Getting further off topic, but have you played mass effect 1? You have infinite ammo, the game explains it as F=MA, you just have very low mass bullets accelerated extremely fast, with a nearly infinite energy source. You do, in fact, have to worry about overheating, but that just involves letting your guns cool down. It was a novel take on shooters.
For some reason, they basically said "fuck that, scrounging for ammo MUST be fun!" for the next two games. They explained it as heat dispersion cartridges or something like that so they didn't actually contradict themselves, but it did go from infinite shots (with cooldowns) to limited shots.
I'd argue that right now, very little can shame the federal government, and it's intentional on the part of a small group of people who really hate Obamacare.
Guns in movies never run out of bullets, which is okay because only a headshot is actually lethal. People only very rarely obese or old or ugly. Perhaps as a consequence, they're always having sex. Lawyers make dramatic moving speeches most of the time and rarely do boring paperwork, and cops do almost every other part of the legal system.
Anything more technical than that is bound to be even more unrealistic in movies. Hair floating is pretty trivial. Just pretend a wizard did it if it bothers you that much. Otherwise, applaud movies that do more ACCURATELY than usual.
You're being a simpleton. Yes, it does have to do with science, it's a scientist on a science blog. I'm not saying trust them because they're scientists. I'm saying that in the world of science publishing, trusting that someone didn't fake something is the default. That's the culture you're observing. Slashdot appears to be applying standards appropriate for the courtroom, not scientific publishing. A screenshot is acceptable as evidence by everyone in the discussion.
Don't knock them: this is probably a PR stunt to keep pressure on the US to drop the spying, keep it in the news.
I don't know if that's the most effective way Brazil could do such a thing. Threatening sanctions on the US for what seems like an act of war might be biting off more than Brazil could chew. Although with the economic apocalypse scheduled to happen on Thursday, maybe now would be a GREAT time to cut ties with the US.
Anyway, maybe don't criticize, because I think she's on our side against the NSA.
I think a semi-rational argument, more than "sex bad violence good", is that kids are more likely to see sex and want to have sex than they are to see violence and want to be violent.
I agree with that much: where I disagree is that society as a whole needs to neuter itself to make absolutely sure they don't encounter anything which might turn them into perverts.
It's an important distinction: you need to understand the mindset of people you disagree with in order to convince them. Saying to them "Hey, prudes, violence is worse than sex" will at best make then include violence in with their censorship. The point you disagree with them on is that society should bend over backwards to accommodate children rather than leaving it up to parents to explain adult things to their kids. If kids don't have decent parents, they have bigger problems than seeing tits. It's probably still unlikely that you'll convince many people with that argument unfortunately, but I think it has a better shot of getting them to reconsider.
Scientific publishing operates more on trust than most people realize, and more than the legal system does. If I say I got this band on a western blot, and submit it to Science (the journal), they run routine checks to make sure I haven't done any very dumb editing like in MS paint. They send it to reviewers who will flag it if there's anything glaringly obvious technically. If the claims are extraordinary, they'll require more proof. But at the end of the day, I'm sending them things which could fairly easily be faked.
Why is it this way? Two reasons, one it's impossible to be absolutely sure of anything (as zero kelvin pointed out) and two, because scientists are generally not in it to lie to other people.
Google's store is not exclusive on android, you can install apps outside the store or via amazon without google having any say over it. You uncheck an option in settings. So I'd argue that "control just like google" is actually a pretty loose standard compared to how apple does it on the ipad or iphone.
I'd bet good money against steam limiting where you could install aps from on steam OS. In the beta for the steamboxes, they explictly say you can do whatever you want with the free computers they're handing out. On PCs, obviously, steam has become dominant without following the apple model of being the only store allowed on hardware, so I can't imagine why they'd need to resort to it now.
If someone claims alcoholism can be solved with a regimen of vodka, and they have evidence you can't prove wrong, you'd be dumb to insist it couldn't possibly be true just because it sounds incredible.
Skepticism is fine, and ideally the study would already be published, but lets not reject it out of hand just because it sounds counterintuitive.
