI scans of these people's brains a few years after being forced to use the wrong hand shows clear and unique changes to their brain. Now imagine we're doing that to everyone and it quickly becomes clear just how toxic our public education system is with its "one size fits all" approach.
Customized curriculum is a win for everyone. There are no losers in this; Everyone has a learning style, they're well documented, and we know what the percentages of each in the general population they exist in. Schools can plan for this. It's all statistics... and the larger the school, the more efficient it becomes, unlike the current model. Everyone talks about ratios of teachers to students, but that's the wrong model. We need to be thinking of ratios of types of students.
Your own defense of the unassailable dignity and prestige of the people of California notwithstanding, you actually just proved my point; They've repeatedly tried to force their standards on the rest of the country, co-opting federal law by interfering with commerce, putting tariffs and onerous burdens on anyone wanting to do business in this country because their products might get shipped to California and thus be subject to their whacky local ordinances.
And that was my only point. There is no "truth" about environmentalism... here, the "truth" is about the state versus the federal government, and deciding who has more authority when it comes to standards about products bought and sold in this country. And California's clearly in the wrong.. but since we can't just bomb them into compliance or send in the national guard, the EPA has opted to negotiate with the ecoterrorists that have taken over local government there to maintain the peace.
Well, yes and no. Comcast still contacts people, but in most, but not all markets, the cap was removed. They still throttle and use shaping technologies, which is why my QoS is setup the way it does; On paper, I have almost twice as much bandwidth as I can reliably get without triggering a transient bandwidth clamp-down on my service. Weeks of careful experimentation has revealed that Comcast only provides unmetered access at about 75% of your rated line speed. Go above that, and at certain times of the day, it'll start buffering your downloads, becoming bursty, etc. -- by placing you in a lower priority queue. For people who use VoIP or Netflix, this can ruin your internet experience.
But yeah, in the strictest sense... there aren't any caps. YMMV.
Real scientists create experiments that can be reproduced and independently verified and they did not. Q.E.D.
This is less about a failing of science and open publishing journals than the fact that on the internet, reputations can be shed like a snake sheds its skin -- you're just a few clicks away from a new account and a new identity. This has been a long-studied problem in cryptography -- how to create trust networks in public key crypto with key signing parties, etc. That the lessons learned there apply to social networking sites and open publication journals as well requires only the smallest amount of creativity to see.
If you want honesty, you need to have some way of punishing people who are dishonest. It really is that simple; You need a way to saddle them with a cost that can't be shed by simply switching identities. And the best way to do that, for better or for worse, is a central authority in the real world that matches online identities to real-world ones. Everything else is varying degrees of broken.
Create a blacklist of people who have lied and although you may be able to overwhelm the system for awhile, it is self-correcting... eventually it will run out of people willing or able to get blacklisted, and the quality will then start to rise as people are forced to be responsible for what they say and do.
I imagine Comcast will have something to say about this - something like "No more internet for you, TOS-breaker"
Click. Click. Aaaand it's now a tor service. Because fuck you, Comcast. -_- They have a long history of screwing up people's internet. I just configure the router to pipe all traffic to a VPN, encrypt it, and call it a day. They get exactly zero bytes of unencrypted traffic. Go ahead and try and say anything about my traffic other than "It always goes from point A, to point B, and while the packets vary in length, the bandwidth usage is the same 24/7/365. Because I use QoS on my router and purposefully stuff my Torrent client full of things, even if I don't need them, just to keep the pipe full. Sortof a quiet fuck you to traffic analysis techniques. -_-
That indicates to me that the US rules are in effect for the US, even if the work was copyrighted outside the US.
That is, more or less, how the law operates. Now when I say more or less, the devil's in the details. There are numerous treaties covering cross-country patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc., so filing in one country extends similar protections simultaniously to all the other signatories... but the implimentation of treaty terms can vary from one country to another, as can the interpretations of some provisions. In Japan, for example, you can patent something that is in every detail identical to your competitor except it's a slightly different shade of muave and it qualifies as a unique work. But that doesn't mean you won't get sued in the United States for patent infringement if you try to market it. The laws are a patchwork of often conflicting and vague tombs of treaties, federal, state, and local law. Hell, California routinely tries to supercede federal authority; Pick up a canister of oxygen sometime "This product is known to cause cancer in the state of california." But nowhere else, apparently. Anyone who wants to sell their product in California has to do business by their funktastic and horribly deranged environmental regulations... and the EPA has been forced to write new legislation specifically to say "... We only have to make a new law about this because California rode the short bus on this stuff. Again."
