Putting aside for the moment whether or not I agree with global warming itself, you seem to harbor a patently false understanding of what exactly these "global warming alarmists" are after, because it's anything *but* maintaining the status quo. Changing entrenched lifestyles, adopting new and largely inefficient technologies, and taking the big oil companies and the entire infrastructures that support them out of the game is most assuredly *not* maintaining the status quo. Unless you were using status quo as a synonym to human survival, which is debatable even aside from global warming.
It's not hard to see why the public at large is opposed to nuclear power: see the above headline. What is evidently much harder to see is why that opposition is extremely unreasonable, particularly in relation to power by fossil fuels.
I would agree with you to a certain extent that the benefits of being wrong aren't praised enough. I don't think one's career could be ruined by publishing research that ends up being falsifiable, if only because there's a surprising number of papers out there whose work isn't even reproducible (but the work is often negligible anyway, just something published for the sake of being published...and dismissed by the scientific community at large just as quickly), much less falsifiable. The "career ruining" thing comes into play when researchers are consistently publishing papers that aren't reproducible, have no concrete evidence to support their claims, and generally mock the entire scientific process. Beyond that, good scientists just take an ego beating when a paper turns out to be wrong:)
That's the whole idea of the scientific process, though, in that being wrong drives change. The fact that we've "so often been wrong" I think proves the process works: someone publishes a paper, others peer review it and find it ok but with a few nagging yellow flags, other independent labs perform the same experiment and publish different results, consensus breaks down and alternate, more feasible theories are produced instead. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Also, as a student in research who only just had his first-ever paper accepted and published, I'd have to say your blanket statement about the "most powerful clique" ensuring their papers get published and "no one else"s is patently false. There are always going to be bad apples in research, just like any other field, but that doesn't make the whole process broken.
I have to ask: do you have any evidence to support your theory? I'm not questioning your position, simply inquiring on what basis you make your claims. As a fledgling scientist in the ivory tower of academia, I have an insider's perspective on the peer review process, but I admit it's very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and for that reason welcome any feedback on the process itself.
No, that is exactly what I meant before when I said that the rumor mill changed its tune at least a month ago that this iPad wouldn't have the retina display; that rumor was weeded out very early on.
It was made fairly clear early on (CNET, Engadget, Macrumors, etc) that the retina display was not going to make it onto the iPad 2, but would likely show up on the rumored iPad 3 that will possibly debut in September.
Aside from all this, I have to also fall back on the definition of "rumors" and their very nature.
That's not a bad argument, but I have to point out what I perceive to be a poor analogy: you're absolutely correct regarding your roofing that, while it's definitely straddling the border between "useful" and "really really useful", it's not nearly as "critical" as, say, mortgage and food. However, the roofing is completely independent from your stream of income; having your current roof vs redoing the roof will not alter your pay grade one cent. On the other hand, investing in these scientific programs could (and probably will) stimulate the economy in a feed-forward loop of its own. The only issue with that plan is that this science/education funding is one of the longest-term goals out there: we probably wouldn't see the benefits of it for at least a decade or two, if not more. But by laying the groundwork now, we'd be much more prepared to make the big breakthroughs when our technology is ready. The roofing is just that, and nothing more. Investment in these long-term goals yield far more than just their up-front cost.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I think such mistakes are opportunities for self-improvement, without which we might never make spontaneous advancements, be they anthropological, scientific, philosophical, or otherwise. Pain and suffering are intrinsic to our existence here, so while eliminating them entirely might seem on one hand like a nice pie-in-the-sky goal, I believe it completely misses the point. To try and ignore something that is perpetually interwoven into the fabric of our existence is to discount a huge opportunity for growth, and I think that would be doing a great disservice to the human race.
It's this discomfort and pain that strips away all the bureaucratic bullshit, all the superficial nonsense, and forces people to be who they really are. Whether they sink or swim is entirely up to them, and I think it's necessary for everyone to experience, if only from a perspective of self-discovery (but also for everyone else's benefit). I realize this is all sort of hand-wavy philosophical, but I think it's born out in concrete fashion every day.
What will be truly newsworthy is the day when passwords / users aren't the weakest link in security. Until that happens, I'll stay in my underground bunker sipping on Ramen and playing tower defense.
