Dr. Bakker, Are there any major (or even minor) changes you would like to see in the taxonomy system now generally accepted? Do you in any way feel the current system could be better organized to more accurately reflect those taxa of your expertise and their interrelationships?
Has your thinking regarding mass extinctions, particularly the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, changed or evolved from the time of your writing THE DINOSAUR HERESIES?
This. Spintronics. Room temperature solid-state masers. Quantum teleportation. The Viterbi algorithm. Compressive sensing. Oh, hey, the internet.
Most fundamental inventions are not themselves consumer products - that's part of the issue here. The other part is just ignorance. This is horrible due diligence for a reporter.
Here's to old RPI, Her fame may never die, Here's to old Rensselaer, She stands today, without a peer,...
See, it's right in the song.
Let me just say that Wall Street, if they wanted close access to a Watson machine, could have had one installed in one of the very many campuses of universities that are located in New York City. Rensselaer is in Troy, New York. That's upstate. It's not particularly convenient to Manhattan.
Further, RPI has a long relationship with IBM. There were years (long gone now, I'm afraid) when IBM hired a third of RPI's graduating CS and EEs.
I don't believe you have the right to a large capacity magazine. You may believe that to be true, and perhaps some local laws might support you, but it's a very imaginative reading of the second amendment to contend unequivocally that by "arms" it gives you the right to possess an assault weapon with a high capacity magazine, but, say, denies you the right to own a grenade launcher or a flamethrower. How is the one an "arm" and the others not? If grenade launchers are in fact arms, how then can they be barred from private ownership, if they are also protected by the same amendment? Do you believe your neighbors should all have the right to own grenade launchers? Would you all together then be a "well-ordered militia"?
I don't have an interest in entering a long discussion about this today, but I'm just pointing out that what you're presuming as your right is not universally acknowledged, and that people reasoning in good faith can come to different conclusions about this issue.
It's not that people hate football. I honestly love to watch football. I grew up in Buffalo during Jim Kelly's prime. There was nothing finer than watching sixty minutes of hurry-up offense, believe me.
But there's two things. One, the amount of litigation is about to go ballistic. The NFL is flush with cash and everyone knows it, and retirees and their widows everywhere are lawyering up.
Two, no one in good conscience is going to let their kids go out for football anymore. No one. Would you let your kid play, knowing just what we know today?
So you don't have to hate football - even people who love a good play-action fake can read the writing on the wall.
This has nothing to do with statism. Conscientious parents simply aren't going to let their kids go out for football. Who wants to set their kids up for a lifetime of this - particularly if it increases their likelihood of an early death, of suicide, violence off the field or debilitating mental illness?
Why does everything have to be a political argument? This mostly has to do with being humane. If you wouldn't want this to happen to yourself or your loved ones, why would you pay to see it happen to somebody else?
THIS. You know, if startups actually cared about their customers, they wouldn't sell out so readily (at least, to That Company) or, when doing so, would extract some agreement to not kill the service outright for X years after. I won't mourn MS killing the messenger, but the larger trend is just depressing.
"A short swipe from the left edge of the screen is all it takes to reveal your favourite apps. Page either left or right from the home screen to see the content you use most. A full left-to-right swipe reveals a screen showing all your open apps, while a swipe from the right brings you instantly to the last app you were using.... A swipe from the right edge takes you back to the last app you were using; another swipe takes you back to the app you used before that. It’s natural to keep many apps open at once, which is why Ubuntu was designed for multi-tasking.... Swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone reveals app controls."
Gee I can't see why you don't find this immediately intuitive and convenient./sarcasm
To use this content, please install Silverlight! Gah!
So I can't use an ancilliary device that doesn't support Silverlight, a technology that (by consensus if not by Windows actually admitted it) MS is planning to obsolesce, to find out the basic rudimentary getting-around-and-getting-things-done things with Win8?
I think a better thing than a pardon, which is legally if not rhetorically problematic, would be a monument. This would be more meaningful.
