My point is that it simply isn't true. 30 years is a more realistic estimate
Okay, fine, thirty years then. That's still unacceptable. You can try to rationalize it if you want, but a little footage of soviet "ghost towns" (with peoples' belongings rotting away where they were left when everyone was forced to leave overnight) goes a long way.
Living with a smoker, for example, is more dangerous than living just outside the Chernobyl wildlife refuge.
"just outside"? How is the risk "within" the evacuated area? Would you yourself feel comfortable living there and raising your family there?
Yes, by all means, do.
I'm aware that evacuating all the people from an area allows nature to spring back and occupy niches it was previously forced out of. That's all very nice for nature, but the fact remains that people are no longer able to live in that area.
And as for ruining people's lives, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the use of fossil fuels
Sure, that's true at the moment, because at the moment the number of nuclear plants is quite limited. However, think of the scenario you propose, where most or all of our coal and fossil fuel usage has been supplanted by an equivalent amount of nuclear power. What new problems would you predict we would face then? Myself, I see the following issues:
Stability: either we allow third world countries to build their own nuclear power plants, and face the likelihood of runaway nuclear proliferation and/or terrorism, or we forbid them to do so, and they continue using coal and/or fossil fuels. So either the problem remains unsolved in the third world, or it is solved but only at the price of creating a (potentially) much bigger problem.
Fuel Acquisition: to support so many more nuclear reactors, we will need to mine a lot more nuclear fuel. Each of these new mining operations represents a new environmental and security hazard.
Fuel Transport: each new nuclear reactor will require the regular transport of nuclear materials to the reactor, and the regular transport of waste away from the reactor. Each of these steps involves a risk of accident and/or crime causing things to go awry.
Site Security: each new reactor represents another potential target for terrorists (and earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, etc). (compare with building a new wind farm: if terrorists attacked that, people would just laugh at them and break out the Don Quixote references;^))
Waste Storage: Once the fuel is used, where should we store it so that it won't leak out and contaminate the surroundings? Never mind natural disasters that might cause the nuclear materials to get out: what will stop human miscreants from getting in and taking it? AFAICT this stuff will need to be guarded indefinitely -- something that might be feasible in some parts of the world, but seems like a much more dubious proposition in others.
Economics: I don't want to dismiss nuclear power out of hand; I agree that it can be useful in some situations, at least as a temporary measure until we find something better. The problems listed above can all be solved with enough time and effort. But the solution to each of the problems listed above adds to the cost of nuclear power, and at some point the costs outweight the benefits, so that even if nuclear power is possible, it is no longer practical -- i.e. it becomes more expensive than the alternatives. As I understand it, very few (if any) nuclear power plants have ever earned back the money that was invested into building them, for these reasons.
The main advantage of nuclear is that it is available now, and is the only technology we have that is far enough along to prevent world war three from erupting over control of the oil. Conservation, wind power, etc. just don't have the scope to prevent that deadly showdown.
Do these people by any chance drive cars? Because, you know, one mistake while you're driving and you're done. Same thing with using a fork.
I think what the parent poster meant by "you're done" was, the entire area is made unlivable for hundreds of years. There isn't any second chance. This is much worse than a single person or family accidentally killing themselves. See the area around Chernobyl for an example.
Do you mean that people can (incorrectly) decide--or be persuaded--that something is too dangerous even though it is in fact safe? Or are you mired in some sort of Orwellian double speak, where "Safety is danger"?
What he meant was that there can be a very small chance of something going wrong, but if the penalty for something going wrong is large enough, it can still make the risk not worth taking. For example, most people would be very reluctant to walk along a catwalk without guard rails that is 1000 feet in the air, even though they are generally quite capable of doing so without falling -- but the penalty (instant death) should they happen to trip is so large that the risk is still judged excessive.
Excellent analogy to Chernobyl, which was after all a normal fire, not a reactor problem, and not unlike some of the accidents that we commonly see in the fossil fuel industry.
Then you see the problem: a "normal fire, not unlike accidents we commonly see in the fossil fuel industry" was enough to render a huge area of land permanently uninhabitable and ruin thousands of peoples' lives. That is why so many people are uncomfortable with nuclear power, and seek a better alternative. (btw, I think the public's mind blames hydrogen more than helium;^))
I think that "nuclear or coal" is a false choice. I don't want to see either of those fuels in wide use. I would like to see serious investment in renewable power and energy conservation instead. That way we end up with a world without global warming OR fuel shortages OR terrorists misusing nuclear fuel OR nuclear contamination.
