Re:The logistics of building the Death Star
on
Star Wars Minutiae
·
· Score: 1
Blockquoth the poster:
the control center would not need centience either as it would just blindly follow the building plan.
Yes, because that is surely a recipe for success in any complicated endeavor... On the other hand, the Empire's commitment to quality doesn't seem all that high, so maybe cookie-cutter Death Stars would fit right in...
Re:The logistics of building the Death Star
on
Star Wars Minutiae
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Blockquoth the poster:
Well I believe most of the construction in that era was performed by large robots.
Well, if by "robots" you mean "droids", then what's the difference? Droids are clearly sentient in the Star Wars universe. Are you saying that the life of an organic is intrinsically valuable but the life of a mechanical is not? I am so tired of this carbon bias on slashdot!:)
Was once a time when this government was a democratic representative republic instead of a group of bought & paid for politicians winning the respect of their corporate puppet masters.
Really? Was that around the time that only landed white males could vote? When four million people were considered to be only 2.4 million people? When you had to be of a certain faith to hold office?
The good old days weren't all that good, either, and the cause of freedom is ill-served by gold-plated memories of times that didn't exist.
It's the same general social dysfunction, it's just a smaller scale.
Plus, well, software piracy results in a lot fewer deaths.
Oh, wait. That means it isn't "the same general dysfunction" at all. One involves murder and mayhem; the other involves scoping out 2 Fast 2 Furious for free. Indeed, as is continuously (and facetiously) pointed out all the time on slashdot, even supporters of file swapping don't agree that, say, their cars should be communal -- so there's no "same general disdain for other people's property and rights". (Under other topics file swappers seem in fact to be more concerned with people's rights, so that sort of takes care of a "general disdain" right there.)
Look, infringement of copyright is illegal. In fact, it's even wrong. People shouldn't do it. But that doesn't make it piracy, except through the unjustified and laughably outrageous co-option of the term by publishers, a long long time ago.
And they co-opted the term, as one of the parent posters noted, precisely to raise the connotations of the universally-decried crime of (actual) piracy, to make copyright infringers look more menacing than they actually are.
I can't think of a better way to revive an interest in politics.
C.J. Cregg : The more photo-friendly of the two turkeys gets a Presidential pardon and a full life at a children's petting zoo; the other one gets eaten.
President Josiah Bartlet : If the Oscars were like that, I'd watch.
So you're willing to accept an invalid result if it saves you a few bucks? No wonder the Republic is in such dire straits these days.
Look at it this way: Naturally enough, you believe your positions to be correct. If you also believe in democracy, then you have to believe that your valid ideas will win out, long run, versus the invalid ones that compete. (If you feel this is pollyanna, fine... but then you don't believe in democracy.) Since you're clearly on the side of goodness and light, if an election were to be improper, it would be The Other Guys who rigged it. These are the guys whom you believe want to raise taxes to 100% while legally mandating all sorts of moral depravities. Do you want them to get in because you wouldn't shell out few dollars?
If you believe in your cause, then settling a contested election will lead to the "right" people being elected... and then they can go on to slash revenues and so on. So long term, the spending for a valid election would be more of an investment, or at least, more like spending more money on flourescent bulbs: Down the road, you save more than it costs.
So a small plea to the editors; please keep politics in their own Section until someone fixes the Exclusion?
or fixes the election...:)
Kidding aside, this story is about tech and its impact, not just politics. It's not inappropriate that it appear on the main page. Here's a radical thought, if you see the headline for a story and you just know you won't want to read it: Don't. Participation on slashdot is voluntary in many degrees.
If you're so thin-skinned that you can't handle seeing the merest headline that indicates politics simply exists, then you probably would be happier unplugging the computer and TV, and simply watching the paint crack.
(For the tin-foil crowd, no, I don't think elections will be made illegal or term limits extended in the next four years. Sorry.)
Do you have some objective evidence to support that, or is it just a strongly held belief?
Um, I'm upset at the way things seem to be headed, too, but logically, the poster doesn't have to "prove" the status quo or the allegation that things will continue much as they have. It behooves those who fear a radical change in our political system (i.e., suspended elections) to offer up evidence for this. Not all positions have equal claim to validity, and the burden of proof does not fall indiscriminately the same.
especially when the last few articles ( all so far?) have been slanted to the left (IIRC).
Aye, but that little codicil is the real bit, isn't it? Do you recall correctly? Are the articles slanted to the left, or are you viewing them through a prism that makes you think they are? (BTW, if you're smugly on the left, feel free to parity-swap all of this, because people of all stripes are prone to the error.)
