Cutting off technology is like not having a TV when I was young. Sounds great in theory, but is simply another way of saying 'I don't want to help you grow up, so I will just cut you off from things that could possibly make MY life difficult.'
Oh great, wise and wonderful parent... this bears no relation to any reality I've ever been in contact with. The reason parents like to keep their kids wired up is it keeps them mesmerised and out of your hair for a little while. It takes far more work to raise a kid without a TV or tablet as a baby-sitter.
(Keeping a kid away from the net until they're 6... obviously they'll be stunted and retarded forever... )
They will not be able to assimilate into society when its time to leave the nest. Will hinder their job and education prospects too.
You do realize that the kids are 2 and 5 and the ban is only till April 2014, right?
Yeah, this whole discussion is pretty funny. It's completely ridiculous to compare obsession with your slyFad9 to drug addiction, but the very thought of going without for a few months has everyone's hands shaking. Why, it's tantamount to child abuse!
... at one time there was a pay phone on every corner, now they're all gone.
No, actually they're not all gone (not in San Francisco, anyway). However, they're not all working, and they're aren't as many of them, but it's not typically that hard for me to make a call (on the few occasions when I need to).
What is missing, however, are doorbells. If someone has you meet them at their office in Soma, it invariably turns out that they were expecting you to phone them when you got there. But if you hang around you can probably tailgate your way in within 5 mins or so...
No, frankly, I just find it weird because I don't understand the value in pretending technologies don't really exist or ignoring innovation under the flawed assumption that advances really aren't advances.
But you're making in assumption that these advances really are advances, and not just the latest whizzy things people have been sold on. Sometimes fads really are just fads: popularity is no guide to quality, certainly not when the addiction analogy (or is it just an analogy?) is in play.
Once you get to that point, when you realise that your own judgement is sometimes flawed, that you can get carried away with enthusiasm for things that are doing as much to you as for you... then what? What strategy do you use to deal?
You're willing to concede that a technology fast of a few weeks might be a good idea, but an entire year, well that's just Bad And Wrong. Could it be that you're taking this a little too personally, and protesting a bit much?
(Myself: I voluntarily surrender some "freedom" while I'm out and about, and consequently, I actually pay more attention to where I am, unlike the people shuffling around like zombies staring at their little glowing gadgets. And those people I see driving while checking they're messages... it couldn't be that they've got a bit of an "addiction" problem, could they?)
Not because being away from social media on an iThing for a while isn't perfectly fine, but because of the risk of parents trying to impose their own personality traits on their children.
If you don't give the punks something to rebel against, they may end up on heroin.
You're also clearly someone who has no experience with raising children, (I can tell, even though I'm also someone who also has none).
if they would just allow/mandate the labeling of GMO vs natural foods it would solve a lot of the uproar. Why not give the consumer this information?
You don't mean "allow", it's already allowed. You want it mandated. Say what you mean.
The reasons why not would be additional cost for no benefit, because they wouldn't be allowed to sell the stuff at all if it were actually harmful.
What you're actually after is an opportunity for irrational scare-mongering, pushing what amounts to a mother nature knows best religion-- because if there were actually data that this stuff was bad for you that would be what the argument is about, right?
Myself I think it would be interesting if GMO labeling passed, because I suspect it might go the other way... people would find out that everything they've been eating is GMO, and might learn to shrug it off.
But you know, the voters turned down the opportunity to label GMO food. Got that? In CA it was put up for a vote, and it got voted down. The will of the people, you know? It sucks and all, but that's why you're not allowed to mandate whatever you feel like. Democracy and all.
This is great, not only are you quoting wikipedia for support, you don't appear to have read what you're quoting. (Try looking at the last line again.)
And someone moderated this as "informative".
By the way, back at TFA:
The first version of Golden Rice was criticized for containing too little vitamin A. While this point has meanwhile become obsolete, what did you think of this criticism at that point in time?
It was unjustified from the beginning. On the basis of experimental data on the availability of vitamin A from rice, we can prove today that 100g of our first Golden Rice variant with 1.6 micrograms of vitamin A per gram Endosperm would have been sufficient to compensate vitamin A deficiency. Unfortunately, these data are available only since 2010.