Well, we know what happened the last time a few experts were taken at face value...No WMDs
That isn't a very good example -- in that case, only the experts who predicted the presence of WMDs were "taken at face value". The other experts who expressed doubts were either ignored, suppressed, or told to re-evalutate their conclusions until they did come up with the desired answers.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you want correct answers, keep politics out of science.
Apparently, they increased the depth of the glass from 4mm to 5mm to counter just this problem
I guess I don't really see how this is in any way a 'problem' for the photocopier companies. On the one hand, they get to charge $$$ for repairs every January, and on the other hand... what is the office manager going to do, shop around for more a more ass-friendly brand of photocopier to replace the old one with? (I'd love to see that justification on the invoice submitted to accounting;^))
False. It's so much more satisfying to read something on paper. Easier on the eyes, too
Agreed, but I won't be really happy until we have electronic paper. Then I can just buy a single book and download new text into it as necessary, instead of having to buy new, separate, dedicated display hardware every time I want to read a new story. That will save me money, save trees, and make it possible for me to keep my entire book collection with me at all times.
Tolkien was a professor of the english language and literature at Oxford. Hardly a nerd or a geek
I don't see why being a professor would disqualify Tolkien from geek-hood -- more likely it does just the opposite. In any case, it's a list of books for geeks, not books by geeks, so JRR's personal geek level isn't that relevant.
That said, any author who goes to the trouble of inventing entire languages complete with full grammar and vocabulary, just for the characters in his books to use, is probably a geek;^)
many popular pacifist religions, such as Christianity
Heh, good one. I guess it depends on how you define Christianity -- are you referring to the teachings of Mr. Christ, or to the actual beliefs and practices of contemporary people who call themselves Christians? Because the two are widely separated these days... (not that that's anything new of course)
I can think of many other examples where adult responsbilities put you into a position to take risks - moreso than you would take as a risk loving teen. Haven't you had the same experience?
Frankly, no... I think part of 'adult reponsibility' is avoiding unreasonable risks. In the example above, that might mean calling up my boss (or whomever) and telling him I simply can't make the flight due to bad weather, rather than unduly risking my life to make it.
I used to do flips off my roof into a pool. Stupid? Yeah. Top 25 stupid? Probably not
Just out of curiosity, what are some of the things in your Top 25? (either I've led a sheltered life, or most people are lot.... erm, braver than I thought;^))
If the company is doing something inherently wrong, then a criminal proceeding would come against them by the government.
I don't mean to defend the people involved in this case, but the above statement is simply naive. In many cases, the government either simply doesn't care enough (or have the resources) to prosecute, or is actively taking money from and colluding with the companies in causing the harm. And that's in the USA -- I can imagine the potential for negligence and corruption is much worse in undemocratic countries like China.
I have no doubt that an MRI has "detected" lies. But what it did was detect physiological changes that accompany the stress of lying
For someone who just got through telling me (in all caps no less!) how little we know about how brains work, you seem awfully sure of your interpretation of the MRI results...:^P
What makes you think that it's impossible for a person to: A) Convince themself of something that's not true. B) Forget that they've done so
Absolutely nothing -- of course people do that all the time. But in that case, they wouldn't be lying, only deluded... so the lie detector would (quite properly) not detect a lie. You might think that makes the machine less useful, and you'd be right -- but it would still be a working lie detector, and it could still be useful to catch out people who know they are not telling the truth.
The concept of a "lie detector" is deeply flawed on many levels
The concept seems flawed to you because you have misunderstood it. You seem to think a lie detector should beep whenever someone says something which isn't true, which is a completely different from what it actually would do: beep whenever it detects somebody consciously trying to deceive.
Physical traits are beneficial to society and being attractive is more valuable than being smart.
Okay, I'll bite -- how is being attractive more 'beneficial to society' than being smart? As I see it, smart people can help solve society's problems, whereas attractive people can -- what -- go to Hollywood in the hopes of acting/modelling, find out there are already more actors/models there than there are jobs for them, and end up waiting tables?
[...] you're still disgusting. And that's the way it should be.
Why is that 'the way it should be'? That sounds less like 'the truth about the world' and more like your personal (rather hateful and bitter) opinion. Or a troll.
This is the key to the travesty that passes for "music business" these days. Why do people think it is OK for a publisher to "own" somebody's creative work?
Are you saying that artists shouldn't be allowed to sell the ownership rights to their work?
Deception is only half of a lie. A true lie detector would need to know the falsehood as well.
"Lies" and "deception" are more or less synonymous. A true lie detector needs only to detect deception. It isn't expected to detect innocent falsehoods -- that would certainly be nice, but it's (a) outside the scope of what a lie detector is meant to do, and (b) probably impossible.