It needn't be big, or central, or tremendously expensive. It could just be a quiet place people could go to, to pay their respects. The could read a bit of his story, and think about what he did, and about the other people these laws effected. Rather than being a divisive thing, it could be a place for healing or unburdening.
I know, this sounds stupid on the surface. But I'm thinking about the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington. It was very divisive at the onset. But it's the one place in DC that is truly quiet, and truly moving.
If you really want to do something respectful for his memory, recognize his sacrifice, make amends to his ghost - the monument is the way to go.
"What you're arguing is for more/tighter regulation." Yeah, but any even minute steps towards tighter (I was going to say improved) gun regulations are some kind of red flag that, to most 2nd-amendment defenders and "preppers", is basically calling in the black helicopters.
A valid analogy, IMO, is speed limits. The feds induce the states to post a higher speed limit. The standard response is "putting up a sign wouldn't have stopped THAT GUY from speeding - the one who had the big crash that prompted all this." And you know what - that's very true. Nonetheless, over the years we've amassed an immense amount of data that shows that the number and severity of crashes is to a first approximation linearly related to the number on that sign. Choosing the number on that sign is not trivial, its an act that has moral consequences. Even if it possibly inconveniences a very lot of people.
More guns hanging around = more gun casualties. Less guns around = less gun casualties. Its true for gun rampages, its true for domestic violence, its true for street crimes, its true for household accidents. If guns weren't so efficient and so dangerous, what would be the argument for having them in the first place?
And some twenty year old kid with a closet full of guns, his own or his parents, does not look like a well-regulated militia to me. In no way at all was he defending the Constitution. I'm betting it was the farthest thing from his mind. Just holding onto a gun does not make you a patriot.
I'm sorry, real patriotism is BELIEVING in the Constitution, believing that it works, all of it, not just the one line you like.
If you really cared about the Constitution, you'd be looking at all the other parts of it that have been trampled by the last two administrations. Habeas corpus, due process, privacy, eavesdropping, rendition, targetted killings of US citizens overseas - the list is long. You want to be a patriot? Get involved! Get people motivated! Write your reps! HECK, run for office! Make the government conform to the actual law. That is what real patriotism is. Take some ownership, instead of looking for the exits.
I'm not suggesting we scrub the second amendment. See, that's the assumption every 2nd-amendment defender starts out against, that any opposition at all has a no-guns-anywhere end game in mind. It's a purple unicorn - nowhere in nature can you really find that argument.
I'm suggesting rather that there should be reasonable checks and limits for guns, just like for other substantially dangerous items in society. You want to drive a car, you have to prove you are safe to do so, you get insurance, you take tests, you get checked up every so often, the car itself is inspected. If you want to operate a crane, you have to (etc. etc.) If you want be a surgeon, (etc etc.)
But the argument goes that any inconvenience of the rights of gun owners at all must be a stepping stone to full annihilalation of your Constitutional rights, and so must be challenged with absolute resolve. There isn't, apparently, a single even token move we could make towards more reasonable limits (say, banning 100-round clips?) on private gun ownership, that isn't a challenge to the Constitution.
And can I say, the "if you don't like the second amendment, go to Canada" business is plain offensive. My great grandfather fought in the first world war. His brother earned a purple heart there. My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge. My father served during Vietnam. I did ten years of civilian service in the Department of Defense. I am as much an American citizen and a patriot as anyone, and wanting a lessening of gun violence in America (and valuing that above any unrealistic Red-Dawn fantasies) is a patriotic act.
"making it harder for citizens to defend themselves, with these sorts of things as a natural consequence of that failure to change."
If your goal is to persuade people, rather than just threaten them, maybe an argument that boils down to "stop trying to control guns, or a lot of crazy people are going to shoot up the place some more" is probably not your best choice. Examine what you're saying here and think about what it's really implying.
Well, I'm not a simple ideologue, I'm not sure which part of that I should feel more offended by.