The Japanese government deliberately withheld information until after the election, and now the pollution levels emanating form the plant render many the carefully written, I-told-you-it-was-hysteria explanations, riddled in Smug by the Serious Persons seem pretty silly, if not entertaining, to read.
And if it turns out that your present impression of how bad the problem is is wrong, will you be apologizing for having been so smug and superior right here?
(But wait... how would you ever know? If an expert publishes a result you don't like, you'll just assume it's wrong-- they've obviously been corrupted, eh?)
And do I get points for sitting on the fence about how bad Fukushima is until all the results are in? Unlike, for example, Democracy Now that couldn't wait to quote the first "Worse than Chernobyl!" quote they could find?
One thing I'll concede: I was (and still am) on record for saying how ever bad it is, it won't bring down the nuclear industry's average to below the level of certain other power sources few people seem to worry about...
Every time an airplane crashes, you don't have people going "You see, we need to ban air travel!".
Yes, google beat altavista by using "Page Rank" (i.e. analyzing
the graph of the way pages were linked together, to estimate
popularity). It was pretty remarkable, altavista was clearly
more flexible (like other people here, I remember the "NEAR"
keyword fondly), but you had to read through a page or two of
links to find what you wanted, and google had a knack for putting
it up top in the first few links (hence the "I'm Feeling Lucky"
button, for when you were pretty sure you wanted just the top
link).
(Why do we need to explain things like this? Is everyone on
slashdot these days really this young, or do you guys have no
memory at all?)
What was interesting about this is the moment google became
really successful, it choked off the behavior that Page Rank
relied on: why bother linking to relevent stuff when you knew
everyone could just google it up if they felt like it?
(And it doesn't help that wikipedia opted-out of this to
discourage spam links).
And so, ever since then, google has had to keep dancing to
different ranking techniques (e.g. relying on user click data) to
try to stay ahead of the SEO scum. So yeah, google no longer
seems quite so wonderful (and myself, I'm more inclined to use
blekko.com or
duckduckgo.com
And now we're stuck in a world where you always get shown the
popular stuff that you're expected to want to see, so the popular
stays popular, and struggling upstarts have to struggle even harder...
I'm inclined to agree, but then at least these are fairly
heavy-weight pages with a lot of images, and the "article index"
at the bottom that let's you jump to the part you're interested
in is a very nice touch. A "print" or "single page" link would
be appreciated, though.
Geez - just Alta Vista? Lycos, Yahoo, and a host of others existed at the time as well.
Well, clearly the definitive history needs to be written -- I don't remember about Lycos, off the top of my head -- but I'm pretty sure altavista, then a project at DEC, was the first automated web-crawler index of the web (It was the idea of a friend of mine, who died in 2006: Paul Flaherty) . Altavista was up and running when Yahoo was still a hierarchical list edited by human beings.
You need to think a little more about what a "city core" is.
what does this even mean?
Cities are regions of high density, where many people live.
You're apparently convinced that you are Normal, and that no one
(who matters?) lives in cities. If you're interested in
minimizing average trip times between SF and LA, putting the
terminals near the center of SF and LA makes quite a bit of
sense.
I know how inaccessible they are.
SF is "inaccessible" only if you plan on traveling by car there
and parking in front of the door.
There is a high-speed rail project already in the works coverning the same territory that Musk is looking at. This is actually an idea that's very popular with voters.
are you suggesting that the govt SHOULD pay for hyperloop, and
its ok because the govt is paying for HSR, and everyone
apparently likes HSR?
I'm suggesting that the government should consider paying for
projects like this, yes, but more to the point, I think you need
to face the fact that you are not the world, your opinion is not
law, and that there are many people out there who actually care the
issues the hyperloop scheme claims to address. But hey, if they
disagree they must be retarded, so off with their heads.
So, I hate to tell you this, but you're essentially a hick from the sticks, with barely a clue about what's going on.
Actually I live in LA, so I have quite a good idea of what's going on both in terms of the cities and the HSR project.
From the 'burbs ye have come, to the 'burbs ye shall go, and at
the pearly gates you will whine that there's not enough parking.
You need to think a little more about what a "city core" is.
There is a high-speed rail project already in the works
coverning the same territory that Musk is looking at. This
is actually an idea that's very popular with voters.
Come to think of it, reducing pollution is a popular idea also.