I'd argue the tea party IS a third party that has been fit into the two party system. It won't disappear with more than two parties, if anything it will be worse. And I'd argue that many problems are entirely the tea party's fault.
Another major cause of political woes is voter apathy, which again, wouldn't be solved.
So I doubt it would solve anything, and I'm more certain that changing the voting system would require the two parties to sign off on changing a voting system which clearly benefits them, which will never happen.
I agree, the groupthink reaction to leaks is astonishing, and I can't figure out why it is apparently getting worse. In yesteryear, you ACTUALLY had an formidable enemy (the USSR) who could theoretically gain secrets from leaks to destroy us. With nukes and ICBMs. Do these people ACTUALLY believe that Al Qaeda, whose arms are boxcutters and pipe bombs, could actually do more damage with Snowden's leaks about the computer spying program?
I recognize it's apples to oranges, with Manning some of the concern was specific informants identified, while the soviets could launch a nuke without knowing so much as a zipcode, but still, the response is wildly disproportionate with the threats we face today.
I suspect it's just "Oh, wait, the public DOESN'T care that we ruthlessly pursue people who dare to speak out against us? Shit! We could STILL be torturing Deepthroat!"
Hey man, google STEALS your information! MS told me so. So that must mean that MS doesn't do that. I mean, they'd be HYPOCRITES otherwise. So I use Bing to keep my porn searches safe. My sexual attraction to boobs and butts will remain safe from the NSA.
I think everyone would prefer it if journalists would have an accurate crystal ball to determine who they should listen to and who they shouldn't, but such a thing doesn't exist, reporters are human, and mistakes are going to happen. I'm sure reporters get all types of crazy sounding conspiracy theory nuts. This one turned out to be right in retrospect, but how did he know that in advance?
Not just journalists. I'd prefer if I, a scientist, knew which bits of preliminary data and which hypotheses to chase after. Some of the few that I've actually gone somewhere with sat on the back burner for an embarrassing amount of time before I came back to them and realized what I had been wasting my time with was far less important or likely to go anywhere.
You're applying a double standard. Most religions I can name say "don't kill people." Individuals may believe they are X religion and in their interpretation of X religion, murder is okay. You are taking individuals misusing their religion and putting it at the feet of religion, even if that directly contradicts the more commonly held and/or "official" religious rules of "DON'T kill." You're not doing the same thing for atheism. If I'm atheist and my philosophy tells me that religious people are wrong and are a plague on the earth and must be eliminated through murder if necessary, then that's my individual beliefs. If you apply the same standard to atheism as you do for religion, presumably that cultist fundamentalists speak for all muslims or all religions, then you should conclude that atheism does include killing of religious people.
The idea of extreme atheism is illogical, but by the same token, so are most extreme religious cults. Doesn't mean they don't both exist.
Most scientific grants aren't being awarded right now. This is on top of many funding agencies having their budgets shrink or at best stay the same, while there's increasing competition. The US leads the world in research in many fields at the moment. This shutdown is making the future of the research industry even shakier. I'm looking at jumping ship, I'm far from the only scientist teetering on the edge of moving away. How many more industries can the US afford to lose before it's no longer a first world nation?
I'd suggest the answer is to overuse the fuck out of the word to devalue it. Unfortunately, the politicians who would be able to do that are too busy using the word and the fear it commands for their own purposes. Oops, I mean, the communist, child molesting terrorists in washington who would be able to do that are too busy using the word and the fear it commands for their own purposes.
Don't hate the internet troll: he is a sad and pathetic creature. Why would someone do such a thing if they weren't terribly lonely. Aside from annoying you temporarily, he causes you no harm. Pity him instead.
Or maybe ask why slashdot doesn't take steps to counter this. Why exactly are comments still listed by time rather than by score by default? Is it just that we're all so used to first post nonsense that we'd miss it were it to go away? Why can you post AC or with a brand-new account immediately when a story is posted? If someone is posting something anonymously, they can wait a half an hour to do it.
