Both, actually. I should know - I work in his department. I've heard some ridiculous crap come out of his mouth that makes it clear he hasn't been paying very much attention to the field of molecular biology. Some of his statements about cancer are even worse than his HIV theories. I feel really sorry for the undergrads he teaches (the grad students TAing usually have to cover for his incompetence).
So scientists have been able to isolate HIV now...
And have for years, despite what certain idiots claim. Even Duesberg agrees that HIV has been isolated - he just doesn't think it causes AIDS.
Actually the thing I liked about the series was the idea that it is clearly inspired by the War On Terror.
I liked this too, although it took me a while to realize it. However, having seen the entire first season, let me just say that if the president's hunch in episode 12 turns out to be correct, I'm going to be really pissed off. I'm sure those of us who follow US politics have already figured out a possible real-world parallel to that little plot thread.
Otherwise, best sci-fi show since Farscape, and the season finale was a mind-fuck. (And I thought the shocker ending was relatively less freaky than some of the other plot threads.)
If Hawking wanted to publish some utter nonsense in _Physical Review_ he'd have no trouble getting the placement.
No, because he'd presumably be writing on a subject that the editors and readers of the journal would understand, and they'd immediately recognize if it was bullshit. If Hawking wanted to publish an article, however, positing that child psychology proved the validity of string theory, they'd talk to a child psychologist to see if he was full of shit before publishing. (At least, I hope they would.) But they'd probably just ask him for something, y'know, more *physical*, because physicists usually confine themselves to fields they actually understand, unlike deconstructionists.
Sokal's point was twofold: that the editors of Social Text didn't have any clue about the fields they were applying postmodern theory to, and that the sciences do not belong in postmodern theory. There's also a large element of the scientist sneering at theorists who do nothing but write turgid prose reinterpreting other people's work, a viewpoint I'm often inclined to share.
I know that it doesn't matter if my name is Alan Matheson Turing or Paul Erdoes--whatever I or anyone else submits goes through a formal vetting process which involves having experts pore over my paper with a magnifying glass.
I wish this were always the case. Unfortunately, there certainly are cases where the senior author is famous and/or well-connected and can get a publication because of his name or connections. These articles range from very good (but might not have been high-profile without that extra little push) to sketchy to awful. Alternately, a high-profile result can get published despite major flaws, if it's something everyone wants to see.
The point of Sokal's hoax was that postmodernists wouldn't bother to check on the "science" as long as the article's conclusions were what they wanted to hear. This is sometimes true of scientists as well, but scientists have rules and standards for hypothesis-driven science. They also tend to sneer at pure theorists, and are so fiercely competitive that they'll shred anyone who leaps to conclusions without good solid evidence.
it demonstrated to me precisely why I'm going for a Ph.D. in a discipline where rigor and peer review actually mean something.
Amen to that. Although some of the pre-meds I had to teach last semester have a very postmodern approach to answering test questions.
ignoring for a moment your confusing grouping of einstein and gates
Wasn't my grouping! Blame the parent poster.
when was the last time gates did something usefull? or even, when was the last time he paid someone to do something usefull?
Well, I share your opinion of MS products, but again, comparison was not mine. However, in all fairness to Gates, I greatly admire his philanthropic work, and wish he'd quit his day job and spend all his time funding research into diseases afflicting the Third World. All of which is quite a lot more useful than unleashing yet another worm on poor office assistants. (And on the tech support guys who have to clean up the mess afterwards.)
I am glad the judge is saving us from such social misfits as Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates
Um.
1. Whatever makes you think this kid is as smart as Einstein or even Gates? He release some ripoff of a Windows worm, and got caught. He's just a stupid vandal with nothing better to do, who's not adept enough to cover his tracks.
2. When did Einstein or Gates resort to pointless vandalism because they were too pathetic to do something useful?
Parent's point is well taken, but not entirely true. NSF grants, at least, often do include some funds for dissemination of the results of the research.
Parent's point was entirely wrong in many circumstances. In the specific cases I was thinking of, grants are explicitly given to further the development of various software packages that are useful to a given field. In my case, structural biology. The actual title of many of these grants reflects this. The explicit expectation is that this software will be available to the scientific community - the NIH isn't going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars so some professor can hoard his code or soak the rest of academia with outrageous costs. They most certainly are being paid to disseminate their research, since it's technique development rather than pure basic research.