All these machines can test is for signs of nervousness, even an MRI machine.
Not necessarily. To quote the article I linked to:
More blood also flows to the part of the brain handling multitasking because it is hard for people to keep track of lies they have told.
When you are telling a lie, your brain is executing a different set of tasks than when you are telling the truth. i.e. instead of simply recalling memories and immediately verbalizing them, your brain is (a) thinking up narratives that suit your purpose, (b) checking those narratives to see if they will contradict anything you think your interrogators know, and (c) either modifying those narratives to be more plausible, or speaking them. To the extent that these different tasks involve different parts of the brain, it should be possible (at least in principle) to detect which task is being executed by watching which parts of your brain are being used. This would work whether you felt nervous or not.
Say you think I'm a terrorist, but I think I'm a freedom fighter. You ask me if I'm a terrorist. I say no. The machine doesn't flag it because I don't believe I was lying
Of course not -- since you didn't tell a lie, only a malfunctioning lie-detector would detect one. That's not a problem with the lie detector, that's a problem with the interrogator asking the wrong questions.
Note that I'm not arguing that MRI-based lie detectors are a good idea, only that it is possible to detect lies using MRI (or other brain-imaging technology).
If by "lie detector" you mean polygraph tests, then you're right -- they are bunk. A machine that detects lies by some other means is not impossible though -- you can detect lies with an MRI machine, for example. How you would integrate that into an airport, I don't know.
As long as you never need a dead tree version of your code. Hard copy doesn't scroll horizontally, it wraps, making following the code indentation more difficult.
Very true. Fortunately I have never felt the need for a dead tree copy of my code -- the medium's lack of a search feature makes it next to useless.;^)
Having to scroll right so that most of the code and its indentation is out of view just slows me down.
This isn't a problem if you use an editor like vi, which wraps too-long lines around on screen. I agree that it can be quite annoying on editors that just truncate too-long lines and force you to scroll right and left.
80 characters for whatever reason seems to be a nice width to read
Not for me -- shorter lines may be prettier, but they mean that fewer lines can be shown at once in my text-editor window at the same time. That means that with code limited to 80 columns or less, I end up constantly scrolling up and down in the code, which is annoying and tedious -- like trying to fix an engine while viewing it through a periscope.
So given that both short lines and long lines have their downsides, and that "80 characters" feels like an arbitrary number chosen for obsolete historical reasons, I prefer to just make my lines however long they need to be to do what they need to do, and not force-insert line breaks at any pre-specified regular intervals.
Cool! One thing I think I'd really miss on a new alternate energy car...the SOUND
Heh.... that reminds me of an idea I had to sell simulated-engine-sound-generator DSPs that hook in to your accelerator pedal and your car stereo. Then when you want your electric car to sound impressive, you just crank up the volume...;^)
So you would say that the correlation has absolutely no scientific value, then? That correlation never means anything?
Please quote the section where I called him "stupid". Any time now...
Okay, it was right here:
With reasoning like yours, is it any wonder ID made it into schools?
Yes, it was implicit. It was also quite clear what you were implying.
And in many cases it's not. What was your point?
My point was that just because it's not proof, doesn't mean it's not evidence. Why do you think scientists spend so much time studying correlations between phenonema? Just to keep themselves busy?
So which of the following would you propose, then?
Increased asthma rates and auto pollution occurring in the same areas is an amazing stroke of bad luck?
There is some third factor out there that causes both asthma and car pollution?
The presence of children with asthma causes cars to pollute more?
(Actually item #2 is a possibility... but you have to admit the situation looks awfully suspicious)
With reasoning like yours, is it any wonder ID made it into schools?
The reason that so many people think that correlation does equal causation is that in many cases, correlation is a (heuristic/probable) indication of causation. So before you tell the guy how stupid he is, consider the fact that there might be something to his claim. And then ask yourself why you are being so skeptical -- what is it you are trying to defend?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, fine, thirty years then. That's still unacceptable. You can try to rationalize it if you want, but a little footage of soviet "ghost towns" (with peoples' belongings rotting away where they were left when everyone was forced to leave overnight) goes a long way.
Living with a smoker, for example, is more dangerous than living just
outside the Chernobyl wildlife refuge.
"just outside"? How is the risk "within" the evacuated area? Would you yourself feel comfortable living there and raising your family there?
Yes, by all means, do.
I'm aware that evacuating all the people from an area allows nature to spring back and occupy niches it was previously forced out of. That's all very nice for nature, but the fact remains that people are no longer able to live in that area.