He may as well try to rationalize it: it's not like he can do anything about it. Nor is the American public going to do anything about it.
If enough people got pissed off at Saudi Arabia, it's conceivable that we could put heavy sanctions on Saudi Arabia for human rights violations. But for that to happen, the royal family would have to basically allow it to happen. They've already bought off enough politicians and powerful people in the US.
Let him think the world isn't a massively unfair place: the only two things that can change Saudi Arabia are 1. Saudi Arabians and 2. Time.
Why is it that they seem to have at least some people in UAE who are thinking of their country's future, while most other places rich in one thing they pull up from the ground, the plan seems to be "Well, I'll still be a billionaire when the natural resource runs out, that will be a good time to retire to someplace that ISN'T going to degenerate (further) into insanity, and take my money with me."
Sure. Insistence that other people avow there is no God or Gods or die in prison would be extreme atheism. You could go with a no true scotsman here and say that's not true atheism, and I could see that as being reasonable. However, I could also see the same argument for religious folk: that people who use any religion as an excuse to dehumanize and kill people in their way is not really in the spirit of any religion.
Now, agnosticism would be tough to do to extremes. "The state finds you guilty of believing something, either in the existence of a deity OR in the absence of a deity! You are sentenced to being locked in a 'Schrodinger's cat' chamber for the remainder of your natural semi-life." I'm guessing though someone has already taken agnosticism to an extreme though.
Physics question: is the part of the spectrum we use for 3 and 4G inherently better at long distances than the part we use for wifi? It would make sense, but I could also see the problems you suggest being due to economies of scale and lack of R&D rather than an insurmountable problem.
(not to imply that the problems with wifi need to be insurmountable for it to make more sense just to go with 3 and 4G.)
Slashdot Mirror
Getting further off topic, but have you played mass effect 1? You have infinite ammo, the game explains it as F=MA, you just have very low mass bullets accelerated extremely fast, with a nearly infinite energy source. You do, in fact, have to worry about overheating, but that just involves letting your guns cool down. It was a novel take on shooters.
For some reason, they basically said "fuck that, scrounging for ammo MUST be fun!" for the next two games. They explained it as heat dispersion cartridges or something like that so they didn't actually contradict themselves, but it did go from infinite shots (with cooldowns) to limited shots.
I'd argue that right now, very little can shame the federal government, and it's intentional on the part of a small group of people who really hate Obamacare.
Guns in movies never run out of bullets, which is okay because only a headshot is actually lethal. People only very rarely obese or old or ugly. Perhaps as a consequence, they're always having sex. Lawyers make dramatic moving speeches most of the time and rarely do boring paperwork, and cops do almost every other part of the legal system.
Anything more technical than that is bound to be even more unrealistic in movies. Hair floating is pretty trivial. Just pretend a wizard did it if it bothers you that much. Otherwise, applaud movies that do more ACCURATELY than usual.
You're being a simpleton. Yes, it does have to do with science, it's a scientist on a science blog. I'm not saying trust them because they're scientists. I'm saying that in the world of science publishing, trusting that someone didn't fake something is the default. That's the culture you're observing. Slashdot appears to be applying standards appropriate for the courtroom, not scientific publishing. A screenshot is acceptable as evidence by everyone in the discussion.
Don't knock them: this is probably a PR stunt to keep pressure on the US to drop the spying, keep it in the news.
I don't know if that's the most effective way Brazil could do such a thing. Threatening sanctions on the US for what seems like an act of war might be biting off more than Brazil could chew. Although with the economic apocalypse scheduled to happen on Thursday, maybe now would be a GREAT time to cut ties with the US.
Anyway, maybe don't criticize, because I think she's on our side against the NSA.
"They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove em [from the digital store]."
I think a semi-rational argument, more than "sex bad violence good", is that kids are more likely to see sex and want to have sex than they are to see violence and want to be violent.
I agree with that much: where I disagree is that society as a whole needs to neuter itself to make absolutely sure they don't encounter anything which might turn them into perverts.