However, the rules also permit them to apply a seperate (very harsh) commercial license to the software. Hence, a package which is legally available as source to academics is only available to companies as a binary from some company that in many cases has done little more than slap on a proprietary interface. The bulk of the program was developed with public funding. I've seen the end result of this system when it doesn't work, and it was a disaster. Unfortunately, it's pretty much standard practice. (Personally, however, the presence of closed-source academic software pisses me off much more, especially when I find bugs in it but am unable to do anything about it.)
You, Private Citizen, have always been free to collect the raw data from the NOAA.
Ahhh, I see now - the new XML feed is actually the weather forecasts. So, I guess the obvious followup question is, does the government have a legitimate interest making these weather forecasts or is NOAA just doing it because some of their meteorologists thought it'd be fun or wanted to compete with the commercial services? It certainly makes sense that if these forecasts are being made already we should have equal access, but what was their original purpose?
This implies, but doesn't state clearly, that its information should be made easily available to all
What I don't get is what exactly the NWS provides to the commercial weather services, and what exactly the companies do that they believe is being "duplicated" by the government.
My understanding was that the NWS simply collects raw data and feeds it to the companies. The companies do not actually collect weather data independently. Prior to the new rules, the NWS data was only available to said companies, which packaged it up with fancy graphics or some such nonsense. Now, anyone can download the data and set up their own service. Is this all true?
So, if the NWS is making fancy weather websites (and hence, directly competing with the companies), I agree that this might not be entirely fair (although I've seen this argument extended too far on occasion). On the other hand, if some random private individual wants to set up their own website to interpret the public data, what possible argument is there against this? I'm not clear on what exactly the industry association is objecting too - it sounds like a combination of both cases.
I found a Wired article from last month that made it a little clearer:
"Weather-industry companies were promoting the idea that the government restrict special interests that have the ability to pay for the data -- like Major League Baseball teams or citrus growers -- from acquiring it for free, [some weather company honcho] said."
That sounds like bullshit to me. Why should private companies be discriminated against? They're taxpayers too, at least in theory. The government shouldn't force them to go through some hideously expensive service to get the same info that the public receives for free. (Actually, though, this practice is unfortunately very common in academic sciences, largely as a way for universities to supplement their grant income.)
You could argue that the government shouldn't be in the business of collecting weather data at all - although I think there's a very strong case for the NWS even for libertarian types, since the primary role of government should be to protect our lives and property. So, assuming the NWS is a justified agency, there's no possible case for restricting access to the data to a few private companies.
people don't revolt when, overall, living standards are advancing rapidly.
I work in the hard sciences and at one point a few years ago was part of a lab that had a large number of Chinese students and postdocs. Most of them were pretty indifferent to politics and were more or less permanent expats, but one was considerably more nationalist and intended to return eventually. He was pretty honest about their political system - he didn't consider it communist, but had no illusions about it being a dictatorship. I asked him why the Chinese put up with their tyrants, and he told me "It's because the economy and standard of living keeps improving. If we hit a depression, maybe people would revolt, but as long as the government seems to be increasing prosperity, we're inclined to ignore the abuses."
interesting that the 'totalitarian dictatorship' China uses 'positive' tools to manage the population while the 'anti-communist democratic republic' is today using negative ones.
There are many objections to this, not the least of which is that our government does not have the ability (yet) to exercise control over all aspects of life. The USA is under constitutional rule with a system of checks and balances and official accountability (yes, I realize this isn't perfect). The Chinese government is not. Which means that the range of "population control" devices available to the Chinese government is vastly larger. If this were China, Michael Moore would be rotting in Guantanamo. At least in America we have official recourse when the government abuses our rights or its power. I do think there needs to be more accountability and transparency in our government, but we did just have the opportunity to penalize our leadership for its transgressions. (An opportunity we missed, but this says far more about the American voting public than about our system of government.)
I realize the USA isn't perfect, and I didn't vote for our current abyssmal leadership, but I fail to see the equivalency between their system of government and propaganda and ours. Besides, the people I most often hear these complaints from tend to be the type who argue for a more powerful government, not less. I'm not averse to regulation, limited social welfare, and some taxpayer-funded programs (like roads, public schools, and scientific research), but I can't understand why anyone who wants the government to respect individual rights would trust their economic fate to a bunch of bureaucrats.
I haven't yet seen any indication that the end of the Cold War did anything but speed up the US militarization of space.
Unless there's some key detail I'm missing, I'd say the exact opposite is true. Any motivation to militarize space was driven by the knowledge that the USSR most certainly had this intention, and while you may be right about the PRC's plans, the US hasn't been responding yet.