And as for ruining people's lives, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the use of fossil fuels
Sure, that's true at the moment, because at the moment the number of nuclear plants is quite limited. However, think of the scenario you propose, where most or all of our coal and fossil fuel usage has been supplanted by an equivalent amount of nuclear power. What new problems would you predict we would face then? Myself, I see the following issues:
The main advantage of nuclear is that it is available now, and is the only technology we have that is far enough along to prevent world war three from erupting over control of the oil. Conservation, wind power, etc. just don't have the scope to prevent that deadly showdown.
I think what the parent poster meant by "you're done" was, the entire area is made unlivable for hundreds of years. There isn't any second chance. This is much worse than a single person or family accidentally killing themselves. See the area around Chernobyl for an example.
Do you mean that people can (incorrectly) decide--or be persuaded--that something is too dangerous even though it is in fact safe? Or are you mired in some sort of Orwellian double speak, where "Safety is danger"?
What he meant was that there can be a very small chance of something going wrong, but if the penalty for something going wrong is large enough, it can still make the risk not worth taking. For example, most people would be very reluctant to walk along a catwalk without guard rails that is 1000 feet in the air, even though they are generally quite capable of doing so without falling -- but the penalty (instant death) should they happen to trip is so large that the risk is still judged excessive.
Excellent analogy to Chernobyl, which was after all a normal fire, not a reactor problem, and not unlike some of the accidents that we commonly see in the fossil fuel industry.
Then you see the problem: a "normal fire, not unlike accidents we commonly see in the fossil fuel industry" was enough to render a huge area of land permanently uninhabitable and ruin thousands of peoples' lives. That is why so many people are uncomfortable with nuclear power, and seek a better alternative. (btw, I think the public's mind blames hydrogen more than helium
I think that "nuclear or coal" is a false choice. I don't want to see either of those fuels in wide use. I would like to see serious investment in renewable power and energy conservation instead. That way we end up with a world without global warming OR fuel shortages OR terrorists misusing nuclear fuel OR nuclear contamination.
That isn't a very good example -- in that case, only the experts who predicted the presence of WMDs were "taken at face value". The other experts who expressed doubts were either ignored, suppressed, or told to re-evalutate their conclusions until they did come up with the desired answers.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you want correct answers, keep politics out of science.
I guess I don't really see how this is in any way a 'problem' for the photocopier companies. On the one hand, they get to charge $$$ for repairs every January, and on the other hand... what is the office manager going to do, shop around for more a more ass-friendly brand of photocopier to replace the old one with? (I'd love to see that justification on the invoice submitted to accounting
Agreed, but I won't be really happy until we have electronic paper. Then I can just buy a single book and download new text into it as necessary, instead of having to buy new, separate, dedicated display hardware every time I want to read a new story. That will save me money, save trees, and make it possible for me to keep my entire book collection with me at all times.
I don't see why being a professor would disqualify Tolkien from geek-hood -- more likely it does just the opposite. In any case, it's a list of books for geeks, not books by geeks, so JRR's personal geek level isn't that relevant.
That said, any author who goes to the trouble of inventing entire languages complete with full grammar and vocabulary, just for the characters in his books to use, is probably a geek
More importantly, who on Slashdot will be the first to welcome it as their new overlord?
Heh, good one. I guess it depends on how you define Christianity -- are you referring to the teachings of Mr. Christ, or to the actual beliefs and practices of contemporary people who call themselves Christians? Because the two are widely separated these days... (not that that's anything new of course)
Frankly, no... I think part of 'adult reponsibility' is avoiding unreasonable risks. In the example above, that might mean calling up my boss (or whomever) and telling him I simply can't make the flight due to bad weather, rather than unduly risking my life to make it.
Heh. Let's pack the high schools with horny, quarreling, embittered, hormone-soaked teenagers, all packing heat. What could possibly go wrong?
Just out of curiosity, what are some of the things in your Top 25? (either I've led a sheltered life, or most people are lot.... erm, braver than I thought
I don't mean to defend the people involved in this case, but the above statement is simply naive. In many cases, the government either simply doesn't care enough (or have the resources) to prosecute, or is actively taking money from and colluding with the companies in causing the harm. And that's in the USA -- I can imagine the potential for negligence and corruption is much worse in undemocratic countries like China.
Evidently, you can.
For someone who just got through telling me (in all caps no less!) how little we know about how brains work, you seem awfully sure of your interpretation of the MRI results...
What makes you think that it's impossible for a person to:
A) Convince themself of something that's not true.