It's an important distinction: you need to understand the mindset of people you disagree with in order to convince them. Saying to them "Hey, prudes, violence is worse than sex" will at best make then include violence in with their censorship. The point you disagree with them on is that society should bend over backwards to accommodate children rather than leaving it up to parents to explain adult things to their kids. If kids don't have decent parents, they have bigger problems than seeing tits. It's probably still unlikely that you'll convince many people with that argument unfortunately, but I think it has a better shot of getting them to reconsider.
Scientific publishing operates more on trust than most people realize, and more than the legal system does. If I say I got this band on a western blot, and submit it to Science (the journal), they run routine checks to make sure I haven't done any very dumb editing like in MS paint. They send it to reviewers who will flag it if there's anything glaringly obvious technically. If the claims are extraordinary, they'll require more proof. But at the end of the day, I'm sending them things which could fairly easily be faked.
Why is it this way? Two reasons, one it's impossible to be absolutely sure of anything (as zero kelvin pointed out) and two, because scientists are generally not in it to lie to other people.
So unless there's a good motive for the person to lie, like an undisclosed financial incentive, why don't we assume scientists are being honest? Especially given that no one is disputing it and SciAm gave a politician's apology (or apologized without apologizing).
Google's store is not exclusive on android, you can install apps outside the store or via amazon without google having any say over it. You uncheck an option in settings. So I'd argue that "control just like google" is actually a pretty loose standard compared to how apple does it on the ipad or iphone.
I'd bet good money against steam limiting where you could install aps from on steam OS. In the beta for the steamboxes, they explictly say you can do whatever you want with the free computers they're handing out. On PCs, obviously, steam has become dominant without following the apple model of being the only store allowed on hardware, so I can't imagine why they'd need to resort to it now.
If someone claims alcoholism can be solved with a regimen of vodka, and they have evidence you can't prove wrong, you'd be dumb to insist it couldn't possibly be true just because it sounds incredible.
Skepticism is fine, and ideally the study would already be published, but lets not reject it out of hand just because it sounds counterintuitive.
Let me rephrase that:
1. Give your private data to MS
2. Give money to MS
3. ????
4. SECURITY!!!
No idea, but I suspect it starts and ends with gullible people giving MS money.
I'd argue the tea party IS a third party that has been fit into the two party system. It won't disappear with more than two parties, if anything it will be worse. And I'd argue that many problems are entirely the tea party's fault.
Another major cause of political woes is voter apathy, which again, wouldn't be solved.
So I doubt it would solve anything, and I'm more certain that changing the voting system would require the two parties to sign off on changing a voting system which clearly benefits them, which will never happen.
I agree, the groupthink reaction to leaks is astonishing, and I can't figure out why it is apparently getting worse. In yesteryear, you ACTUALLY had an formidable enemy (the USSR) who could theoretically gain secrets from leaks to destroy us. With nukes and ICBMs. Do these people ACTUALLY believe that Al Qaeda, whose arms are boxcutters and pipe bombs, could actually do more damage with Snowden's leaks about the computer spying program?
I recognize it's apples to oranges, with Manning some of the concern was specific informants identified, while the soviets could launch a nuke without knowing so much as a zipcode, but still, the response is wildly disproportionate with the threats we face today.
I suspect it's just "Oh, wait, the public DOESN'T care that we ruthlessly pursue people who dare to speak out against us? Shit! We could STILL be torturing Deepthroat!"
Hey man, google STEALS your information! MS told me so. So that must mean that MS doesn't do that. I mean, they'd be HYPOCRITES otherwise. So I use Bing to keep my porn searches safe. My sexual attraction to boobs and butts will remain safe from the NSA.
I think everyone would prefer it if journalists would have an accurate crystal ball to determine who they should listen to and who they shouldn't, but such a thing doesn't exist, reporters are human, and mistakes are going to happen. I'm sure reporters get all types of crazy sounding conspiracy theory nuts. This one turned out to be right in retrospect, but how did he know that in advance?