If you think any government space program has ever had any other goal, you are naive and deluded.
I agree that this was much of the unspoken motivation for the original US space program, but I just don't think that's been true for years. Certainly the deep-space probes are purely scientific, and I don't see any military benefit to a Mars landing (okay, the scientific benefits for that are pretty slim too). You might be able to make a case for a military motivation for the ISS, but if so why would we ever cooperate with other nations on that?
Your faulty historicism sounds like it came out of Cliff Notes. Not every political situation can be or needs to be explicitly compared to past events. If you think there's a justification for the Iraq war, then argue that: don't cite WWII as a justification.
I can easily make a comparison between Saddam and Hitler - others - experts in the field- did.
You can easily make a comparison between anyone and Hitler - I see the loony left (sometimes including supposed "experts") compare Bush to Hitler all the time. Doesn't make it any less obnoxious or less bullshit. I have read convincing arguments that Baathism was the moral heir of Naziism, but that still doesn't mean that the situation in 2002 was at all comparable to that in 1939.
Again, my overall point is that we cannot and should not rely on cyclic theories of history to dictate our course of action in every circumstance. (This is not my original idea; Karl Popper used it against Marx.) Especially not the way you're using them here: to imply that anyone who opposed the Iraq war would have favored leaving Hitler in power.
You're missing my point. There were reasonable justifications for ousting Saddam in 2003 (although many of them seem hopelessly naive in retrospect). None of these is comparable to the circumstances that led America to enter WWII. Furthermore, the only compelling justification given by the administration was that Saddam posed an immediate threat, which was of course false. Go read at least the first half of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" before showing off your ignorance of history.
There needs to be a ban on repeating phony historical parallels - this goes for both the pro-war crowd and the hysterical leftists who compare America to Germany circa 1933.
So when Saddam decided to conquer his neighbor, the US decided to not allow him to continue.
Yes, and we beat his army back, and largely neutered his regime (even though he was still in power). This has nothing to do with the recent war, which is what the parent poster was complaining about. We had already contained his regime and stopped him from murdering the Kurds. You can argue the 2003 war on its own merits if you want, but the comparison to WWII is absurd. (In addition to being a sleazy historical device which "The Daily Show" has definitively deconstructed: "John, do you love Hitler?")
In fact, I don't think there has ever been a scientific advance that wasn't either funded by or directly based on research funded by the state.
This is incorrect - there have been many of these. However, they usually fall into the category of "corporate engineering wizard", "lone genius", or "rich dude who can buy tons of laboratory equipment". The first is still quite common; the invention of PCR is a good example. The latter is occasionally found still (Craig Venter - although he got his start at the NIH, and also had a corporate sugar daddy that thought a genome sequence could make money) but more of those guys will just donate the money to scientists (thank you, Mr. Gates!). The second is the one that the libertarians praise the most, and I think it's the least common - because the lone genius can accomplish squat without a few hundred thousand dollars of equipment. (At least; I regularly use a $5 million facility at a $300 million accelerator. Thank you, American taxpayers!) Some rebel academic working out of his garage is never going to cure cancer unless he has access to a whole lot of money.
Anyway, there was a time when quite a few advances were made privately, but I think the exponential progress in the hard sciences over the past century is due in part to increased funding. If we took all that away, I have no idea how progress would continue - most of basic research isn't driven by the commercial market because it's hard to predict whether something is going to be commercializable.
The libertarian response to this is usually either "Not my problem!" (say that again when you're dying from cancer) or "Private donations will find a way!" (put down the bong, please). I agree with the libertarians on all sorts of issues (yay capitalism!) but I just don't see any replacement for our combination of public and commercial science. It seems to work pretty well. (Okay, it pays me, too.)
However to get anywhere in hard science you need to publish. The techniques will be availible to the community. It is the primary benchmark for the research community.
This is true - but it's even more complicated.
Among the many reasons why the US system of publically funded science continues to be such an incredible success is that within the confines of government funding, it's like an artificial free market. (All you Randians out there, shut the fuck up for a moment and listen.) Scientists compete for a limited amount of grant money - I believe about a fifth of NIH grant proposals actually get approved. Once you have money, you usually have hates to issue a retraction so they're pretty cautious most of the time.