So, I hate to tell you this, but you're essentially a hick from
the sticks, with barely a clue about what's going on.
I spent a few minutes on a web search, and I see it's supposed to be faster and pollute less. (A terrible thing, reading 450 slashdot comments and not being able to find out what you want to know.).
Your estimated flight time of an hour doesn't include travel to or from the airports on either end. Train stations are usually closer to city cores than airports.
Apple, meanwhile, plans to spend nearly five billion dollars to build a giant, impenetrable ringed headquarters in the middle of a park that is technically part of Cupertino. These inward-looking places keep tech workers from having even accidental contact with the surrounding community.
That I think is Exhibit A. Cupertino sucks so badly that Apple has to offer to bus new employees in from San Francisco, but instead of putting some of their much vaunted design genius to work on improving the town, they're building a round pentagon to protect themselves from it. There's a medieval fortress vibe about this scheme that really should give one pause, (if one were capable of finding the pause button on one's slyFad 9).
(By the way, before you start singing the praises of San Francisco's hills and harbor, consider that the Mission district has nothing to do with that stuff. If urban communities are just a matter of brand creation and network effects, a place like Apple really ought to be able to figure it out.)
I was in San Francisco twice earlier this year. It was the first time I'd been there in a few years. I was surprised at how many homeless people there are there now and how aggressive they've become.
Yeah, there's a bunch of people on the streets in SF (I hadn't noticed a big upswing in numbers, nor an increase in aggressiveness, however). They've been there since Reagan but funding for mental hospitals... they end up in SF because the relatively liberal populous limits how nasty the police are allowed to be to them. Some hospitals have been known to bus these people to SF if they have to eject them out on to the street, on the theory that they'll at least have a chance to survive there.
My take is that there's a bit of a stand-off going here on who exactly is responsible for the mentally ill. SF's sort-of-tolerant, but not really that helpful attitude isn't something to be proud of exactly, but if you think your own town has it's act together, you might want to look a little more closely at what your cops are doing when they see someone out on the street.
It has to beg for money from SF, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties, and they're all hesitant to pony up
More precisely, San Mateo has been reluctant to pony up, and I think the reason is pretty clear if you look at whose using those trains. Most of the ridership is running between SF and Silicon Valley. A lot of the express train schedules seem to be designed to skip San Mateo county...
Anyway, yeah, Caltrain has it's problems, but it's not a joke-- for example, it's been a leader in providing space for cyclists to carry bikes on the train. That's been pretty key for me to get my commutes to work, in any case.
Similarly, the VTA light rail system, despite some problems, can be pretty useful, really. If there's one leaving when I need it to, it's faster to ride it from Mountain View to Sunnyvale than it is for me to bike the 7 miles.
Culture is culture - there are no objectively "better" or "worse" cultures, you idiot.
Okay, now brace yourselves, I know the slashdot crowd may be shocked to here this: but many people really do care about things that are not objectively measurable.
Try to wrap your brain around that. The function of a city includes certain intangible qualities that we refer to using those big C words like "culture" and "community"...
Moreover, no one on the scene here really needs to be convinced of this, trust me, all of those valley commuters feel at least a twinge of guilt. They want to live in an exciting neighborhood, and they know they're making it more boring, and pushing out the people who made it exciting, and they don't particularly like it, but it beats living in South Bay.
The obvious solution is for the city of SF to issue more building permits for high density housing.
Oh dude, you're *still* a libertarian? Where have you been?
Oh never mind, tells us more about this strange "free market" idea, and how a brave new world composed of "rational actors" will achieve utopia on earth coordinated only by that old invisible hand.
And if you ask me, the obvious thing to do is for companies located in the armpit of the bay area to try to improve the local community to the point where they can convince new employees to live there, so they don't need to keep stuffing them into buses for hours a day.
And actually, they presumably want to live in SF because they like the character of SF, so solutions to this problem that involve radically transforming the character of SF are not really solutions.
(The idea that the problem here is that this is eating into the tax base or something isn't really it... And anyway, the San Francisco city government repeatedly leaves money sitting on the table, because they won't raise taxes on the folks who kick in for "campaign donations".)
Perhaps at the quantites we can produce today. Try scaling solar power up by a factor of 1500.
I share your scepticism though I suspect the issue is going to be whole systems cost-analysis.