Here's the dark side to the democratization of information represented by the Net: Yes, you can find lots of info about almost any topic and it's close to impossible to silence your enemies. But you can also filter out almost anything you want and carve out your own little microcosm. And if you're not extremely careful, you will begin to think that your painstakingly crafted filtered world is the world, and that your blinkered view is reality.
In other words, the Net makes possible tremendous discussion while at the same time choking off actual discourse.
I'm not calling for a government mandate to read slashdot, or a law requiring "balance" (whatever the hell that is), and I respect your right to read news sources that satisfy your need for news. But to filter out everything of a different political persuasion -- that's the menace to the Republic, far more even than single-party rule and unified government.
It doesn't have to be this way. All we need to do is make sure We Keep Talking
I'm sorry but I still think the system worked exactly as it's supposed to and exactly as it should. If you make a wildly divergent claim, it is encumbent on you to provide solid evidence -- and to facilitate the work of others to verify it. The phase space of entirely unexpected (but still valid) proposals is infinitesimal compared to the phase space of entirely unexpected and completely bogus claims. With only finite resources, the community needs to set priorities. The scientific process is a well-evolved technique for sounding out BS -- a system for detecting falsehood. There are indeed examples of apparently outrageous concepts that have become accepted (quantum mechanics, for example), but that is precisely because the early proponents of those concepts threw them open to investigation by many other researchers.
Some of the subsequent experiments saw (ambiguous) anomalous results but no one replicated P&F -- and P&F allowed no one to try.
The only part of the response that was sordid at all, and it is something which even at the time dismayed me, was the presumption by many physicists that mere electrochemists could not conceivably have discovered new fundamental physics. The pedigree of P&F should not have mattered. But their resistance to submitting their results for independent replication and peer review should have, and did.
which attempted to explain the 'cold fusion' phenomenon through use of localized time-reversal zones, which were in fact proven a year or three ago
Oh, I think you really have to supply a link or three to back that up, or a reference to an actual peer-reviewed paper. Reading the back of comic books does not count.
And no, I'm not saying that all science should explore the bizarre but some level of exploration is healthy to the field in general.
The issue was not that "mainstream science" crushed down those noble researchers explorer "the bizarre". Contrary to popular myth, most scientists are delighted at the unexpected discovery of new phenomena, even if they pose a threat to established theory. But there are rules that have been evolved, over several centuries of painstaking effort, to give us some hope of knowing the validity of claims -- which is the root of all scientific progress.
Some of these rules involve repeatability (which even Pons and Fleischmann, with their own equipment, could not reliably achieve), open publication, peer review, and so on. The original researchers and their rabid fans felt that the process of science slowed them down too much, so they ignored that process. They were doomned not by the "hostility" of "the establishment", but by the failure of other labs to reproduce their results in any significant and reliable manner.
If honest, peer-reviewed work shows excess heat, it will be an interesting and possibly tremendous discovery. But Pons and Fleischmann will remains just as wrong.
I take exception: Cold fusion has always and obviously been a real nuclear effect, in my mind,
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? It doesn't matter if it's a nuclear effect "in your mind". Your mind doesn't enter into it. Neither does Pons or Fleischmann's minds. What matters is whether nuclear fusion is actually occurring, and that is to be settled by experiment.
Pons and Fleischmann might have seen a real effect. Certainly, carefully-constructed experiments have consistently given hints of excess heat. But that doesn't make them "right". Lucretius wrote about "atoms" centuries before Dalton. That doesn't mean the ancient Greeks invented modern chemistry.
Pons and Fleischmann violated just about every tenet of the open, peer-reviewed scientific process. In so doing they abandoned any claim to legitimacy. If this effect turns out to be real, they didn't "get it right". They just got lucky. And if this effect turns out to be real, it will be the paintstaking, not-by-press-conference slow work of real researchers who understand how science works, that will ironically provide actual justification.
You know what I really love on slashdot? When someone posts a link to "prove" their point, and end up pointing out how wrong they are. From the linked FAQ:
I know that I need permission for live performances
Later in the same FAQ
2. How much will it cost to obtain an ASCAP license to perform music?
The annual rate depends on the type of business. Generally, rates are based on the manner in which music is performed (live, recorded or audio only or audio/visual) and the size of the establishment or potential audience for the music. For example, rates for restaurants, nightclubs, bars and similar establishments depend on whether the music is live or recorded, whether it's audio only or audio visual, the seating capacity of the bar or restaurant, the number of nights per week music is offered, the number of musicians, whether admission is charged and several other factors.... Concert rates are based on the ticket revenue and seating capacity of the facility.