So, the incentive is to keep things secret until you're ready to publish. (Unfortunately, molecular biology is so competitive that it's gone too far and people will sometimes be ultra-secretive about their work.) Once you've published, virtually every journal requires you to make your data and materials publically available. If someone writes you saying "I'm working on the same protein - could we get that construct?", you're obligated to send it to them. And any "data not shown", or raw numerical data - that also needs to be shared on request. (The rules for this don't go far enough, in my opinion.)
Patents only cover commercialization. Up to this point, you have a combination of ruthless competition and community-mandated sharing, plus some collaboration between investigators. This is probably the most efficient way to get science done under our current system. If we were to make commercializable discoveries "open-source", we'd end up with the same problem. No company would invest in the science; you could leave it to public investigators, but you'd have four or so competing with each other to make an actual product, which is more expensive and not as useful (from the public-funding perspective) than basic research. And let's say you do come up with a proven product - who's going to manufacture that when any competitor could potentially do it cheaper? Or do you want the government to pay for that too?
Scoff all you want, but the current system has served us very well, and it's a bad idea to tamper with progress. Finding a happy medium between the free market and public science is exceedingly difficult but we've done it about as well as possible.
Except Whedon did it better and left out sound as well. I guess the BSG creators decided a series with space dogfights couldn't get away with this, although thankfully the sound is kept much lower than, say, Star Trek. Fortunately, the space dogfights are kept to a minimum as well; I was afraid this was going to be "Wing Commander", but I've been quite pleasantly surprised.
Agreed. I thought it seemed more like a thriller set in space than a conventional sci-fi show; it's sort of like "24" with the running plotlines and double-crosses. The first episode in particular is very spooky.
Ironically, the largest plot hole is also what makes the series work so well for me. The setting might as well be the present day with a couple of hundred years better technology (or sometimes, conventional modern-day tech). This obviously conflicts with the supposed setting, but also makes it feel very familiar and the reactions and behavior of the characters make much more sense. Especially since we don't have to hear useless pontificating about the sanctity of timelines or the Prime Directive.
My sense is that this can (theoretically) be explained pretty well based on physical chemistry, e.g. the kinetics and binding constants of each reaction involved. The timing of complex animal development is fairly precise, and that's just a giant transcription factor cascade that's both temporally and spatially localized in an embryo. There are all sorts of weird interactions that govern how long a signal persists, usually in the form of feedback regulation and antagonistic pathways
This is one of the dumbest fucking comments I've read here in a long time. As of 2000, the US spent upwards of $7 billion fighting AIDS, $2 billion of which was just basic research. Some of this is done in collaboration with Third-World nations as well, not just targeted at US citizens. There is an immense effort to eradicate AIDS, and there have been many advances in short-term treatment (at least, for those in developed nations that can afford the drugs), and you're repeating the standard Slashdot whine about big pharma. Incredible.
Not to suggest that we shouldn't cure AIDS, but eliminating HIV as a threat might have some unintended consequences.
Sure, but the need for increased spending on prevention/treatment of these other STDs would be more than balanced by the reduced impact of countless other diseases that prey on immunocompromised individuals. I do research on TB, and one of the reasons that bug has been resurgent recently (mostly in the Third World) is that it takes particular advantage of people with AIDS. The current treatment for TB is expensive and a pain in the ass to administer, and getting rid of AIDS would certainly save money (and trouble) spent on TB.
Dude, I spent last semester teaching advanced molecular biology to pre-meds at a rather prestigous university. . . and believe me, there are plenty that are that stupid and naive. Scares the shit out of me, actually. I hope the majority never make it as far as an MD, for all our sakes.
Re:Why is more dimensions "better"
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3D User Interfaces
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Would you be happy only using the command line?
On a daily basis, I use exactly two graphical apps:
1. Mozilla 2. Molecular modelling programs
On a somewhat less regular basis, I use PDF viewers, The Gimp, and several other scientific apps that use a GUI. But 90% of the real work I do gets done in Xterms, and as far as I'm concerned a window manager exists just to keep my terminal windows in order.
I can think of improved user interfaces that would make my life easier, but most of them would still involve a command line, because that's almost ALWAYS going to be faster than using a mouse or waving your hands, as long as you actually know the commands. (This is also the single most important reason why I use Linux for everything: because I just get work done so much fucking faster.) Even with my 3D graphics work, I'm constantly switching back and forth between the display and assorted terminals.
Slashdot Mirror
So Duesberg is just crazy/wrong then.
Both, actually. I should know - I work in his department. I've heard some ridiculous crap come out of his mouth that makes it clear he hasn't been paying very much attention to the field of molecular biology. Some of his statements about cancer are even worse than his HIV theories. I feel really sorry for the undergrads he teaches (the grad students TAing usually have to cover for his incompetence).