The solar enthusiasts are excited about a rapid drop in price of PVs, and while that's very cool, it's not the whole story. Energy storage is still an unsolved problem, for example.
(On the other hand, it would be really nice to be proven wrong about the virtues of solar as a major energy source, and the research is relatively cheap, so why not?)
You know what the great thing about science is? We don't have to focus on emotion and rhetoric. We can do the experiment, and see if it would have supported the conclusion.
In this case, the author did not follow the instruction to
(apparently) just make something up. So the question is
not whether someone falsified something, it's whether there's
someone out there promoting a cyncical approach to writing
scientific papers.
And science is a social process. Yeah, you're supposed to have
a physical process specified that you can try to replicate, but
practically that's not likely to be more than spot checks for all
but the most important results, the process of replication is
quite likely tedioius and expensive, so the immediate question is
whose results you're going to try to replicate. You don't
pay much attention to some guy on the street or some dude on the
internet, you use the scientific credentially system to find
people who are likely to have results that are worth taking the
trouble of studying and (possibly) taking the trouble to
replicate.
So what we have here is a social trust issue, and if we had a
Science Bureau of Investigation, you would hope they'd be trying
to figure out who wrote this note, and whether they're in the
habit of giving similar instructions to other researchers.
(And may I say, you appear to be a victum of what I think of as
"the techies fallacy": all those messy human problems can be
dodged by just focusing on our nice hard-eged Technical world.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh great, wise and wonderful parent... this bears no relation to any reality I've ever been in contact with. The reason parents like to keep their kids wired up is it keeps them mesmerised and out of your hair for a little while. It takes far more work to raise a kid without a TV or tablet as a baby-sitter.
(Keeping a kid away from the net until they're 6... obviously they'll be stunted and retarded forever... )
Yeah, this whole discussion is pretty funny. It's completely ridiculous to compare obsession with your slyFad9 to drug addiction, but the very thought of going without for a few months has everyone's hands shaking. Why, it's tantamount to child abuse!
No, actually they're not all gone (not in San Francisco, anyway). However, they're not all working, and they're aren't as many of them, but it's not typically that hard for me to make a call (on the few occasions when I need to).
What is missing, however, are doorbells. If someone has you meet them at their office in Soma, it invariably turns out that they were expecting you to phone them when you got there. But if you hang around you can probably tailgate your way in within 5 mins or so...
But you're making in assumption that these advances really are advances, and not just the latest whizzy things people have been sold on. Sometimes fads really are just fads: popularity is no guide to quality, certainly not when the addiction analogy (or is it just an analogy?) is in play.
Once you get to that point, when you realise that your own judgement is sometimes flawed, that you can get carried away with enthusiasm for things that are doing as much to you as for you... then what? What strategy do you use to deal?
You're willing to concede that a technology fast of a few weeks might be a good idea, but an entire year, well that's just Bad And Wrong. Could it be that you're taking this a little too personally, and protesting a bit much?
(Myself: I voluntarily surrender some "freedom" while I'm out and about, and consequently, I actually pay more attention to where I am, unlike the people shuffling around like zombies staring at their little glowing gadgets. And those people I see driving while checking they're messages... it couldn't be that they've got a bit of an "addiction" problem, could they?)
If you don't give the punks something to rebel against, they may end up on heroin.
You're also clearly someone who has no experience with raising children, (I can tell, even though I'm also someone who also has none).
You don't mean "allow", it's already allowed. You want it mandated. Say what you mean.
The reasons why not would be additional cost for no benefit, because they wouldn't be allowed to sell the stuff at all if it were actually harmful.
What you're actually after is an opportunity for irrational scare-mongering, pushing what amounts to a mother nature knows best religion-- because if there were actually data that this stuff was bad for you that would be what the argument is about, right?
Myself I think it would be interesting if GMO labeling passed, because I suspect it might go the other way... people would find out that everything they've been eating is GMO, and might learn to shrug it off.
But you know, the voters turned down the opportunity to label GMO food. Got that? In CA it was put up for a vote, and it got voted down. The will of the people, you know? It sucks and all, but that's why you're not allowed to mandate whatever you feel like. Democracy and all.
This is great, not only are you quoting wikipedia for support, you don't appear to have read what you're quoting. (Try looking at the last line again.)
