I remember hearing that PS2 was a nightmare to code for, and that the only reason games came out on it was because it was the clear winner. I also heard that the 360 would dominate in the next round because it's MS and easier to code for. And that no one would buy a wii becuase it was so dramatically underpowered. I've since stopped listening to clerks at gamestop when they are giving their expert opinion on consoles. I probably should have known better even then.
Don't worry, we have a hefty blackmail file on him to get him to back down. Our sources indicate that his mother has had sexual relations with a majority of people who have played against him, I'm sure he wouldn't want that to get out...
And by the time they're acknowledged, they've often been beaten into submission. Or perhaps people just get less creative with age. Not sure which is more depressing.
Sea water is a lot more damaging to pipes, and piping sea water in as well as freshwater would require two sets of incoming pipes to residences. So I assume you're talking about a very limited context.
It just makes you look like reactionary nutjobs, and by the time you're proven right, people will have forgotten you said anything or will actually blame you for failing to convince them.
FTFY. As far as reactionaries go, "don't fuck it up" is probably the safer of the two than "Aw, you crazy environmentalists, saying the sky is falling, IT'LL NEVER BE A PROBLEM!" which is all too prevalent.
We're just discovering these freshwater reserves, and you appear to state for a fact that we need not be concerned about messing them up? Based on what exactly? TFA states they were made hundreds of thousands of years ago and are not being replenished, so there's no reason to believe there's a maintenance mechanism. Salinity affects temperature uptake, I've seen papers suggesting that the oceans are buffering a lot of the climate change effect. If we disturb these things and the temperature increase increases, that's pretty stupid. Salinity affects currents too. If the Great garbage patch begins to wash ashore rather than be collected in a dead zone, that's going to really fuck things up.
I don't have any idea how realistic any of that is, but neither does anyone else. Caution should be the default, not "what can possibly go wrong?"
In my opinion, we're only fucked as a nation when we as a nation give up due to fear or apathy. We did give up for a while after 9/11, but it's not permanent, bad government never is. The fear is weakening, and the apathy is starting to crumble as a result of what happened right after 9/11.
The time frame might be too long, especially if you're planning on not being around longer than 10 years, but we're not totally fucked permanently ever. Remember that we've had a two party system basically the whole time this country has been around, and the constitution has been shit on much more thoroughly than it has after 9/11. For that matter, the constitution itself had some shit baked right into it from the start, we managed to improve upon parts of it. That's not to say things are good today, just that they've been much worse and we've recovered from it.
No you fool! Forget privacy, there's a bigger danger! If these trends continue, we'll upload the last existing server to the cloud and shut down the server, only to realize that the cloud was on servers! THE INTERNET WILL JUST DISAPPEAR!
The difference is that there's no actual competition in pro-wrestling, it's fundamentally fake. With mythbusters, they actually engage in hypothesis testing. I'd admit that it's not the most rigorous science out there, but I'd argue it IS actually science. They're using scientific approaches to dispel non-scientific myths that exist in pop culture. Combating chain e-mail myths that your uncle forwards and believes with heavy statistics is exactly the wrong format for "publishing": their target audience would just ignore it without the entertainment factor. That happens in "real" science too. Good communication is half the job of a scientist. The introduction, abstract, and discussion sections of papers are to engage the audience, they're not hard data. In presentations, jokes are often good to put in where possible, slides in powerpoint need to be easily accessible, and delivery is more important than most scientists appreciate.
They're doing a good job. Why are we knocking them with the comparisons to fake sports? Simple elitism?
Unless you're hitting bald eagles or some other endangered species, I don't think you need to try to rationalize it with evolutionary theory. No one worth talking about is getting mad at you about pigeons getting killed (at least for the sake of the birds, perhaps your wife or someone is mad at the grill being messed up.)
Wouldn't the lawyers need to be already working with the EPA or as a prosecutor? Your average ambulance-chaser can't just drag wind farm operators to court and demand money because the eagle's family they represent suffered greatly, right?
Japan seems to have made most of their buildings pretty earthquake safe already. Fixing the earth seems like a less efficient step even assuming we were sure we weren't going to make it worse. Japan regularly experiences and ignores earthquakes which would cause a lot of damage elsewhere.
That's not to say we should discount any possibility of fixing the plates to suit us. California for example has been taking some cues from Japan in earthquake proofing, but hasn't done nearly as much, and will be facing a much bigger earthquake at some point. There are probably a lot of other faults around the world where people and governments have been less effective at making sure people building take into account the quakes. Japan could probably save a lot of lives and money by investing in the research you're suggesting.