So scientists have been able to isolate HIV now...
And have for years, despite what certain idiots claim. Even Duesberg agrees that HIV has been isolated - he just doesn't think it causes AIDS.
Hmm.... be nice to see one electron microscope picture of the organism... "HIV".
Are you the only person on the planet who hasn't heard of Google?
Retard.
Actually the thing I liked about the series was the idea that it is clearly inspired by the War On Terror.
I liked this too, although it took me a while to realize it. However, having seen the entire first season, let me just say that if the president's hunch in episode 12 turns out to be correct, I'm going to be really pissed off. I'm sure those of us who follow US politics have already figured out a possible real-world parallel to that little plot thread.
Otherwise, best sci-fi show since Farscape, and the season finale was a mind-fuck. (And I thought the shocker ending was relatively less freaky than some of the other plot threads.)
If Hawking wanted to publish some utter nonsense in _Physical Review_ he'd have no trouble getting the placement.
No, because he'd presumably be writing on a subject that the editors and readers of the journal would understand, and they'd immediately recognize if it was bullshit. If Hawking wanted to publish an article, however, positing that child psychology proved the validity of string theory, they'd talk to a child psychologist to see if he was full of shit before publishing. (At least, I hope they would.) But they'd probably just ask him for something, y'know, more *physical*, because physicists usually confine themselves to fields they actually understand, unlike deconstructionists.
Sokal's point was twofold: that the editors of Social Text didn't have any clue about the fields they were applying postmodern theory to, and that the sciences do not belong in postmodern theory. There's also a large element of the scientist sneering at theorists who do nothing but write turgid prose reinterpreting other people's work, a viewpoint I'm often inclined to share.
I know that it doesn't matter if my name is Alan Matheson Turing or Paul Erdoes--whatever I or anyone else submits goes through a formal vetting process which involves having experts pore over my paper with a magnifying glass.
I wish this were always the case. Unfortunately, there certainly are cases where the senior author is famous and/or well-connected and can get a publication because of his name or connections. These articles range from very good (but might not have been high-profile without that extra little push) to sketchy to awful. Alternately, a high-profile result can get published despite major flaws, if it's something everyone wants to see.
The point of Sokal's hoax was that postmodernists wouldn't bother to check on the "science" as long as the article's conclusions were what they wanted to hear. This is sometimes true of scientists as well, but scientists have rules and standards for hypothesis-driven science. They also tend to sneer at pure theorists, and are so fiercely competitive that they'll shred anyone who leaps to conclusions without good solid evidence.
it demonstrated to me precisely why I'm going for a Ph.D. in a discipline where rigor and peer review actually mean something.
Amen to that. Although some of the pre-meds I had to teach last semester have a very postmodern approach to answering test questions.
ignoring for a moment your confusing grouping of einstein and gates
Wasn't my grouping! Blame the parent poster.
when was the last time gates did something usefull? or even, when was the last time he paid someone to do something usefull?
Well, I share your opinion of MS products, but again, comparison was not mine. However, in all fairness to Gates, I greatly admire his philanthropic work, and wish he'd quit his day job and spend all his time funding research into diseases afflicting the Third World. All of which is quite a lot more useful than unleashing yet another worm on poor office assistants. (And on the tech support guys who have to clean up the mess afterwards.)
I am glad the judge is saving us from such social misfits as Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates
Um.
1. Whatever makes you think this kid is as smart as Einstein or even Gates? He release some ripoff of a Windows worm, and got caught. He's just a stupid vandal with nothing better to do, who's not adept enough to cover his tracks.
2. When did Einstein or Gates resort to pointless vandalism because they were too pathetic to do something useful?
Parent's point is well taken, but not entirely true. NSF grants, at least, often do include some funds for dissemination of the results of the research.
Parent's point was entirely wrong in many circumstances. In the specific cases I was thinking of, grants are explicitly given to further the development of various software packages that are useful to a given field. In my case, structural biology. The actual title of many of these grants reflects this. The explicit expectation is that this software will be available to the scientific community - the NIH isn't going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars so some professor can hoard his code or soak the rest of academia with outrageous costs. They most certainly are being paid to disseminate their research, since it's technique development rather than pure basic research.