And someone moderated this as "informative".
By the way, back at TFA:
And if it turns out that your present impression of how bad the problem is is wrong, will you be apologizing for having been so smug and superior right here?
(But wait... how would you ever know? If an expert publishes a result you don't like, you'll just assume it's wrong-- they've obviously been corrupted, eh?)
And do I get points for sitting on the fence about how bad Fukushima is until all the results are in? Unlike, for example, Democracy Now that couldn't wait to quote the first "Worse than Chernobyl!" quote they could find?
One thing I'll concede: I was (and still am) on record for saying how ever bad it is, it won't bring down the nuclear industry's average to below the level of certain other power sources few people seem to worry about...
Every time an airplane crashes, you don't have people going "You see, we need to ban air travel!".
+1
Yes, google beat altavista by using "Page Rank" (i.e. analyzing the graph of the way pages were linked together, to estimate popularity). It was pretty remarkable, altavista was clearly more flexible (like other people here, I remember the "NEAR" keyword fondly), but you had to read through a page or two of links to find what you wanted, and google had a knack for putting it up top in the first few links (hence the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, for when you were pretty sure you wanted just the top link).
(Why do we need to explain things like this? Is everyone on slashdot these days really this young, or do you guys have no memory at all?)
What was interesting about this is the moment google became really successful, it choked off the behavior that Page Rank relied on: why bother linking to relevent stuff when you knew everyone could just google it up if they felt like it? (And it doesn't help that wikipedia opted-out of this to discourage spam links). And so, ever since then, google has had to keep dancing to different ranking techniques (e.g. relying on user click data) to try to stay ahead of the SEO scum. So yeah, google no longer seems quite so wonderful (and myself, I'm more inclined to use blekko.com or duckduckgo.com
And now we're stuck in a world where you always get shown the popular stuff that you're expected to want to see, so the popular stays popular, and struggling upstarts have to struggle even harder...
I'm inclined to agree, but then at least these are fairly heavy-weight pages with a lot of images, and the "article index" at the bottom that let's you jump to the part you're interested in is a very nice touch. A "print" or "single page" link would be appreciated, though.
Well, clearly the definitive history needs to be written -- I don't remember about Lycos, off the top of my head -- but I'm pretty sure altavista, then a project at DEC, was the first automated web-crawler index of the web (It was the idea of a friend of mine, who died in 2006: Paul Flaherty) . Altavista was up and running when Yahoo was still a hierarchical list edited by human beings.
Some history of Altavista: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067142/Happy-Birthday-AltaVista
Just like all your other friends, eh?
Right. Buying a TV to smash it up counts as a public service.
Cities are regions of high density, where many people live. You're apparently convinced that you are Normal, and that no one (who matters?) lives in cities. If you're interested in minimizing average trip times between SF and LA, putting the terminals near the center of SF and LA makes quite a bit of sense.
SF is "inaccessible" only if you plan on traveling by car there and parking in front of the door.
I'm suggesting that the government should consider paying for projects like this, yes, but more to the point, I think you need to face the fact that you are not the world, your opinion is not law, and that there are many people out there who actually care the issues the hyperloop scheme claims to address. But hey, if they disagree they must be retarded, so off with their heads.
From the 'burbs ye have come, to the 'burbs ye shall go, and at the pearly gates you will whine that there's not enough parking.
You need to think a little more about what a "city core" is.
There is a high-speed rail project already in the works coverning the same territory that Musk is looking at. This is actually an idea that's very popular with voters. Come to think of it, reducing pollution is a popular idea also.
So, I hate to tell you this, but you're essentially a hick from the sticks, with barely a clue about what's going on.
I spent a few minutes on a web search, and I see it's supposed to be faster and pollute less. (A terrible thing, reading 450 slashdot comments and not being able to find out what you want to know.).
Your estimated flight time of an hour doesn't include travel to or from the airports on either end. Train stations are usually closer to city cores than airports.
From the George Packer article in the New Yorker:
That I think is Exhibit A. Cupertino sucks so badly that Apple has to offer to bus new employees in from San Francisco, but instead of putting some of their much vaunted design genius to work on improving the town, they're building a round pentagon to protect themselves from it. There's a medieval fortress vibe about this scheme that really should give one pause, (if one were capable of finding the pause button on one's slyFad 9).