Yeah, well, you can't expect me to keep everyone's marketing straight... it's not like I buy a new car every few months. And to be honest, looking at Toyota's recent slogans... Cars bursting into flames seems to mirror their marketing department's abilities.
You asked for it! You got it! Oh, what a feeling! Who could ask for anything more? I love what you do for me, Toyota! Everyday Get the feeling! Moving Forward Let's Go Places
Guys... the 80s called. They want the names of their unborn one hit wonders back. -_-
Sometimes you say some pretty heavily debated shit. No doubt burning your karma to the ground.
You don't learn how to make comments that are "great and insightful constructed logically" by avoiding heavily debated positions. I reply to anyone, even anonymous cowards, if I think they have a point. Many a time I have played devil's advocate, arguing with someone whose position I agree with, because I felt their argument was sub-par. Arriving at the right conclusion for the wrong reasons to me is no different than reaching the wrong conclusion -- you should have a solid argument regardless of what side you're on.
I count amongst my friends conservatives and liberals alike, and frequently debate both of them to the point both think I'm on the other team. But it's more important to me that people think critically about their own values and positions and have good reasons for holding to them, than that they agree with me. For example, there's a lot of things Apple does right -- they have spent a LOT of time, money, and effort, on making a simple and intuitive UI for many of their products. This is a solid point in Apple's favor. But they also have used slave labor to produce those products, the work atmosphere even here in the United States has been described as toxic, and they have a very aggressive legal department to protect their overpriced products. Those are all things in the negative. Does that mean that the product might be so good that we can ignore all these things? Quite possibly, if you value that enough. In which case, that's fine -- if that is what you place a premium on, that's a totally valid position. But if you think that all comes at too high of a cost, that's a valid position too. I can see it going both ways -- but saying that Apple has none of those negative qualities, while embracing the good qualities, is a cognitive error, and I will come down on you like a bag of bricks for it.
I find it more important for people to be able to critically reason out why they hold the positions they do, than which position they hold. This means that yeah, I get into heavily debated areas and get modbombed for it... but I'm okay with that too. They may be punitively -1'ing me, but I hope that, despite their anger, I at least made them think about something they hadn't considered... even if they won't admit it.
so your genius attempts to ssh to your external server running on tcp/443, will not only be blocked, you will be flagged and tagged.
Umm, excuse me. Not to interrupt what was turning out to be a really good rant, but I did no such thing and claimed no such thing, so don't talk about my "genius attempts". All I did was go fishing -- do something that most people would think to be reasonably secure, then wait and see what happens.
What happened was about 27 felonies for unauthorized computer access. In the corporate IT world, this is also known as Tuesday. But god help you if you connect your phone to your computer to charge it -- people have gone to jail for this because company policy prohibited it. It's called "selective enforcement". If we persecuted all computer crimes equally, then every manager in every fortune 500 company would be arrested and jailed for life, just based on the things they'll either be doing, knowing about (accomplice), or complicit in allowing, in the next week alone.
My point here is that the NSA isn't the people you need to worry about when it comes to your own computer's security -- your idiot manager is a far more dangerous entity.
Given that half of Slashdot works in corporate IT I'm sure we're all shocked by this announcement.
Yeah, and we all know who to blame. (looks ominously upward) The irony here is that corporate IT is even more into surveillance and CYA than the former NSA guy is. I mean, the NSA has rules and shit to follow. Management at a company these days is like to be all "Yo, we do whatever we want. You dun like it? Dere's da fuckin' door." (sorry, Jersey accents are really hard to do on slashdot forum posts)
As an experiment I once sent an e-mail out from my last employer containing about 5KB of randomly generated gibberish to an e-mail address setup that had never been used before on a server that didn't have an SMTP server prior to the test balloon. Over the next three days, this previously unused and unloved honeypot got dozens of pings from the corporate network from people trying to login to the SSH, poke at the SMTP server, looking for web services. I sent it from a gmail account specially setup ahead of time, then logged in over a supposedly secure 'ssl' connection.