However, the rules also permit them to apply a seperate (very harsh) commercial license to the software. Hence, a package which is legally available as source to academics is only available to companies as a binary from some company that in many cases has done little more than slap on a proprietary interface. The bulk of the program was developed with public funding. I've seen the end result of this system when it doesn't work, and it was a disaster. Unfortunately, it's pretty much standard practice. (Personally, however, the presence of closed-source academic software pisses me off much more, especially when I find bugs in it but am unable to do anything about it.)
You, Private Citizen, have always been free to collect the raw data from the NOAA.
Ahhh, I see now - the new XML feed is actually the weather forecasts. So, I guess the obvious followup question is, does the government have a legitimate interest making these weather forecasts or is NOAA just doing it because some of their meteorologists thought it'd be fun or wanted to compete with the commercial services? It certainly makes sense that if these forecasts are being made already we should have equal access, but what was their original purpose?
This implies, but doesn't state clearly, that its information should be made easily available to all
What I don't get is what exactly the NWS provides to the commercial weather services, and what exactly the companies do that they believe is being "duplicated" by the government.
My understanding was that the NWS simply collects raw data and feeds it to the companies. The companies do not actually collect weather data independently. Prior to the new rules, the NWS data was only available to said companies, which packaged it up with fancy graphics or some such nonsense. Now, anyone can download the data and set up their own service. Is this all true?
So, if the NWS is making fancy weather websites (and hence, directly competing with the companies), I agree that this might not be entirely fair (although I've seen this argument extended too far on occasion). On the other hand, if some random private individual wants to set up their own website to interpret the public data, what possible argument is there against this? I'm not clear on what exactly the industry association is objecting too - it sounds like a combination of both cases.
I found a Wired article from last month that made it a little clearer:
"Weather-industry companies were promoting the idea that the government restrict special interests that have the ability to pay for the data -- like Major League Baseball teams or citrus growers -- from acquiring it for free, [some weather company honcho] said."
That sounds like bullshit to me. Why should private companies be discriminated against? They're taxpayers too, at least in theory. The government shouldn't force them to go through some hideously expensive service to get the same info that the public receives for free. (Actually, though, this practice is unfortunately very common in academic sciences, largely as a way for universities to supplement their grant income.)
You could argue that the government shouldn't be in the business of collecting weather data at all - although I think there's a very strong case for the NWS even for libertarian types, since the primary role of government should be to protect our lives and property. So, assuming the NWS is a justified agency, there's no possible case for restricting access to the data to a few private companies.
people don't revolt when, overall, living standards are advancing rapidly.
I work in the hard sciences and at one point a few years ago was part of a lab that had a large number of Chinese students and postdocs. Most of them were pretty indifferent to politics and were more or less permanent expats, but one was considerably more nationalist and intended to return eventually. He was pretty honest about their political system - he didn't consider it communist, but had no illusions about it being a dictatorship. I asked him why the Chinese put up with their tyrants, and he told me "It's because the economy and standard of living keeps improving. If we hit a depression, maybe people would revolt, but as long as the government seems to be increasing prosperity, we're inclined to ignore the abuses."
interesting that the 'totalitarian dictatorship' China uses 'positive' tools to manage the population while the 'anti-communist democratic republic' is today using negative ones.
There are many objections to this, not the least of which is that our government does not have the ability (yet) to exercise control over all aspects of life. The USA is under constitutional rule with a system of checks and balances and official accountability (yes, I realize this isn't perfect). The Chinese government is not. Which means that the range of "population control" devices available to the Chinese government is vastly larger. If this were China, Michael Moore would be rotting in Guantanamo. At least in America we have official recourse when the government abuses our rights or its power. I do think there needs to be more accountability and transparency in our government, but we did just have the opportunity to penalize our leadership for its transgressions. (An opportunity we missed, but this says far more about the American voting public than about our system of government.)
I realize the USA isn't perfect, and I didn't vote for our current abyssmal leadership, but I fail to see the equivalency between their system of government and propaganda and ours. Besides, the people I most often hear these complaints from tend to be the type who argue for a more powerful government, not less. I'm not averse to regulation, limited social welfare, and some taxpayer-funded programs (like roads, public schools, and scientific research), but I can't understand why anyone who wants the government to respect individual rights would trust their economic fate to a bunch of bureaucrats.
I haven't yet seen any indication that the end of the Cold War did anything but speed up the US militarization of space.
Unless there's some key detail I'm missing, I'd say the exact opposite is true. Any motivation to militarize space was driven by the knowledge that the USSR most certainly had this intention, and while you may be right about the PRC's plans, the US hasn't been responding yet.