(By the way, before you start singing the praises of San Francisco's hills and harbor, consider that the Mission district has nothing to do with that stuff. If urban communities are just a matter of brand creation and network effects, a place like Apple really ought to be able to figure it out.)
Yeah, there's a bunch of people on the streets in SF (I hadn't noticed a big upswing in numbers, nor an increase in aggressiveness, however). They've been there since Reagan but funding for mental hospitals... they end up in SF because the relatively liberal populous limits how nasty the police are allowed to be to them. Some hospitals have been known to bus these people to SF if they have to eject them out on to the street, on the theory that they'll at least have a chance to survive there.
My take is that there's a bit of a stand-off going here on who exactly is responsible for the mentally ill. SF's sort-of-tolerant, but not really that helpful attitude isn't something to be proud of exactly, but if you think your own town has it's act together, you might want to look a little more closely at what your cops are doing when they see someone out on the street.
More precisely, San Mateo has been reluctant to pony up, and I think the reason is pretty clear if you look at whose using those trains. Most of the ridership is running between SF and Silicon Valley. A lot of the express train schedules seem to be designed to skip San Mateo county...
Anyway, yeah, Caltrain has it's problems, but it's not a joke-- for example, it's been a leader in providing space for cyclists to carry bikes on the train. That's been pretty key for me to get my commutes to work, in any case.
Similarly, the VTA light rail system, despite some problems, can be pretty useful, really. If there's one leaving when I need it to, it's faster to ride it from Mountain View to Sunnyvale than it is for me to bike the 7 miles.
Okay, now brace yourselves, I know the slashdot crowd may be shocked to here this: but many people really do care about things that are not objectively measurable.
Try to wrap your brain around that. The function of a city includes certain intangible qualities that we refer to using those big C words like "culture" and "community"...
Moreover, no one on the scene here really needs to be convinced of this, trust me, all of those valley commuters feel at least a twinge of guilt. They want to live in an exciting neighborhood, and they know they're making it more boring, and pushing out the people who made it exciting, and they don't particularly like it, but it beats living in South Bay.
Oh dude, you're *still* a libertarian? Where have you been? Oh never mind, tells us more about this strange "free market" idea, and how a brave new world composed of "rational actors" will achieve utopia on earth coordinated only by that old invisible hand.
And if you ask me, the obvious thing to do is for companies located in the armpit of the bay area to try to improve the local community to the point where they can convince new employees to live there, so they don't need to keep stuffing them into buses for hours a day.
And actually, they presumably want to live in SF because they like the character of SF, so solutions to this problem that involve radically transforming the character of SF are not really solutions.
(The idea that the problem here is that this is eating into the tax base or something isn't really it... And anyway, the San Francisco city government repeatedly leaves money sitting on the table, because they won't raise taxes on the folks who kick in for "campaign donations".)
Wait... you mean you can't?
What's happening to the computer industry...
I share your scepticism though I suspect the issue is going to be whole systems cost-analysis. The solar enthusiasts are excited about a rapid drop in price of PVs, and while that's very cool, it's not the whole story. Energy storage is still an unsolved problem, for example.
(On the other hand, it would be really nice to be proven wrong about the virtues of solar as a major energy source, and the research is relatively cheap, so why not?)
In this case, the author did not follow the instruction to (apparently) just make something up. So the question is not whether someone falsified something, it's whether there's someone out there promoting a cyncical approach to writing scientific papers.
And science is a social process. Yeah, you're supposed to have a physical process specified that you can try to replicate, but practically that's not likely to be more than spot checks for all but the most important results, the process of replication is quite likely tedioius and expensive, so the immediate question is whose results you're going to try to replicate. You don't pay much attention to some guy on the street or some dude on the internet, you use the scientific credentially system to find people who are likely to have results that are worth taking the trouble of studying and (possibly) taking the trouble to replicate.
So what we have here is a social trust issue, and if we had a Science Bureau of Investigation, you would hope they'd be trying to figure out who wrote this note, and whether they're in the habit of giving similar instructions to other researchers.
(And may I say, you appear to be a victum of what I think of as "the techies fallacy": all those messy human problems can be dodged by just focusing on our nice hard-eged Technical world.)
Oh, I don't know, I would say Obama is seeming increasingly transparent.