Not just journalists. I'd prefer if I, a scientist, knew which bits of preliminary data and which hypotheses to chase after. Some of the few that I've actually gone somewhere with sat on the back burner for an embarrassing amount of time before I came back to them and realized what I had been wasting my time with was far less important or likely to go anywhere.
And that's important to anything how?
You're applying a double standard. Most religions I can name say "don't kill people." Individuals may believe they are X religion and in their interpretation of X religion, murder is okay. You are taking individuals misusing their religion and putting it at the feet of religion, even if that directly contradicts the more commonly held and/or "official" religious rules of "DON'T kill." You're not doing the same thing for atheism. If I'm atheist and my philosophy tells me that religious people are wrong and are a plague on the earth and must be eliminated through murder if necessary, then that's my individual beliefs. If you apply the same standard to atheism as you do for religion, presumably that cultist fundamentalists speak for all muslims or all religions, then you should conclude that atheism does include killing of religious people.
The idea of extreme atheism is illogical, but by the same token, so are most extreme religious cults. Doesn't mean they don't both exist.
but NOTHING bad is happening.
Most scientific grants aren't being awarded right now. This is on top of many funding agencies having their budgets shrink or at best stay the same, while there's increasing competition. The US leads the world in research in many fields at the moment. This shutdown is making the future of the research industry even shakier. I'm looking at jumping ship, I'm far from the only scientist teetering on the edge of moving away. How many more industries can the US afford to lose before it's no longer a first world nation?
I'd suggest the answer is to overuse the fuck out of the word to devalue it. Unfortunately, the politicians who would be able to do that are too busy using the word and the fear it commands for their own purposes. Oops, I mean, the communist, child molesting terrorists in washington who would be able to do that are too busy using the word and the fear it commands for their own purposes.
Don't hate the internet troll: he is a sad and pathetic creature. Why would someone do such a thing if they weren't terribly lonely. Aside from annoying you temporarily, he causes you no harm. Pity him instead.
Or maybe ask why slashdot doesn't take steps to counter this. Why exactly are comments still listed by time rather than by score by default? Is it just that we're all so used to first post nonsense that we'd miss it were it to go away? Why can you post AC or with a brand-new account immediately when a story is posted? If someone is posting something anonymously, they can wait a half an hour to do it.
He may as well try to rationalize it: it's not like he can do anything about it. Nor is the American public going to do anything about it.
If enough people got pissed off at Saudi Arabia, it's conceivable that we could put heavy sanctions on Saudi Arabia for human rights violations. But for that to happen, the royal family would have to basically allow it to happen. They've already bought off enough politicians and powerful people in the US.
Let him think the world isn't a massively unfair place: the only two things that can change Saudi Arabia are 1. Saudi Arabians and 2. Time.
Why is it that they seem to have at least some people in UAE who are thinking of their country's future, while most other places rich in one thing they pull up from the ground, the plan seems to be "Well, I'll still be a billionaire when the natural resource runs out, that will be a good time to retire to someplace that ISN'T going to degenerate (further) into insanity, and take my money with me."
Sure. Insistence that other people avow there is no God or Gods or die in prison would be extreme atheism. You could go with a no true scotsman here and say that's not true atheism, and I could see that as being reasonable. However, I could also see the same argument for religious folk: that people who use any religion as an excuse to dehumanize and kill people in their way is not really in the spirit of any religion.
Now, agnosticism would be tough to do to extremes. "The state finds you guilty of believing something, either in the existence of a deity OR in the absence of a deity! You are sentenced to being locked in a 'Schrodinger's cat' chamber for the remainder of your natural semi-life." I'm guessing though someone has already taken agnosticism to an extreme though.
Physics question: is the part of the spectrum we use for 3 and 4G inherently better at long distances than the part we use for wifi? It would make sense, but I could also see the problems you suggest being due to economies of scale and lack of R&D rather than an insurmountable problem.
(not to imply that the problems with wifi need to be insurmountable for it to make more sense just to go with 3 and 4G.)