Setting that aside, you could start by telling me how exactly we're making it harder and harder for citizens to defend themselves. The assault gun ban, started under Clinton, was stopped by President Bush. The handgun provisions in Chicago were recently struck down in court, openly ignoring the surge in gun violence in that city. The Stand Your Ground laws have proliferated and already been a factor in several shooting deaths. Concealed carry laws are everywhere now, several of them passed just this year. It's hard to imagine a venue of public life where you're not allowed to carry a gun now (church? libraries? sporting events?) Gun sales have gone through the roof. And the NRA is the biggest lobbying organization in the country.
I think the truth is that most gun owners are really afraid of the gun control measures that have been taken by an oppressive government they've imagined IN THEIR OWN MINDS rather than anything you could actually cite in, say, a newspaper.
Also, I don't believe there are many (any) cases of shooting rampages being triggered by legislative action on the part of gun control advocates. You're welcome to cite counterexamples here, but most shooters that I've read about have either done it out of personal jealousy or spite, workplace disagreements, or just plain being unhinged.
Constantly gun-rights advocates ignore the basic facts that more guns = more gun casualties, and that less guns = less gun casualties. That's EVIDENCE-BASED.
See, what makes the argument suspect is absoluteness of it. If we say, removed every gun in America, still, no less people would die from violent acts. None? Not a single one less? That's simply not believable.
I'm willing to grant that a zero gun policy would not prevent all gun violence. I'm willing to grant that a zero gun policy would be impossible to implement. I assert that the number of guns in America and the number of gun killings in America are not unrelated to one another. In reality, the one quantity is approximately a linear non-decreasing function of the other.
Still, nobody's given me a number. A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? What if everybody in America died from gun violence? Would you, some time after that, concede that maybe some gun controls were reasonable?
C'mon, what was a twenty-year old kid doing with this kind of firepower, anyway? Defending the Constitution?
NO I very much disagree with what you're saying. We do respect each other, at least, as much as we always have. The past is not some golden age, something better than we could possibly be. People are people.
The shooter here was a twenty-year old kid. He used a glock, and something called a "Sig Sauer". One thing that is different now than in the past is Access. When I was 20, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Sig Sauer - I doubt the vast majority did. I doubt anybody in my home town would know where to find such a thing, and surely no one could have gotten on the internet and ordered one up (because the internet didn't exist then.)
Part of the problem is that these kinds of weapons are much more accessible, much more available, much more part of the public consciousness than they once were.
Every time these incidents occur, there is a tremendous and instantaneous outpouring of these same old arguments "guns don't kill people..." "outlawing guns is not going to prevent crazy people from getting them..." The arguments never change, the politics never change, and these incidents happen again and again.
The definition of 'crazy', or one of them, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. HOW MANY TIMES do we have to hear about shooting rampages in our own schools, malls, movie theaters, workplaces, before people will begin to ask themselves if maybe their outlook is simply wrong? How many people would have to die before you, Mr. 2nd Amendment Defender, would reconsider your own viewpoint? Just do this exercise for me - say a number out loud.
Doubt is essential in a deliberative society. If you can never doubt your own viewpoint, then the freedom to discuss and debate it is worthless.
This. I think a good solution here would be for police to just tase anyone attempting to buy an iPhone in an Apple store.
It's an elegant, simple, user-oriented solution to an age-old problem. It could be augmented by intelligent choices among typefaces, and skeumorphisms to make the analogy clearer. And you have to admit, it has a certain Steve-Jobs-flair (tm) to it, don't you? The policeman could come right up to your face, and with a breath wreaking of donuts and stale coffee, shriek "OH AND JUST ONE MORE THING!!" right before pulling the trigger.
Android simply couldn't compete with this. Apple's vertically-integrated retail channels offer "marketing leverage". Apple would be lifting something that was previously a simple transaction and transforming it into an integrated, social experience. Again, Apple is setting the pace.
One thing that's worth looking into - OpSIS hosts or points to web-based training and seminars several times a year, sometimes given by CAD vendors that support their design and fab processes. They are well worth sitting in for if you're trying to spin up on this stuff. Not a plug, just my own experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Bakker,
Are there any major (or even minor) changes you would like to see in the taxonomy system now generally accepted? Do you in any way feel the current system could be better organized to more accurately reflect those taxa of your expertise and their interrelationships?