If you think any government space program has ever had any other goal, you are naive and deluded.
I agree that this was much of the unspoken motivation for the original US space program, but I just don't think that's been true for years. Certainly the deep-space probes are purely scientific, and I don't see any military benefit to a Mars landing (okay, the scientific benefits for that are pretty slim too). You might be able to make a case for a military motivation for the ISS, but if so why would we ever cooperate with other nations on that?
I've read plenty of books on Nazi Germany
Your faulty historicism sounds like it came out of Cliff Notes. Not every political situation can be or needs to be explicitly compared to past events. If you think there's a justification for the Iraq war, then argue that: don't cite WWII as a justification.
I can easily make a comparison between Saddam and Hitler - others - experts in the field- did.
You can easily make a comparison between anyone and Hitler - I see the loony left (sometimes including supposed "experts") compare Bush to Hitler all the time. Doesn't make it any less obnoxious or less bullshit. I have read convincing arguments that Baathism was the moral heir of Naziism, but that still doesn't mean that the situation in 2002 was at all comparable to that in 1939.
Again, my overall point is that we cannot and should not rely on cyclic theories of history to dictate our course of action in every circumstance. (This is not my original idea; Karl Popper used it against Marx.) Especially not the way you're using them here: to imply that anyone who opposed the Iraq war would have favored leaving Hitler in power.
You're missing my point. There were reasonable justifications for ousting Saddam in 2003 (although many of them seem hopelessly naive in retrospect). None of these is comparable to the circumstances that led America to enter WWII. Furthermore, the only compelling justification given by the administration was that Saddam posed an immediate threat, which was of course false. Go read at least the first half of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" before showing off your ignorance of history.
There needs to be a ban on repeating phony historical parallels - this goes for both the pro-war crowd and the hysterical leftists who compare America to Germany circa 1933.
So when Saddam decided to conquer his neighbor, the US decided to not allow him to continue.
Yes, and we beat his army back, and largely neutered his regime (even though he was still in power). This has nothing to do with the recent war, which is what the parent poster was complaining about. We had already contained his regime and stopped him from murdering the Kurds. You can argue the 2003 war on its own merits if you want, but the comparison to WWII is absurd. (In addition to being a sleazy historical device which "The Daily Show" has definitively deconstructed: "John, do you love Hitler?")
Presumably it was playing him up as a real dreamboat.
"In his rare moments of spare time, Bill also enjoys puppy dogs, long walks in the park, mountain biking, Italian opera, and hacking 8088 assembler."
In fact, I don't think there has ever been a scientific advance that wasn't either funded by or directly based on research funded by the state.
This is incorrect - there have been many of these. However, they usually fall into the category of "corporate engineering wizard", "lone genius", or "rich dude who can buy tons of laboratory equipment". The first is still quite common; the invention of PCR is a good example. The latter is occasionally found still (Craig Venter - although he got his start at the NIH, and also had a corporate sugar daddy that thought a genome sequence could make money) but more of those guys will just donate the money to scientists (thank you, Mr. Gates!). The second is the one that the libertarians praise the most, and I think it's the least common - because the lone genius can accomplish squat without a few hundred thousand dollars of equipment. (At least; I regularly use a $5 million facility at a $300 million accelerator. Thank you, American taxpayers!) Some rebel academic working out of his garage is never going to cure cancer unless he has access to a whole lot of money.
Anyway, there was a time when quite a few advances were made privately, but I think the exponential progress in the hard sciences over the past century is due in part to increased funding. If we took all that away, I have no idea how progress would continue - most of basic research isn't driven by the commercial market because it's hard to predict whether something is going to be commercializable.
The libertarian response to this is usually either "Not my problem!" (say that again when you're dying from cancer) or "Private donations will find a way!" (put down the bong, please). I agree with the libertarians on all sorts of issues (yay capitalism!) but I just don't see any replacement for our combination of public and commercial science. It seems to work pretty well. (Okay, it pays me, too.)
However to get anywhere in hard science you need to publish. The techniques will be availible to the community. It is the primary benchmark for the research community.
This is true - but it's even more complicated.
Among the many reasons why the US system of publically funded science continues to be such an incredible success is that within the confines of government funding, it's like an artificial free market. (All you Randians out there, shut the fuck up for a moment and listen.) Scientists compete for a limited amount of grant money - I believe about a fifth of NIH grant proposals actually get approved. Once you have money, you usually have hates to issue a retraction so they're pretty cautious most of the time.