Similar has happened at 7 out of 10 employers I've worked for. They don't just monitor all your stuff...they actively go out and fuck with it. And the only reason this isn't a problem is because they're so terrifyingly bad at it.
Guessing it uses the peltier effect. Well, I see three problems here, which is probably why it's on Kickstarter and not in a t-mobile store. First, if you overheat it, your goose is cooked. Second, it looks like the solution to the overheating problem is to use water. Third... fire + water + electronics generally end badly. Usually because water causes fire which kills electronics, but really, any combination of the three usually ends badly.
Just buy a solar panel like a normal person; Don't risk it tipping over and killing your (likely) only means of communication in the wilderness. And while you're at it... buy a shortwave radio. They're cheap, low power, have long range, and you can easily run/charge them with a hand crank in minutes. And unlike a cell phone... many models are made to be waterproof and the simplicity of the design means they likely could even survive an EMP from a nuclear weapon. I'd rather have one of those in my "oh shit" bag than some complex contraption like this...
Slashdot Mirror
^^ This guy gets it. But next time man, stick with the traditional car analogy. If you mention penis, the discussion goes one of two ways after; Either everyone giggles and spends the next ten minutes exchanging awkward looks before one of them says penis again, ad nauseum... or someone assumes you insulted the size of their penis and WWIII breaks out, resulting in downmods and bitchiness all around. Also, anyone who has even 3 girlfriends a year obviously has commitment issues... let alone 14, at which point I start to question your credibility.
What do you mean by "fractally wrong"?
This.
True, but...
The end. There is no "but"; Either it's a correct statement, and you need to admit your original was mistaken and try again, or it's not, in which case no 'but' is required. All that using the word 'but' means is that your pride was hurt. While I sympathize, please stop using your busted argument.
No one really knows at the outset if they've got what it takes,
"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." -- Carl Sagan
No, people do know. It takes the ability to observe natural phenomenon, form conclusions based on that, then test them until you can get the same result multiple times. That's it. As I said before -- animals do this all the time. Not just people. So you don't need to climb mountains and risk death to be a scientist. Maybe you do to get paid, but science is something anyone can do.
But that's not the same thing as "doing science" the way Einstein did,
Are you saying you can't pick up a piece of chalk and write on a blackboard? That you can't stare into space having a good think on something? Are you suggesting you're incapable of looking with fascination at something happening around you and say "I think I would like to know more about that." Because that's what Einstein did, he just happened to do it particularly well.
Look, at this point you're arguing just for the sake of argument; Science is the light of reason. It is something available to all. You don't have to pay for it. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to put on a lab coat, or get a PhD, or climb mountains, or risk death. All you really need is to be observant and enough mental capacity to see how your own interactions with the environment change it. Everything on top of that is just extra.
There is no reason why we cannot all be scientists. I get that you wanna hero worship Einstein because you feel that your own intelligence should be rewarded and acknowledged, at least in some small measure, like his was. But drop the emotional neediness here and look at the big picture: The pursuit of science is its own reward. You don't need recognition or publication to benefit from your own pursuit of knowledge.
That isn't true at all. Perpetual motion is an innate property of the universe itself on many scales.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
On the macro scale there is the constant expansions and contraction. All energy and particles are in a state of perpetual motion. The only reason anything ever appears to not be moving is because the scale you are focusing on is moving at a rate comparable or slower than the rate your energy is moving at on that scale.
No, it's because I understand the first and second laws of Thermodynamics. The fact that things are in motion does not change the fact that (a) energy can be neither created nor destroyed, and (b) the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium; which is to say... it stops moving. All that motion you're describing is part of an open system, not closed. And even it will eventually stop; See also -- heat death of the universe.
If your body and mind moved at the speed of rock the landscape would be bubbling (rock moves like a fluid, rising when heated, sinking when cool, and yes I'm referring to the 'solid' stuff) and erosion on a mountain might appear to be sand being blown off a dune. People might look like sparks or possibly move so fast as to not be observable.
Look, if you want to play games with optical illusions and relativistic effects, rock on with your socks on... but no physical laws are being broken here. Your perpetual motion machine... can't exist.