Thanks -
Hello again Dr. Bakker,
What do you make of efforts by Jack Horner and others to 'reverse-evolve' a dinosaur from chicken embryos?
Thanks -
Hello Dr. Bakker,
Has your thinking regarding mass extinctions, particularly the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, changed or evolved from the time of your writing THE DINOSAUR HERESIES?
Thanks sincerely -
Once again, William Gibson was here first.
This is pretty squarely in "no true Scotsman" territory.
This. Spintronics. Room temperature solid-state masers. Quantum teleportation. The Viterbi algorithm. Compressive sensing. Oh, hey, the internet.
Most fundamental inventions are not themselves consumer products - that's part of the issue here. The other part is just ignorance. This is horrible due diligence for a reporter.
Here's to old RPI,
Her fame may never die,
Here's to old Rensselaer,
She stands today, without a peer,...
See, it's right in the song.
Let me just say that Wall Street, if they wanted close access to a Watson machine, could have had one installed in one of the very many campuses of universities that are located in New York City. Rensselaer is in Troy, New York. That's upstate. It's not particularly convenient to Manhattan.
Further, RPI has a long relationship with IBM. There were years (long gone now, I'm afraid) when IBM hired a third of RPI's graduating CS and EEs.
Once again, William Gibson was here first.
I don't believe you have the right to a large capacity magazine. You may believe that to be true, and perhaps some local laws might support you, but it's a very imaginative reading of the second amendment to contend unequivocally that by "arms" it gives you the right to possess an assault weapon with a high capacity magazine, but, say, denies you the right to own a grenade launcher or a flamethrower. How is the one an "arm" and the others not? If grenade launchers are in fact arms, how then can they be barred from private ownership, if they are also protected by the same amendment? Do you believe your neighbors should all have the right to own grenade launchers? Would you all together then be a "well-ordered militia"?
I don't have an interest in entering a long discussion about this today, but I'm just pointing out that what you're presuming as your right is not universally acknowledged, and that people reasoning in good faith can come to different conclusions about this issue.
Good day to you -
It's not that people hate football. I honestly love to watch football. I grew up in Buffalo during Jim Kelly's prime. There was nothing finer than watching sixty minutes of hurry-up offense, believe me.
But there's two things. One, the amount of litigation is about to go ballistic. The NFL is flush with cash and everyone knows it, and retirees and their widows everywhere are lawyering up.
Two, no one in good conscience is going to let their kids go out for football anymore. No one. Would you let your kid play, knowing just what we know today?
So you don't have to hate football - even people who love a good play-action fake can read the writing on the wall.
This has nothing to do with statism. Conscientious parents simply aren't going to let their kids go out for football. Who wants to set their kids up for a lifetime of this - particularly if it increases their likelihood of an early death, of suicide, violence off the field or debilitating mental illness?
Why does everything have to be a political argument? This mostly has to do with being humane. If you wouldn't want this to happen to yourself or your loved ones, why would you pay to see it happen to somebody else?
THIS. You know, if startups actually cared about their customers, they wouldn't sell out so readily (at least, to That Company) or, when doing so, would extract some agreement to not kill the service outright for X years after. I won't mourn MS killing the messenger, but the larger trend is just depressing.
(Filming this with my Flip camera.)
COUNT ZERO
"A short swipe from the left edge of the screen is all it takes to reveal your favourite apps. Page either left or right from the home screen to see the content you use most. A full left-to-right swipe reveals a screen showing all your open apps, while a swipe from the right brings you instantly to the last app you were using. ... A swipe from the right edge takes you back to the last app you were using; another swipe takes you back to the app you used before that. It’s natural to keep many apps open at once, which is why Ubuntu was designed for multi-tasking. ... Swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone reveals app controls."
Gee I can't see why you don't find this immediately intuitive and convenient. /sarcasm
To use this content, please install Silverlight! Gah!
So I can't use an ancilliary device that doesn't support Silverlight, a technology that (by consensus if not by Windows actually admitted it) MS is planning to obsolesce, to find out the basic rudimentary getting-around-and-getting-things-done things with Win8?