So, the incentive is to keep things secret until you're ready to publish. (Unfortunately, molecular biology is so competitive that it's gone too far and people will sometimes be ultra-secretive about their work.) Once you've published, virtually every journal requires you to make your data and materials publically available. If someone writes you saying "I'm working on the same protein - could we get that construct?", you're obligated to send it to them. And any "data not shown", or raw numerical data - that also needs to be shared on request. (The rules for this don't go far enough, in my opinion.)
Patents only cover commercialization. Up to this point, you have a combination of ruthless competition and community-mandated sharing, plus some collaboration between investigators. This is probably the most efficient way to get science done under our current system. If we were to make commercializable discoveries "open-source", we'd end up with the same problem. No company would invest in the science; you could leave it to public investigators, but you'd have four or so competing with each other to make an actual product, which is more expensive and not as useful (from the public-funding perspective) than basic research. And let's say you do come up with a proven product - who's going to manufacture that when any competitor could potentially do it cheaper? Or do you want the government to pay for that too?
Scoff all you want, but the current system has served us very well, and it's a bad idea to tamper with progress. Finding a happy medium between the free market and public science is exceedingly difficult but we've done it about as well as possible.
Of course, it was also ripped from Firefly.
Except Whedon did it better and left out sound as well. I guess the BSG creators decided a series with space dogfights couldn't get away with this, although thankfully the sound is kept much lower than, say, Star Trek. Fortunately, the space dogfights are kept to a minimum as well; I was afraid this was going to be "Wing Commander", but I've been quite pleasantly surprised.
Agreed. I thought it seemed more like a thriller set in space than a conventional sci-fi show; it's sort of like "24" with the running plotlines and double-crosses. The first episode in particular is very spooky.
Ironically, the largest plot hole is also what makes the series work so well for me. The setting might as well be the present day with a couple of hundred years better technology (or sometimes, conventional modern-day tech). This obviously conflicts with the supposed setting, but also makes it feel very familiar and the reactions and behavior of the characters make much more sense. Especially since we don't have to hear useless pontificating about the sanctity of timelines or the Prime Directive.
My sense is that this can (theoretically) be explained pretty well based on physical chemistry, e.g. the kinetics and binding constants of each reaction involved. The timing of complex animal development is fairly precise, and that's just a giant transcription factor cascade that's both temporally and spatially localized in an embryo. There are all sorts of weird interactions that govern how long a signal persists, usually in the form of feedback regulation and antagonistic pathways
This is one of the dumbest fucking comments I've read here in a long time. As of 2000, the US spent upwards of $7 billion fighting AIDS, $2 billion of which was just basic research. Some of this is done in collaboration with Third-World nations as well, not just targeted at US citizens. There is an immense effort to eradicate AIDS, and there have been many advances in short-term treatment (at least, for those in developed nations that can afford the drugs), and you're repeating the standard Slashdot whine about big pharma. Incredible.
Not to suggest that we shouldn't cure AIDS, but eliminating HIV as a threat might have some unintended consequences.
Sure, but the need for increased spending on prevention/treatment of these other STDs would be more than balanced by the reduced impact of countless other diseases that prey on immunocompromised individuals. I do research on TB, and one of the reasons that bug has been resurgent recently (mostly in the Third World) is that it takes particular advantage of people with AIDS. The current treatment for TB is expensive and a pain in the ass to administer, and getting rid of AIDS would certainly save money (and trouble) spent on TB.
NFW someone that stupid and naive is in pre-med.
Dude, I spent last semester teaching advanced molecular biology to pre-meds at a rather prestigous university. . . and believe me, there are plenty that are that stupid and naive. Scares the shit out of me, actually. I hope the majority never make it as far as an MD, for all our sakes.
Would you be happy only using the command line?
On a daily basis, I use exactly two graphical apps:
1. Mozilla
2. Molecular modelling programs
On a somewhat less regular basis, I use PDF viewers, The Gimp, and several other scientific apps that use a GUI. But 90% of the real work I do gets done in Xterms, and as far as I'm concerned a window manager exists just to keep my terminal windows in order.
I can think of improved user interfaces that would make my life easier, but most of them would still involve a command line, because that's almost ALWAYS going to be faster than using a mouse or waving your hands, as long as you actually know the commands. (This is also the single most important reason why I use Linux for everything: because I just get work done so much fucking faster.) Even with my 3D graphics work, I'm constantly switching back and forth between the display and assorted terminals.