B) Forget that they've done so
Absolutely nothing -- of course people do that all the time. But in that case, they wouldn't be lying, only deluded... so the lie detector would (quite properly) not detect a lie. You might think that makes the machine less useful, and you'd be right -- but it would still be a working lie detector, and it could still be useful to catch out people who know they are not telling the truth.
The concept of a "lie detector" is deeply flawed on many levels
The concept seems flawed to you because you have misunderstood it. You seem to think a lie detector should beep whenever someone says something which isn't true, which is a completely different from what it actually would do: beep whenever it detects somebody consciously trying to deceive.
Okay, I'll bite -- how is being attractive more 'beneficial to society' than being smart? As I see it, smart people can help solve society's problems, whereas attractive people can -- what -- go to Hollywood in the hopes of acting/modelling, find out there are already more actors/models there than there are jobs for them, and end up waiting tables?
[...] you're still disgusting. And that's the way it should be.
Why is that 'the way it should be'? That sounds less like 'the truth about the world' and more like your personal (rather hateful and bitter) opinion. Or a troll.
Are you saying that artists shouldn't be allowed to sell the ownership rights to their work?
"Lies" and "deception" are more or less synonymous. A true lie detector needs only to detect deception. It isn't expected to detect innocent falsehoods -- that would certainly be nice, but it's (a) outside the scope of what a lie detector is meant to do, and (b) probably impossible.
Not necessarily. To quote the article I linked to:
More blood also flows to the part of the brain handling multitasking because it is hard for people to keep track of lies they have told.
When you are telling a lie, your brain is executing a different set of tasks than when you are telling the truth. i.e. instead of simply recalling memories and immediately verbalizing them, your brain is (a) thinking up narratives that suit your purpose, (b) checking those narratives to see if they will contradict anything you think your interrogators know, and (c) either modifying those narratives to be more plausible, or speaking them. To the extent that these different tasks involve different parts of the brain, it should be possible (at least in principle) to detect which task is being executed by watching which parts of your brain are being used. This would work whether you felt nervous or not.
Say you think I'm a terrorist, but I think I'm a freedom fighter. You ask me if I'm a terrorist. I say no. The machine doesn't flag it because I don't believe I was lying
Of course not -- since you didn't tell a lie, only a malfunctioning lie-detector would detect one. That's not a problem with the lie detector, that's a problem with the interrogator asking the wrong questions.
Note that I'm not arguing that MRI-based lie detectors are a good idea, only that it is possible to detect lies using MRI (or other brain-imaging technology).
If by "lie detector" you mean polygraph tests, then you're right -- they are bunk. A machine that detects lies by some other means is not impossible though -- you can detect lies with an MRI machine, for example. How you would integrate that into an airport, I don't know.
Very true. Fortunately I have never felt the need for a dead tree copy of my code -- the medium's lack of a search feature makes it next to useless.
Having to scroll right so that most of the code and its indentation is out of view just slows me down.
This isn't a problem if you use an editor like vi, which wraps too-long lines around on screen. I agree that it can be quite annoying on editors that just truncate too-long lines and force you to scroll right and left.
Not for me -- shorter lines may be prettier, but they mean that fewer lines can be shown at once in my text-editor window at the same time. That means that with code limited to 80 columns or less, I end up constantly scrolling up and down in the code, which is annoying and tedious -- like trying to fix an engine while viewing it through a periscope.
So given that both short lines and long lines have their downsides, and that "80 characters" feels like an arbitrary number chosen for obsolete historical reasons, I prefer to just make my lines however long they need to be to do what they need to do, and not force-insert line breaks at any pre-specified regular intervals.
Heh.... that reminds me of an idea I had to sell simulated-engine-sound-generator DSPs that hook in to your accelerator pedal and your car stereo. Then when you want your electric car to sound impressive, you just crank up the volume...
So you would say that the correlation has absolutely no scientific value, then? That correlation never means anything?
Please quote the section where I called him "stupid". Any time now...
Okay, it was right here:
With reasoning like yours, is it any wonder ID made it into schools?
Yes, it was implicit. It was also quite clear what you were implying.
And in many cases it's not. What was your point?
My point was that just because it's not proof, doesn't mean it's not evidence. Why do you think scientists spend so much time studying correlations between phenonema? Just to keep themselves busy?
So which of the following would you propose, then?
(Actually item #2 is a possibility... but you have to admit the situation looks awfully suspicious)
With reasoning like yours, is it any wonder ID made it into schools?
The reason that so many people think that correlation does equal causation is that in many cases, correlation is a (heuristic/probable) indication of causation. So before you tell the guy how stupid he is, consider the fact that there might be something to his claim. And then ask yourself why you are being so skeptical -- what is it you are trying to defend?