I think a better thing than a pardon, which is legally if not rhetorically problematic, would be a monument. This would be more meaningful.
It needn't be big, or central, or tremendously expensive. It could just be a quiet place people could go to, to pay their respects. The could read a bit of his story, and think about what he did, and about the other people these laws effected. Rather than being a divisive thing, it could be a place for healing or unburdening.
I know, this sounds stupid on the surface. But I'm thinking about the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington. It was very divisive at the onset. But it's the one place in DC that is truly quiet, and truly moving.
If you really want to do something respectful for his memory, recognize his sacrifice, make amends to his ghost - the monument is the way to go.
"What you're arguing is for more/tighter regulation." Yeah, but any even minute steps towards tighter (I was going to say improved) gun regulations are some kind of red flag that, to most 2nd-amendment defenders and "preppers", is basically calling in the black helicopters.
A valid analogy, IMO, is speed limits. The feds induce the states to post a higher speed limit. The standard response is "putting up a sign wouldn't have stopped THAT GUY from speeding - the one who had the big crash that prompted all this." And you know what - that's very true. Nonetheless, over the years we've amassed an immense amount of data that shows that the number and severity of crashes is to a first approximation linearly related to the number on that sign. Choosing the number on that sign is not trivial, its an act that has moral consequences. Even if it possibly inconveniences a very lot of people.
More guns hanging around = more gun casualties. Less guns around = less gun casualties. Its true for gun rampages, its true for domestic violence, its true for street crimes, its true for household accidents. If guns weren't so efficient and so dangerous, what would be the argument for having them in the first place?
And some twenty year old kid with a closet full of guns, his own or his parents, does not look like a well-regulated militia to me. In no way at all was he defending the Constitution. I'm betting it was the farthest thing from his mind. Just holding onto a gun does not make you a patriot.
I'm sorry, real patriotism is BELIEVING in the Constitution, believing that it works, all of it, not just the one line you like.
If you really cared about the Constitution, you'd be looking at all the other parts of it that have been trampled by the last two administrations. Habeas corpus, due process, privacy, eavesdropping, rendition, targetted killings of US citizens overseas - the list is long. You want to be a patriot? Get involved! Get people motivated! Write your reps! HECK, run for office! Make the government conform to the actual law. That is what real patriotism is. Take some ownership, instead of looking for the exits.
I'm not suggesting we scrub the second amendment. See, that's the assumption every 2nd-amendment defender starts out against, that any opposition at all has a no-guns-anywhere end game in mind. It's a purple unicorn - nowhere in nature can you really find that argument.
I'm suggesting rather that there should be reasonable checks and limits for guns, just like for other substantially dangerous items in society. You want to drive a car, you have to prove you are safe to do so, you get insurance, you take tests, you get checked up every so often, the car itself is inspected. If you want to operate a crane, you have to (etc. etc.) If you want be a surgeon, (etc etc.)
But the argument goes that any inconvenience of the rights of gun owners at all must be a stepping stone to full annihilalation of your Constitutional rights, and so must be challenged with absolute resolve. There isn't, apparently, a single even token move we could make towards more reasonable limits (say, banning 100-round clips?) on private gun ownership, that isn't a challenge to the Constitution.
And can I say, the "if you don't like the second amendment, go to Canada" business is plain offensive. My great grandfather fought in the first world war. His brother earned a purple heart there. My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge. My father served during Vietnam. I did ten years of civilian service in the Department of Defense. I am as much an American citizen and a patriot as anyone, and wanting a lessening of gun violence in America (and valuing that above any unrealistic Red-Dawn fantasies) is a patriotic act.
"making it harder for citizens to defend themselves, with these sorts of things as a natural consequence of that failure to change."
If your goal is to persuade people, rather than just threaten them, maybe an argument that boils down to "stop trying to control guns, or a lot of crazy people are going to shoot up the place some more" is probably not your best choice. Examine what you're saying here and think about what it's really implying.
Well, I'm not a simple ideologue, I'm not sure which part of that I should feel more offended by.