Oh, I'd say it's pretty clear that even for live music, they expect their cut.
All fince places, full of lovely people, I'm sure, but as an American, I'm not exactly keen on a monetary system that gives the South Africans a say in how much I can afford to spend at the grocery store this week.
Because it's worked so well giving, say, Middle Eastern potentates a say on how much you can afford... Actually, in all this high-faluting econo talk flying about, it's interesting that petroleum's action as a currency hasn't been raised.
And this differs from the methodology of economics in what way?
Great question. That's why I, unlike many others here, am not willing to exclude economics as a science a priori. There are however feedback effects in economics that make it currently doubtful whether any model can be made simultaneously (a) complex enough to shed light on the operations of the economy while remaining (b) simple enough to avoid being swamped by social noise.
Or to put it another way: When an economic model fails, there is always some reason why -- some "freak occurence" -- that allows the model to not have failed. Or, more simply: It seems impossible, with the current state of economics (and economists!) to actually settle anything via experiment or observation.
And last I checked, central planning of an economy was not a very good idea; the more control goes into the hands of a few people, the less well things tend to run.
And that's exactly why I'm opposed to total free-market capitalism and libertarianism... because the ultimate effect is to concentrate all of the wealth and all of the power into the hands of just a few.
Sure, governments can give you the same problem. But the failure of straight democracy is not the same as a proof for oligarchy.
Essentially no practicing scientist actually follows the hallowed "Scientific Method". Taken as a whole, the endeavor we call "science" more or less follows the method. The Scientific Method as quote in Wikipedia and in middle school textbooks throughout the land, is a comforting fiction.
The essence of science is the construction of falsifiable theories whose falseness can, in principle, be established by experiment (or observation of a large number of systems, which admits astrophysics and quantum mechanics into the club). The problem with economics, as a whole, is that the system studied is so complex and so ill-constrained, that it's hard to design experiments (or studies) that rise above the social noise.
How do your perform an controlled experiment in astronomy?
You observe a statistically huge number of events and see if the distributions match the theory. Most philosophers of science will, implicitly at least, add "statistical observation" to "controlled experimentation" as the methods of science.
'Course, it's the application of physical law (as derived and tested on Earth) to the celestial realm that makes it into astrophysics and not astronomy. Astronomy is to astrophysics as taxonomy is to biology.
At that point, some gold would actually move around, but this limited movement of gold or silver in no way constrained the economy.
Ah, yes, because the Middle Ages are known for their robust, flexible, and growing economies... In fact, it was the inability of the old system to match the needs of the growing international economy that lead to the rise of international banking and credit -- long before even these "fiat currencies" sprang into existence.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because that is surely a recipe for success in any complicated endeavor... On the other hand, the Empire's commitment to quality doesn't seem all that high, so maybe cookie-cutter Death Stars would fit right in...
Well, if by "robots" you mean "droids", then what's the difference? Droids are clearly sentient in the Star Wars universe. Are you saying that the life of an organic is intrinsically valuable but the life of a mechanical is not? I am so tired of this carbon bias on slashdot!
Really? Was that around the time that only landed white males could vote? When four million people were considered to be only 2.4 million people? When you had to be of a certain faith to hold office?
The good old days weren't all that good, either, and the cause of freedom is ill-served by gold-plated memories of times that didn't exist.
Plus, well, software piracy results in a lot fewer deaths.
Oh, wait. That means it isn't "the same general dysfunction" at all. One involves murder and mayhem; the other involves scoping out 2 Fast 2 Furious for free. Indeed, as is continuously (and facetiously) pointed out all the time on slashdot, even supporters of file swapping don't agree that, say, their cars should be communal -- so there's no "same general disdain for other people's property and rights". (Under other topics file swappers seem in fact to be more concerned with people's rights, so that sort of takes care of a "general disdain" right there.)
Look, infringement of copyright is illegal. In fact, it's even wrong. People shouldn't do it. But that doesn't make it piracy, except through the unjustified and laughably outrageous co-option of the term by publishers, a long long time ago.
And they co-opted the term, as one of the parent posters noted, precisely to raise the connotations of the universally-decried crime of (actual) piracy, to make copyright infringers look more menacing than they actually are.
Well, good for her. Those shared lives cost less but just aren't the same quality...
C.J. Cregg : The more photo-friendly of the two turkeys gets a Presidential pardon and a full life at a children's petting zoo; the other one gets eaten.
President Josiah Bartlet : If the Oscars were like that, I'd watch.
Actually I'm pretty sure it would result in the election of Natalie Portman...
So you're willing to accept an invalid result if it saves you a few bucks? No wonder the Republic is in such dire straits these days.