I feel like DIY research in some fields could be well poised to make some positive changes with what you're talking about. Specifically in biology, it seems like the trend is to fund big science done by huge consortiums or to fund "translational" research*. Those tend to be less risky research and are often less groundbreaking. Universities want researchers to participate in such big or boring research, and to spend the rest of their time filling classrooms. If funding agencies gave more small grants to researchers to pursue more daring research, maybe semi-amateur researchers, I think that might lead to more progress. At the very least, smaller grants would be diversifying the research funded every year.
(* Both are important, but if something is going to lead directly to a profitable treatment or drug, the companies should be investing in that and then reap the rewards. Paying for it with tax dollars and then giving it to private industry for free or for a small licensing fee is corporate welfare, and reduces the amount of money available for the type of research that the government SHOULD be funding: research that isn't directly profitable and therefore won't be done by private industry. )
Well, that's kind of the issue. Academics are already boycotting Elsevier. Thing is, academics are focused on research, not on publishing, so many aren't even aware of the boycott, others care less about their rights to host their own papers than they do in publishing in the highest impact journal they can. Plus, few papers are published with a single author. On my paper, I suggested we not submit there. My boss stifled a laugh. It's published with Elsevier. I occasionally get requests for it from researchers who don't have access to that journal. I guess I'm going to have to start worrying that they are undercover Elsevier agents.
Yeah, but it's nice to have your cake and eat it too. Researchers need to publish in the highest impact journal they can, that's unfortuantely still elsevier in many cases. And Elsevier doesn't give you the option to publish WITHOUT signing all your rights away.
So you're right, but I'm still blaming elsevier for doing a bit of arm twisting. Unnecessary arm-twisting at that. Universities are still going to pay elsevier for subscriptions to their journals. They're not going to say "Researchers often put their papers on their webpages, so we don't need to pay a subscription."
Doesn't that kind of make sense? I mean, no one likes activist judges. I suspect that's because an activist judge is just a judge doing something you don't like, but if they're as inactive as possible...
Is there an ideal body you'd like the decision to be left up to? I mean, power corrupts, so any body with any say over something like this is going to be a little corrupted. Among the top of the three branches, the supreme court is probably the least fucked up at the moment. I'd prefer the EFF to be left in charge of the decision, but I'd wager that if they WERE in a position to have that power, they wouldn't be the same EFF we have right now, I think it would be full of industry lobbyists, or intentionally incompetent people, much like you see in the regulatory bodies and in the patent office specifically.
Actually, as long as we're wishing, I wish that I was the one in charge of making the decision. My qualifications mainly include wasting time on slashdo and being not an old geezert. I trust I have your support for replacing the supreme court?
"viral" is a co-opted word, "DNA" is a co-opted acronym. Both are real things though which have nothing to do with computers. Either one independently is annoying, but when you combine them, it sounds even dumber, since viral DNA is a real fucking thing.
Did turnable.fm use cytomegalovirus's genome or something? Were the songs streaming from herpes in a PCR machine somehow?
It's dumb, I know, and I apologize. But don't say "viral DNA" unless you are talking about nucleotides from an actual microorganism which hijacks cells.
This politically correct "oh, so tragic:(" reaction to every death and accident is going to eventually result in more deaths. But no, do go on. Make yourself feel like the bigger person for "taking a stand". I learned about a term recently, called social justice warriors. It's a pretty apt description. Fight on soldier.
Regardless of recent rethinking on the theory, can you really say that an idiot lighting a cigarette after spraying gasoline all over himself is not incredibly stupid and unquestionably good that they were purged from the gene pool?
"unquestionably good" is a hyperbole no matter the context. In this specific case, I don't think it's even merely good. I doubt he was significantly dumber than the average gene pool, thus we gain no net advancement. He may have reproduced already. We only know how he died, not what he may have contributed to humanity.
More than that, for fucks sake, NO, one stupid act does not make one stupid. Raise your hand if you haven't almost accidentally killed yourself ever. If you're raising your hand, you're probably a boring person.
I really don't understand it. He's already rich. He's going to lose control, either by something better coming along or him dying. His power isn't going to vanish immediately. What on earth does he have to gain that's worth dicking over democracy and millions of people?
Have you read the Darwin awards? They seem to be a flimsy excuse to laugh at other people's tragedies, with a little bit of superiority thrown in for good measure. There's quite a bit of questionable entries in there. For example.... And that's even if you accept the idea that only people who are stupid because of heritable characteristics ever do dangerous, dumb things. Plus you kind of have to ignore a bunch of more recent evolutionary theory which suggests that individuals within a species dying or living comes down more to chance and doesn't really drive evolution gradually.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember hearing that PS2 was a nightmare to code for, and that the only reason games came out on it was because it was the clear winner. I also heard that the 360 would dominate in the next round because it's MS and easier to code for. And that no one would buy a wii becuase it was so dramatically underpowered. I've since stopped listening to clerks at gamestop when they are giving their expert opinion on consoles. I probably should have known better even then.