Setting that aside, you could start by telling me how exactly we're making it harder and harder for citizens to defend themselves. The assault gun ban, started under Clinton, was stopped by President Bush. The handgun provisions in Chicago were recently struck down in court, openly ignoring the surge in gun violence in that city. The Stand Your Ground laws have proliferated and already been a factor in several shooting deaths. Concealed carry laws are everywhere now, several of them passed just this year. It's hard to imagine a venue of public life where you're not allowed to carry a gun now (church? libraries? sporting events?) Gun sales have gone through the roof. And the NRA is the biggest lobbying organization in the country.
I think the truth is that most gun owners are really afraid of the gun control measures that have been taken by an oppressive government they've imagined IN THEIR OWN MINDS rather than anything you could actually cite in, say, a newspaper.
Also, I don't believe there are many (any) cases of shooting rampages being triggered by legislative action on the part of gun control advocates. You're welcome to cite counterexamples here, but most shooters that I've read about have either done it out of personal jealousy or spite, workplace disagreements, or just plain being unhinged.
Constantly gun-rights advocates ignore the basic facts that more guns = more gun casualties, and that less guns = less gun casualties. That's EVIDENCE-BASED.
See, what makes the argument suspect is absoluteness of it. If we say, removed every gun in America, still, no less people would die from violent acts. None? Not a single one less? That's simply not believable.
I'm willing to grant that a zero gun policy would not prevent all gun violence. I'm willing to grant that a zero gun policy would be impossible to implement. I assert that the number of guns in America and the number of gun killings in America are not unrelated to one another. In reality, the one quantity is approximately a linear non-decreasing function of the other.
Still, nobody's given me a number. A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? What if everybody in America died from gun violence? Would you, some time after that, concede that maybe some gun controls were reasonable?
C'mon, what was a twenty-year old kid doing with this kind of firepower, anyway? Defending the Constitution?
NO I very much disagree with what you're saying. We do respect each other, at least, as much as we always have. The past is not some golden age, something better than we could possibly be. People are people.
The shooter here was a twenty-year old kid. He used a glock, and something called a "Sig Sauer". One thing that is different now than in the past is Access. When I was 20, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Sig Sauer - I doubt the vast majority did. I doubt anybody in my home town would know where to find such a thing, and surely no one could have gotten on the internet and ordered one up (because the internet didn't exist then.)
Part of the problem is that these kinds of weapons are much more accessible, much more available, much more part of the public consciousness than they once were.
Every time these incidents occur, there is a tremendous and instantaneous outpouring of these same old arguments "guns don't kill people..." "outlawing guns is not going to prevent crazy people from getting them..." The arguments never change, the politics never change, and these incidents happen again and again.
The definition of 'crazy', or one of them, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. HOW MANY TIMES do we have to hear about shooting rampages in our own schools, malls, movie theaters, workplaces, before people will begin to ask themselves if maybe their outlook is simply wrong? How many people would have to die before you, Mr. 2nd Amendment Defender, would reconsider your own viewpoint? Just do this exercise for me - say a number out loud.
Doubt is essential in a deliberative society. If you can never doubt your own viewpoint, then the freedom to discuss and debate it is worthless.
This. I think a good solution here would be for police to just tase anyone attempting to buy an iPhone in an Apple store.
It's an elegant, simple, user-oriented solution to an age-old problem. It could be augmented by intelligent choices among typefaces, and skeumorphisms to make the analogy clearer. And you have to admit, it has a certain Steve-Jobs-flair (tm) to it, don't you? The policeman could come right up to your face, and with a breath wreaking of donuts and stale coffee, shriek "OH AND JUST ONE MORE THING!!" right before pulling the trigger.
Android simply couldn't compete with this. Apple's vertically-integrated retail channels offer "marketing leverage". Apple would be lifting something that was previously a simple transaction and transforming it into an integrated, social experience. Again, Apple is setting the pace.
One thing that's worth looking into - OpSIS hosts or points to web-based training and seminars several times a year, sometimes given by CAD vendors that support their design and fab processes. They are well worth sitting in for if you're trying to spin up on this stuff. Not a plug, just my own experience.