Now, if you have some proof that the laws of thermodynamics are broken, the second law in particular... please step forward and collect about 50 consecutive Nobel Prizes. Otherwise, you need to accept that perpetual motion machines... are a scientific impossibility. The end.
Tsk. Curiosity generates intelligence.
Citation needed. Please show me a study where someone who becomes curious about something becomes more intelligent. Conventional thinking right now is that intelligence is primarily genetic, and while it can be influenced by environment, it is largely fixed from birth. There are no cases I'm aware of where a person who was firmly tested and found to be of average or below average intelligence, by some later life experience, became a genius. This is real life, not Flowers for Algernon.
I would argue that [...] he was better able to benefit from his curiosity and to be more satisfied and captivated by its fruits.
Curiousity is a personality trait. Intelligence is an ability. You can be curious and stupid, or disinterested yet intelligent. One has no bearing on the other. The fact that he was curious and intelligent also is no proof that he was more satisfied by its fruits. A king losing his crown and a child losing her doll means the same to each. A person's level of emotional satisfaction has to do with past experience and temperament, rather than the abstract measure of impact the event had.
Now I know what you were trying to say here; But what you actually said is bogus. People who are intelligent generally are also more open-minded. Which means they're generally more curious, more prone to analytical thinking, and generally more likely to embrace science, etc. But this is true of groups; We can say nothing with confidence about any individual on the basis of having observed one of these two traits.
However, that doesn't change the fact that Swartz was dangerously naive, and I don't think anyone with a clue can honestly dispute that.
Of course, we're then left to question whether naitivity is a problem with the individual, or society. We're saying he was ignorant, not stupid. That he was young and lacked crucial knowledge about the world that may have enabled him to overcome this obstacle, instead of smashing him into the rocks where a lighthouse should have been present, but wasn't. I don't think someone being naive is the fault of the person; It implies you simply don't know something, and we all have been there. To imply he should have known better, or should have known better at his age, or should have known better because... well... how can you say that? With the enormity of variance in personal experience, there is undoubtedly a few things you don't know that "everyone" else does.
Which leave us with the prosecutor, who wasn't naive and knew full well what he was doing. When you threaten someone with decades in jail, massive fines, and basically ending life as they know it, there's always the possibility they will lose their composure. The biggest badasses on the street are still the ones that cry like little girls in the back of squad cars as it dawns on them how screwed they are. If you can break a man who's got "Fuck the police" hot sauced across his forehead, what do you think some wet-behind-the-ears kid in MIT is going to do when you threaten the same?
The prosecutor knew better. There is no 'if' here, it's his job. He did know. He had to have known. So that means he did it intentionally and with full view of the potential consequences... he did it with a blatant disregard for the well-being of others. He doesn't just deserve to be fired, he deserves to be in jail for being the proximate cause of another's death; He deserves a criminal record.
Of course, fortunately for him, our legal system doesn't work that way. No matter how much shit you lay out on someone, how much abuse you give them, how many times you beat them to a pulp, to the point that they're reduced to ash... as long as they're the one that pulls the trigger and not you; You are not responsible for their death.
Swartz is dead, and nothing can change that. But what we can change is the people employed by the state prosecution -- we can remove this man's name and ensure he can never harm anyone like this again, and then start talking about reforming the system and putting audits in place so that this kind of prosecutorial misconduct is dealt with swiftly and evenly. Because while Swartz took the ultimate get out of jail card, there's plenty of innocent people in jail because they opted for the more reasonable approach of pleading guilty to crimes they were innocent of, because the odds were not in their favor and the charge sheet was long and would have kept them in jail for life if they lost a bet they already had bad odds on.
If we're going to assign blame, if we're going to point fingers... then I'd say it's 95% the prosecutor, 5% the kid. Ignorance may be no excuse from the law, but it's not an excuse for the law to abuse people either.
Curiosity is necessary for a great scientist (or even a not-so-great one) but it's not sufficient.
No, sorry, but this is a fractally wrong statement to make. With sufficient curiousity, you will be dedicated to learning as much as you can. The drive to learn will push you where you need to go. Intelligence merely sets the speed by which you'll arrive. Your over-emphasis on intelligence is elitism; It's suggesting that if you can't be "smart enough", you shouldn't be in science.