Don't worry, we have a hefty blackmail file on him to get him to back down. Our sources indicate that his mother has had sexual relations with a majority of people who have played against him, I'm sure he wouldn't want that to get out...
And by the time they're acknowledged, they've often been beaten into submission. Or perhaps people just get less creative with age. Not sure which is more depressing.
Sea water is a lot more damaging to pipes, and piping sea water in as well as freshwater would require two sets of incoming pipes to residences. So I assume you're talking about a very limited context.
It just makes you look like reactionary nutjobs, and by the time you're proven right, people will have forgotten you said anything or will actually blame you for failing to convince them.
FTFY. As far as reactionaries go, "don't fuck it up" is probably the safer of the two than "Aw, you crazy environmentalists, saying the sky is falling, IT'LL NEVER BE A PROBLEM!" which is all too prevalent.
We're just discovering these freshwater reserves, and you appear to state for a fact that we need not be concerned about messing them up? Based on what exactly? TFA states they were made hundreds of thousands of years ago and are not being replenished, so there's no reason to believe there's a maintenance mechanism. Salinity affects temperature uptake, I've seen papers suggesting that the oceans are buffering a lot of the climate change effect. If we disturb these things and the temperature increase increases, that's pretty stupid. Salinity affects currents too. If the Great garbage patch begins to wash ashore rather than be collected in a dead zone, that's going to really fuck things up.
I don't have any idea how realistic any of that is, but neither does anyone else. Caution should be the default, not "what can possibly go wrong?"
- Dead and forgotten bike shop competitors to the Wright brothers
In my opinion, we're only fucked as a nation when we as a nation give up due to fear or apathy. We did give up for a while after 9/11, but it's not permanent, bad government never is. The fear is weakening, and the apathy is starting to crumble as a result of what happened right after 9/11.
The time frame might be too long, especially if you're planning on not being around longer than 10 years, but we're not totally fucked permanently ever. Remember that we've had a two party system basically the whole time this country has been around, and the constitution has been shit on much more thoroughly than it has after 9/11. For that matter, the constitution itself had some shit baked right into it from the start, we managed to improve upon parts of it. That's not to say things are good today, just that they've been much worse and we've recovered from it.
No you fool! Forget privacy, there's a bigger danger! If these trends continue, we'll upload the last existing server to the cloud and shut down the server, only to realize that the cloud was on servers! THE INTERNET WILL JUST DISAPPEAR!
The difference is that there's no actual competition in pro-wrestling, it's fundamentally fake. With mythbusters, they actually engage in hypothesis testing. I'd admit that it's not the most rigorous science out there, but I'd argue it IS actually science. They're using scientific approaches to dispel non-scientific myths that exist in pop culture. Combating chain e-mail myths that your uncle forwards and believes with heavy statistics is exactly the wrong format for "publishing": their target audience would just ignore it without the entertainment factor. That happens in "real" science too. Good communication is half the job of a scientist. The introduction, abstract, and discussion sections of papers are to engage the audience, they're not hard data. In presentations, jokes are often good to put in where possible, slides in powerpoint need to be easily accessible, and delivery is more important than most scientists appreciate.
They're doing a good job. Why are we knocking them with the comparisons to fake sports? Simple elitism?
Unless you're hitting bald eagles or some other endangered species, I don't think you need to try to rationalize it with evolutionary theory. No one worth talking about is getting mad at you about pigeons getting killed (at least for the sake of the birds, perhaps your wife or someone is mad at the grill being messed up.)
Wouldn't the lawyers need to be already working with the EPA or as a prosecutor? Your average ambulance-chaser can't just drag wind farm operators to court and demand money because the eagle's family they represent suffered greatly, right?
Adam and Jamie on mythbusters seem to have a blast, pun intended.
In seriousness, I disagree. At least not to the extent of nuclear physics. Look at DIY bio research.
Japan seems to have made most of their buildings pretty earthquake safe already. Fixing the earth seems like a less efficient step even assuming we were sure we weren't going to make it worse. Japan regularly experiences and ignores earthquakes which would cause a lot of damage elsewhere.
That's not to say we should discount any possibility of fixing the plates to suit us. California for example has been taking some cues from Japan in earthquake proofing, but hasn't done nearly as much, and will be facing a much bigger earthquake at some point. There are probably a lot of other faults around the world where people and governments have been less effective at making sure people building take into account the quakes. Japan could probably save a lot of lives and money by investing in the research you're suggesting.
I feel like DIY research in some fields could be well poised to make some positive changes with what you're talking about. Specifically in biology, it seems like the trend is to fund big science done by huge consortiums or to fund "translational" research*. Those tend to be less risky research and are often less groundbreaking. Universities want researchers to participate in such big or boring research, and to spend the rest of their time filling classrooms. If funding agencies gave more small grants to researchers to pursue more daring research, maybe semi-amateur researchers, I think that might lead to more progress. At the very least, smaller grants would be diversifying the research funded every year.