Isn't this the same problem faced by trying to undertake widespread adoption of IPv6? Maybe we should just do both at the same time - one massive headache that will hopefully last as short as possible, as opposed to two much longer (and likely overlapping), less intense headaches. Not that corporations who aren't running into any DNS cache poisoning or IP exhaustion issues (aka the vast majority) will be chomping at the bit to get these items done out of the fathomless kindness of their hearts.
Does Comcast simply not care about their customer satisfaction ratings, or are they on a quest to consciously plunge their ratings into the gutter? I ask semi-seriously because the latter strategy has merit: they can effectively do whatever they want without fear of too much consequence. After all, if they still have customers after kicking them around like this with the crap they've been pulling, they can probably continue to treat their customers like dirt and get away with it.
There's a noticeable trend: as the graphics in video games have become "more realistic" over the last decade, homicide rates among 14-25 year-olds (arguably the most potent age demographic in the gaming industry) has dropped over the last decade.
No, correlation does not imply causation, nor would that make in this particular case. Furthermore, homicides can't be construed as an end-all, be-all indicator of any culturally-induced violent behavior. But saying that kids who play Counterstrike and then leave their house with their dad's shotgun and blow holes in their neighbors' heads were inspired to do so from playing video games is ludicrous.
Video games may nudge already-unstable mental states of individuals in a certain direction, but it's nothing that a certain environment wouldn't have done on its own anyway. They don't turn "normal" human beings into mindless rampaging murderers.
Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers.
I find it very difficult to believe that the man who has presided over Apple's astonishing march back into relevancy over the last couple decades could possibly be labeled "a mistake".
Is that tiny edge that Facebook has over Google outside the margin of error? I don't doubt that Facebook use is growing faster than Google use, but has it exceeded the "noisy" range and clearly bested Google, or is this just a random spike during which someone happened to be paying attention?
I may be modded off-topic for this, but I am genuinely curious as to your explanations for why an afterlife doesn't (or shouldn't?) exist, as well as how you qualify actions as purely deterministic. Not saying I agree or disagree (yet); I'm just very curious as to how you reached those conclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting aside for the moment whether or not I agree with global warming itself, you seem to harbor a patently false understanding of what exactly these "global warming alarmists" are after, because it's anything *but* maintaining the status quo. Changing entrenched lifestyles, adopting new and largely inefficient technologies, and taking the big oil companies and the entire infrastructures that support them out of the game is most assuredly *not* maintaining the status quo. Unless you were using status quo as a synonym to human survival, which is debatable even aside from global warming.
It's not hard to see why the public at large is opposed to nuclear power: see the above headline. What is evidently much harder to see is why that opposition is extremely unreasonable, particularly in relation to power by fossil fuels.
True enough, you got me there :P
I would agree with you to a certain extent that the benefits of being wrong aren't praised enough. I don't think one's career could be ruined by publishing research that ends up being falsifiable, if only because there's a surprising number of papers out there whose work isn't even reproducible (but the work is often negligible anyway, just something published for the sake of being published...and dismissed by the scientific community at large just as quickly), much less falsifiable. The "career ruining" thing comes into play when researchers are consistently publishing papers that aren't reproducible, have no concrete evidence to support their claims, and generally mock the entire scientific process. Beyond that, good scientists just take an ego beating when a paper turns out to be wrong :)
That's the whole idea of the scientific process, though, in that being wrong drives change. The fact that we've "so often been wrong" I think proves the process works: someone publishes a paper, others peer review it and find it ok but with a few nagging yellow flags, other independent labs perform the same experiment and publish different results, consensus breaks down and alternate, more feasible theories are produced instead. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Also, as a student in research who only just had his first-ever paper accepted and published, I'd have to say your blanket statement about the "most powerful clique" ensuring their papers get published and "no one else"s is patently false. There are always going to be bad apples in research, just like any other field, but that doesn't make the whole process broken.
I have to ask: do you have any evidence to support your theory? I'm not questioning your position, simply inquiring on what basis you make your claims. As a fledgling scientist in the ivory tower of academia, I have an insider's perspective on the peer review process, but I admit it's very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and for that reason welcome any feedback on the process itself.
No, that is exactly what I meant before when I said that the rumor mill changed its tune at least a month ago that this iPad wouldn't have the retina display; that rumor was weeded out very early on.
It was made fairly clear early on (CNET, Engadget, Macrumors, etc) that the retina display was not going to make it onto the iPad 2, but would likely show up on the rumored iPad 3 that will possibly debut in September.
Aside from all this, I have to also fall back on the definition of "rumors" and their very nature.
But somehow I'm not surprised at all.