I disagree. Firmly. Anyone can be a scientist. It is a method, a way of learning about the world. Almost every human being on the planet is capable of this. Even non-sentient animals have demonstrated an ability to use tools and experiment with their surroundings to gain understanding. If birds, wolves, monkeys, dolphins, and other animals can manage to do science, your argument of high general intelligence being necessary is totally and completely busted.
I stand by what I said before: You just need to be passionately curious. Even Einstein said as much, so if you want to argue the "you need to be smart too!" ... you're going up against someone who, by your own measure, is the smartest person to ever have lived. Good luck.
I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty and I know what I'm doing, but I want as close to zero maintenance as possible."
DD-WRT. Pick a good router with a fast cpu in it if you plan on running P2P with it. My high-end Asus 'black knight' (one of the recommended high-end dd-wrt models) shits itself if you have more than about a 800 or so simultanious connections, because the CPU isn't fast enough. I would not recommend using a 'netbook' with a wifi card simply because it consumes a lot of power and you'll make up in lower power consumption costs what you'd spend on a purpose-built router in about 15-18 months.
It only shows he had this difference; not that it was a factor in the public's perception that he is deemed intelligent.
While arguing about logical fallacies you've failed to address the original point entirely; A sample size of one is a problem, guys. It can't disprove the null hypothesis. It doesn't matter how many observations you make in the control group; At the very best, the ideal case, you'll succeed in identifying properties of this brain not present in all those other brains, but what you could be identifying may have absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. It could just as easily be another property, like his love of Justin Bieber (hey, if we're going to allow a sample size of one to be scientifically valid, I'm bringing time travel back -- so no bitching).
A little over a hundred years ago, people thought that humans could never fly because science proved it with the knowledge of the era. And yet when people work on so-called "perpetual motion" machines, they're called idiots just because our current understand of physics says it's not possible. And when you ask a scientist to explain gravity, all he can offer is a formula to calculate its value because all the current theories can't quite explain gravity itself and even those who try see their theories destroyed at smaller scales.
While your comment is massively off-topic, it hits on a topic near and dear to my heart, and it pains me greatly to see anyone misunderstand how science works, even an anonymous internet punter.
1. This is technically a true statement. Humans still cannot fly. We stuff ourselves in giant metal cans with wings on them, and the machines fly. We just sit inside them, continuing to stubbornly obey basic biology.
But I get your point. I notice you said "people thought," not "scientists thought". As far back as roman-greek times, people were dreaming about flying. Davinci was inking flying machine after flying machine. People who were studied in science never claimed it was impossible because they regularly observed birds flying. They knew they simply lacked sufficient understanding to do it, and set to the business of gaining that understanding.
2. Perpetual motion is idiotic; There has never been a case of it being observed. I'll explain in a minute just why scientists consider these people abject morons.
3. When you ask a scientist to explain gravity, he explains it on the basis of observation; Drop an apple, and it hits the ground. We can measure it very precisely. We have a great many theories that have allowed additional experiments to be carried out to observe it in more detail. The fact that it cannot be explained at the very tiny scale of quantum mechanics is not proof the theories are broken, but rather that some crucial observation is missing to tie it all together.
4. On the issue of scale, if I took your car engine and shrunk it to about 1/5th scale, it wouldn't run anymore, despite being exactly correct in every proportion. It's been long-understood that various physical forces only balance each other out at certain points and times. You can't create nuclear fission, for example, until you've gotten enough fissile material in the same place and close enough together. You can't just scale down beyond a certain point -- the machine will fail to function. This isn't a problem with "can't quite explain gravity", but rather a misunderstanding of fundamental physical laws.
When I see people write things like you just did, it makes me sad. Science is about empirical observation. It is the essence, the core, upon which everything else is built. You do not have to understand something to have it become scientific knowledge -- that's just extra. If you can observe something happening repeatedly and explain to others how to observe the same thing, and consistently get the same result, then you have science. Note that I didn't mention a theory, or an understanding, about what is being observed. All I mentioned were the elements of independent observation and the ability to reproduce the results. Understanding only comes in the context of research -- this is where we look at other observations and try to find similarities and common themes and patterns, that might allow us to construct a theory to explain what's going on. And theories can, indeed must, change whenever we find new observations that contradict it. But this is not instantanious. Observation does not automatically lead to theory.