(* Both are important, but if something is going to lead directly to a profitable treatment or drug, the companies should be investing in that and then reap the rewards. Paying for it with tax dollars and then giving it to private industry for free or for a small licensing fee is corporate welfare, and reduces the amount of money available for the type of research that the government SHOULD be funding: research that isn't directly profitable and therefore won't be done by private industry. )
Well, that's kind of the issue. Academics are already boycotting Elsevier. Thing is, academics are focused on research, not on publishing, so many aren't even aware of the boycott, others care less about their rights to host their own papers than they do in publishing in the highest impact journal they can. Plus, few papers are published with a single author. On my paper, I suggested we not submit there. My boss stifled a laugh. It's published with Elsevier. I occasionally get requests for it from researchers who don't have access to that journal. I guess I'm going to have to start worrying that they are undercover Elsevier agents.
Yeah, but it's nice to have your cake and eat it too. Researchers need to publish in the highest impact journal they can, that's unfortuantely still elsevier in many cases. And Elsevier doesn't give you the option to publish WITHOUT signing all your rights away.
So you're right, but I'm still blaming elsevier for doing a bit of arm twisting. Unnecessary arm-twisting at that. Universities are still going to pay elsevier for subscriptions to their journals. They're not going to say "Researchers often put their papers on their webpages, so we don't need to pay a subscription."
Hey man, fuck you too, terrorist lover!
Sincerely,
The NSA
PS: Your mother is going to be shocked when she sees the porn you've been watching. She's still on hotmail, right?
Doesn't that kind of make sense? I mean, no one likes activist judges. I suspect that's because an activist judge is just a judge doing something you don't like, but if they're as inactive as possible...
Is there an ideal body you'd like the decision to be left up to? I mean, power corrupts, so any body with any say over something like this is going to be a little corrupted. Among the top of the three branches, the supreme court is probably the least fucked up at the moment. I'd prefer the EFF to be left in charge of the decision, but I'd wager that if they WERE in a position to have that power, they wouldn't be the same EFF we have right now, I think it would be full of industry lobbyists, or intentionally incompetent people, much like you see in the regulatory bodies and in the patent office specifically.
Actually, as long as we're wishing, I wish that I was the one in charge of making the decision. My qualifications mainly include wasting time on slashdo and being not an old geezert. I trust I have your support for replacing the supreme court?
"viral" is a co-opted word, "DNA" is a co-opted acronym. Both are real things though which have nothing to do with computers. Either one independently is annoying, but when you combine them, it sounds even dumber, since viral DNA is a real fucking thing.
Did turnable.fm use cytomegalovirus's genome or something? Were the songs streaming from herpes in a PCR machine somehow?
It's dumb, I know, and I apologize. But don't say "viral DNA" unless you are talking about nucleotides from an actual microorganism which hijacks cells.
This politically correct "oh, so tragic :(" reaction to every death and accident is going to eventually result in more deaths. But no, do go on. Make yourself feel like the bigger person for "taking a stand". I learned about a term recently, called social justice warriors. It's a pretty apt description. Fight on soldier.
Ah, I missed the ad-homenim attack. Nice.
Regardless of recent rethinking on the theory, can you really say that an idiot lighting a cigarette after spraying gasoline all over himself is not incredibly stupid and unquestionably good that they were purged from the gene pool?
"unquestionably good" is a hyperbole no matter the context. In this specific case, I don't think it's even merely good. I doubt he was significantly dumber than the average gene pool, thus we gain no net advancement. He may have reproduced already. We only know how he died, not what he may have contributed to humanity.
More than that, for fucks sake, NO, one stupid act does not make one stupid. Raise your hand if you haven't almost accidentally killed yourself ever. If you're raising your hand, you're probably a boring person.
I really don't understand it. He's already rich. He's going to lose control, either by something better coming along or him dying. His power isn't going to vanish immediately. What on earth does he have to gain that's worth dicking over democracy and millions of people?
Not sure why they don't just do what the NSA is doing: change nothing and wait for people to forget about- HEY LOOK! A CELEBRITY DEATH!!!
Have you read the Darwin awards? They seem to be a flimsy excuse to laugh at other people's tragedies, with a little bit of superiority thrown in for good measure. There's quite a bit of questionable entries in there. For example.... And that's even if you accept the idea that only people who are stupid because of heritable characteristics ever do dangerous, dumb things. Plus you kind of have to ignore a bunch of more recent evolutionary theory which suggests that individuals within a species dying or living comes down more to chance and doesn't really drive evolution gradually.