That's not a bad argument, but I have to point out what I perceive to be a poor analogy: you're absolutely correct regarding your roofing that, while it's definitely straddling the border between "useful" and "really really useful", it's not nearly as "critical" as, say, mortgage and food. However, the roofing is completely independent from your stream of income; having your current roof vs redoing the roof will not alter your pay grade one cent. On the other hand, investing in these scientific programs could (and probably will) stimulate the economy in a feed-forward loop of its own. The only issue with that plan is that this science/education funding is one of the longest-term goals out there: we probably wouldn't see the benefits of it for at least a decade or two, if not more. But by laying the groundwork now, we'd be much more prepared to make the big breakthroughs when our technology is ready. The roofing is just that, and nothing more. Investment in these long-term goals yield far more than just their up-front cost.
No, the moral of the story is to not do any of those things, since your box is going to get hacked anyway.
To be honest, they're the last ISP I'd have expected to start IPv6 implementation.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I think such mistakes are opportunities for self-improvement, without which we might never make spontaneous advancements, be they anthropological, scientific, philosophical, or otherwise. Pain and suffering are intrinsic to our existence here, so while eliminating them entirely might seem on one hand like a nice pie-in-the-sky goal, I believe it completely misses the point. To try and ignore something that is perpetually interwoven into the fabric of our existence is to discount a huge opportunity for growth, and I think that would be doing a great disservice to the human race.
It's this discomfort and pain that strips away all the bureaucratic bullshit, all the superficial nonsense, and forces people to be who they really are. Whether they sink or swim is entirely up to them, and I think it's necessary for everyone to experience, if only from a perspective of self-discovery (but also for everyone else's benefit). I realize this is all sort of hand-wavy philosophical, but I think it's born out in concrete fashion every day.
What will be truly newsworthy is the day when passwords / users aren't the weakest link in security. Until that happens, I'll stay in my underground bunker sipping on Ramen and playing tower defense.
Isn't this the same problem faced by trying to undertake widespread adoption of IPv6? Maybe we should just do both at the same time - one massive headache that will hopefully last as short as possible, as opposed to two much longer (and likely overlapping), less intense headaches. Not that corporations who aren't running into any DNS cache poisoning or IP exhaustion issues (aka the vast majority) will be chomping at the bit to get these items done out of the fathomless kindness of their hearts.
Does Comcast simply not care about their customer satisfaction ratings, or are they on a quest to consciously plunge their ratings into the gutter? I ask semi-seriously because the latter strategy has merit: they can effectively do whatever they want without fear of too much consequence. After all, if they still have customers after kicking them around like this with the crap they've been pulling, they can probably continue to treat their customers like dirt and get away with it.
Why is there a "Share this on Facebook" button at the end of TFA?
Could we get this feature on jailbroken iPhones too? I'd love to be able to write an app and upload it to my phone immediately.
There's a noticeable trend: as the graphics in video games have become "more realistic" over the last decade, homicide rates among 14-25 year-olds (arguably the most potent age demographic in the gaming industry) has dropped over the last decade.
No, correlation does not imply causation, nor would that make in this particular case. Furthermore, homicides can't be construed as an end-all, be-all indicator of any culturally-induced violent behavior. But saying that kids who play Counterstrike and then leave their house with their dad's shotgun and blow holes in their neighbors' heads were inspired to do so from playing video games is ludicrous.
Video games may nudge already-unstable mental states of individuals in a certain direction, but it's nothing that a certain environment wouldn't have done on its own anyway. They don't turn "normal" human beings into mindless rampaging murderers.
I find it very difficult to believe that the man who has presided over Apple's astonishing march back into relevancy over the last couple decades could possibly be labeled "a mistake".
of this app.
Is that tiny edge that Facebook has over Google outside the margin of error? I don't doubt that Facebook use is growing faster than Google use, but has it exceeded the "noisy" range and clearly bested Google, or is this just a random spike during which someone happened to be paying attention?
I may be modded off-topic for this, but I am genuinely curious as to your explanations for why an afterlife doesn't (or shouldn't?) exist, as well as how you qualify actions as purely deterministic. Not saying I agree or disagree (yet); I'm just very curious as to how you reached those conclusions.
...or do the patent lawsuits that show up on /. seem frivolous to the point of absurdity?
If so, is that sample bias? Or are all patent lawsuits intrinsically ridiculous?
"It just works!...even though it's not actually supposed to!"