We must experience first, then understand. It has always been this way. This is not science; This is life.
And yes, his other brain differences were know for a while, so this seems to be a new revelation based on new evidence of the correlation and the discovered photos.
All this ignores a rather glaring problem: The sample size is one.
If Einstein were alive, he would have told you, as he told them when he was still alive -- he wasn't particularly intelligent, only passionately curious. That's paraphrasing a direct quote. He probably would have also told you to stand outside utterly fascinating by water drops falling out of a fountain instead of going to accept your award for being so smart, and run around town in your loafers not giving a fuck what anyone else thought of you.
Maybe it's not intelligence per-se that we need to encourage, but non-conformity and the ability to embrace new ideas without pre-judgement.
Well, Hal, if this is what it takes to let you sleep at night despite your and your school's part in Swartz's persecution
You'd think MIT's psychology department would have pointed out the obvious flaw in this logic, but I'm guessing management had something to do with that. But I'm sure it's an isolated case. You can't have an entire school convert to fascism overnight without its students noticing something was going horribly wrong. I mean, if something is very, very obviously wrong and you see everybody else doing it, you wouldn't just go along with it.
What people object to is the fact that it only applies to students with rich parents who are able to afford the $30000 analysis, irrespective of the student's own ability or potential.
It doesn't cost $30,000 to do a psych test. Hell, it doesn't cost more than $5 for pencil and paper to take a test on this. Learning styles aren't rocket science.
But Alec Ross, a senior advisor on innovation at the U.S. State Department, worries this would create a new class of haves and have-nots.
Please fire this advisor without delay. He apparently doesn't understand process optimization. This is nothing new; Educators have been aware for decades that everyone has their own learning style, and therefore curriculum is tailored to try and use as many of those methods as possible for mass education. However, it is highly inefficient -- someone who learns best from hands-on is sitting bored out of their skull while the teacher asks everyone to copy what's on the blackboard into their notebooks to help the people who learn best by doing that. And both groups are bored to tears during the Q&A where you invariably get those two people that need to talk their way through the material to understand it.
By tailoring curriculum individually and/or grouping students by learning style, the teacher wastes less time, the students remain more engaged and retain more of the material, and the overall program costs go down as the grouped students are able to learn faster. It's a dirty little secret that most of public education is busywork... homework doesn't work for many people, but because it helps "enough" people, everyone gets it.
So you have students being forced to learn in a way that is unnatural and awkward -- it's like forcing a left handed person to write right handed. Schools do this, and it causes neurosis and MRI scans of these people's brains a few years after being forced to use the wrong hand shows clear and unique changes to their brain. Now imagine we're doing that to everyone and it quickly becomes clear just how toxic our public education system is with its "one size fits all" approach.
Customized curriculum is a win for everyone. There are no losers in this; Everyone has a learning style, they're well documented, and we know what the percentages of each in the general population they exist in. Schools can plan for this. It's all statistics... and the larger the school, the more efficient it becomes, unlike the current model. Everyone talks about ratios of teachers to students, but that's the wrong model. We need to be thinking of ratios of types of students.
Too bad you have that entirely backwards.
Your own defense of the unassailable dignity and prestige of the people of California notwithstanding, you actually just proved my point; They've repeatedly tried to force their standards on the rest of the country, co-opting federal law by interfering with commerce, putting tariffs and onerous burdens on anyone wanting to do business in this country because their products might get shipped to California and thus be subject to their whacky local ordinances.
And that was my only point. There is no "truth" about environmentalism... here, the "truth" is about the state versus the federal government, and deciding who has more authority when it comes to standards about products bought and sold in this country. And California's clearly in the wrong.. but since we can't just bomb them into compliance or send in the national guard, the EPA has opted to negotiate with the ecoterrorists that have taken over local government there to maintain the peace.
Comcast stop capping their customers a while ago.
Well, yes and no. Comcast still contacts people, but in most, but not all markets, the cap was removed. They still throttle and use shaping technologies, which is why my QoS is setup the way it does; On paper, I have almost twice as much bandwidth as I can reliably get without triggering a transient bandwidth clamp-down on my service. Weeks of careful experimentation has revealed that Comcast only provides unmetered access at about 75% of your rated line speed. Go above that, and at certain times of the day, it'll start buffering your downloads, becoming bursty, etc. -- by placing you in a lower priority queue. For people who use VoIP or Netflix, this can ruin your internet experience.
But yeah, in the strictest sense... there aren't any caps. YMMV.
Real scientists create experiments that can be reproduced and independently verified and they did not. Q.E.D.
This is less about a failing of science and open publishing journals than the fact that on the internet, reputations can be shed like a snake sheds its skin -- you're just a few clicks away from a new account and a new identity. This has been a long-studied problem in cryptography -- how to create trust networks in public key crypto with key signing parties, etc. That the lessons learned there apply to social networking sites and open publication journals as well requires only the smallest amount of creativity to see.
If you want honesty, you need to have some way of punishing people who are dishonest. It really is that simple; You need a way to saddle them with a cost that can't be shed by simply switching identities. And the best way to do that, for better or for worse, is a central authority in the real world that matches online identities to real-world ones. Everything else is varying degrees of broken.
Create a blacklist of people who have lied and although you may be able to overwhelm the system for awhile, it is self-correcting... eventually it will run out of people willing or able to get blacklisted, and the quality will then start to rise as people are forced to be responsible for what they say and do.
I imagine Comcast will have something to say about this - something like "No more internet for you, TOS-breaker"
Click. Click. Aaaand it's now a tor service. Because fuck you, Comcast. -_- They have a long history of screwing up people's internet. I just configure the router to pipe all traffic to a VPN, encrypt it, and call it a day. They get exactly zero bytes of unencrypted traffic. Go ahead and try and say anything about my traffic other than "It always goes from point A, to point B, and while the packets vary in length, the bandwidth usage is the same 24/7/365. Because I use QoS on my router and purposefully stuff my Torrent client full of things, even if I don't need them, just to keep the pipe full. Sortof a quiet fuck you to traffic analysis techniques. -_-
That indicates to me that the US rules are in effect for the US, even if the work was copyrighted outside the US.
That is, more or less, how the law operates. Now when I say more or less, the devil's in the details. There are numerous treaties covering cross-country patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc., so filing in one country extends similar protections simultaniously to all the other signatories... but the implimentation of treaty terms can vary from one country to another, as can the interpretations of some provisions. In Japan, for example, you can patent something that is in every detail identical to your competitor except it's a slightly different shade of muave and it qualifies as a unique work. But that doesn't mean you won't get sued in the United States for patent infringement if you try to market it. The laws are a patchwork of often conflicting and vague tombs of treaties, federal, state, and local law. Hell, California routinely tries to supercede federal authority; Pick up a canister of oxygen sometime "This product is known to cause cancer in the state of california." But nowhere else, apparently. Anyone who wants to sell their product in California has to do business by their funktastic and horribly deranged environmental regulations... and the EPA has been forced to write new legislation specifically to say "... We only have to make a new law about this because California rode the short bus on this stuff. Again."
I thought that was Pontiac's slogan.
Yeah, well, you can't expect me to keep everyone's marketing straight... it's not like I buy a new car every few months. And to be honest, looking at Toyota's recent slogans... Cars bursting into flames seems to mirror their marketing department's abilities.
You asked for it! You got it!
Oh, what a feeling!
Who could ask for anything more?
I love what you do for me, Toyota!
Everyday
Get the feeling!
Moving Forward
Let's Go Places
Guys... the 80s called. They want the names of their unborn one hit wonders back. -_-
Tesla Model S Catches Fire: Is This Tesla's 'Toyota' Moment?
Only when you consider Toyota's slogan is "Driving excitement". I can think of nothing more exciting than OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE.
Sometimes you say some pretty heavily debated shit. No doubt burning your karma to the ground.
You don't learn how to make comments that are "great and insightful constructed logically" by avoiding heavily debated positions. I reply to anyone, even anonymous cowards, if I think they have a point. Many a time I have played devil's advocate, arguing with someone whose position I agree with, because I felt their argument was sub-par. Arriving at the right conclusion for the wrong reasons to me is no different than reaching the wrong conclusion -- you should have a solid argument regardless of what side you're on.
I count amongst my friends conservatives and liberals alike, and frequently debate both of them to the point both think I'm on the other team. But it's more important to me that people think critically about their own values and positions and have good reasons for holding to them, than that they agree with me. For example, there's a lot of things Apple does right -- they have spent a LOT of time, money, and effort, on making a simple and intuitive UI for many of their products. This is a solid point in Apple's favor. But they also have used slave labor to produce those products, the work atmosphere even here in the United States has been described as toxic, and they have a very aggressive legal department to protect their overpriced products. Those are all things in the negative. Does that mean that the product might be so good that we can ignore all these things? Quite possibly, if you value that enough. In which case, that's fine -- if that is what you place a premium on, that's a totally valid position. But if you think that all comes at too high of a cost, that's a valid position too. I can see it going both ways -- but saying that Apple has none of those negative qualities, while embracing the good qualities, is a cognitive error, and I will come down on you like a bag of bricks for it.
I find it more important for people to be able to critically reason out why they hold the positions they do, than which position they hold. This means that yeah, I get into heavily debated areas and get modbombed for it... but I'm okay with that too. They may be punitively -1'ing me, but I hope that, despite their anger, I at least made them think about something they hadn't considered... even if they won't admit it.
so your genius attempts to ssh to your external server running on tcp/443, will not only be blocked, you will be flagged and tagged.
Umm, excuse me. Not to interrupt what was turning out to be a really good rant, but I did no such thing and claimed no such thing, so don't talk about my "genius attempts". All I did was go fishing -- do something that most people would think to be reasonably secure, then wait and see what happens.
What happened was about 27 felonies for unauthorized computer access. In the corporate IT world, this is also known as Tuesday. But god help you if you connect your phone to your computer to charge it -- people have gone to jail for this because company policy prohibited it. It's called "selective enforcement". If we persecuted all computer crimes equally, then every manager in every fortune 500 company would be arrested and jailed for life, just based on the things they'll either be doing, knowing about (accomplice), or complicit in allowing, in the next week alone.
My point here is that the NSA isn't the people you need to worry about when it comes to your own computer's security -- your idiot manager is a far more dangerous entity.
Given that half of Slashdot works in corporate IT I'm sure we're all shocked by this announcement.
Yeah, and we all know who to blame. (looks ominously upward) The irony here is that corporate IT is even more into surveillance and CYA than the former NSA guy is. I mean, the NSA has rules and shit to follow. Management at a company these days is like to be all "Yo, we do whatever we want. You dun like it? Dere's da fuckin' door." (sorry, Jersey accents are really hard to do on slashdot forum posts)
As an experiment I once sent an e-mail out from my last employer containing about 5KB of randomly generated gibberish to an e-mail address setup that had never been used before on a server that didn't have an SMTP server prior to the test balloon. Over the next three days, this previously unused and unloved honeypot got dozens of pings from the corporate network from people trying to login to the SSH, poke at the SMTP server, looking for web services. I sent it from a gmail account specially setup ahead of time, then logged in over a supposedly secure 'ssl' connection.
Similar has happened at 7 out of 10 employers I've worked for. They don't just monitor all your stuff...they actively go out and fuck with it. And the only reason this isn't a problem is because they're so terrifyingly bad at it.
Guessing it uses the peltier effect. Well, I see three problems here, which is probably why it's on Kickstarter and not in a t-mobile store. First, if you overheat it, your goose is cooked. Second, it looks like the solution to the overheating problem is to use water. Third... fire + water + electronics generally end badly. Usually because water causes fire which kills electronics, but really, any combination of the three usually ends badly.
Just buy a solar panel like a normal person; Don't risk it tipping over and killing your (likely) only means of communication in the wilderness. And while you're at it... buy a shortwave radio. They're cheap, low power, have long range, and you can easily run/charge them with a hand crank in minutes. And unlike a cell phone... many models are made to be waterproof and the simplicity of the design means they likely could even survive an EMP from a nuclear weapon. I'd rather have one of those in my "oh shit" bag than some complex contraption like this...