Look at it this way: Naturally enough, you believe your positions to be correct. If you also believe in democracy, then you have to believe that your valid ideas will win out, long run, versus the invalid ones that compete. (If you feel this is pollyanna, fine... but then you don't believe in democracy.) Since you're clearly on the side of goodness and light, if an election were to be improper, it would be The Other Guys who rigged it. These are the guys whom you believe want to raise taxes to 100% while legally mandating all sorts of moral depravities. Do you want them to get in because you wouldn't shell out few dollars?
If you believe in your cause, then settling a contested election will lead to the "right" people being elected
or fixes the election...
Kidding aside, this story is about tech and its impact, not just politics. It's not inappropriate that it appear on the main page. Here's a radical thought, if you see the headline for a story and you just know you won't want to read it: Don't. Participation on slashdot is voluntary in many degrees.
If you're so thin-skinned that you can't handle seeing the merest headline that indicates politics simply exists, then you probably would be happier unplugging the computer and TV, and simply watching the paint crack.
Um, I'm upset at the way things seem to be headed, too, but logically, the poster doesn't have to "prove" the status quo or the allegation that things will continue much as they have. It behooves those who fear a radical change in our political system (i.e., suspended elections) to offer up evidence for this. Not all positions have equal claim to validity, and the burden of proof does not fall indiscriminately the same.
Aye, but that little codicil is the real bit, isn't it? Do you recall correctly? Are the articles slanted to the left, or are you viewing them through a prism that makes you think they are? (BTW, if you're smugly on the left, feel free to parity-swap all of this, because people of all stripes are prone to the error.)
Here's the dark side to the democratization of information represented by the Net: Yes, you can find lots of info about almost any topic and it's close to impossible to silence your enemies. But you can also filter out almost anything you want and carve out your own little microcosm. And if you're not extremely careful, you will begin to think that your painstakingly crafted filtered world is the world, and that your blinkered view is reality.
In other words, the Net makes possible tremendous discussion while at the same time choking off actual discourse.
I'm not calling for a government mandate to read slashdot, or a law requiring "balance" (whatever the hell that is), and I respect your right to read news sources that satisfy your need for news. But to filter out everything of a different political persuasion -- that's the menace to the Republic, far more even than single-party rule and unified government.
But then, if you're lucky, it will rise again as your own personal nosferatu...
Well, then, mission accomplished!
I'm sorry but I still think the system worked exactly as it's supposed to and exactly as it should. If you make a wildly divergent claim, it is encumbent on you to provide solid evidence -- and to facilitate the work of others to verify it. The phase space of entirely unexpected (but still valid) proposals is infinitesimal compared to the phase space of entirely unexpected and completely bogus claims. With only finite resources, the community needs to set priorities. The scientific process is a well-evolved technique for sounding out BS -- a system for detecting falsehood. There are indeed examples of apparently outrageous concepts that have become accepted (quantum mechanics, for example), but that is precisely because the early proponents of those concepts threw them open to investigation by many other researchers.
Some of the subsequent experiments saw (ambiguous) anomalous results but no one replicated P&F -- and P&F allowed no one to try.
The only part of the response that was sordid at all, and it is something which even at the time dismayed me, was the presumption by many physicists that mere electrochemists could not conceivably have discovered new fundamental physics. The pedigree of P&F should not have mattered. But their resistance to submitting their results for independent replication and peer review should have, and did.
Oh, I think you really have to supply a link or three to back that up, or a reference to an actual peer-reviewed paper. Reading the back of comic books does not count.
The issue was not that "mainstream science" crushed down those noble researchers explorer "the bizarre". Contrary to popular myth, most scientists are delighted at the unexpected discovery of new phenomena, even if they pose a threat to established theory. But there are rules that have been evolved, over several centuries of painstaking effort, to give us some hope of knowing the validity of claims -- which is the root of all scientific progress.
Some of these rules involve repeatability (which even Pons and Fleischmann, with their own equipment, could not reliably achieve), open publication, peer review, and so on. The original researchers and their rabid fans felt that the process of science slowed them down too much, so they ignored that process. They were doomned not by the "hostility" of "the establishment", but by the failure of other labs to reproduce their results in any significant and reliable manner.
If honest, peer-reviewed work shows excess heat, it will be an interesting and possibly tremendous discovery. But Pons and Fleischmann will remains just as wrong.
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? It doesn't matter if it's a nuclear effect "in your mind". Your mind doesn't enter into it. Neither does Pons or Fleischmann's minds. What matters is whether nuclear fusion is actually occurring, and that is to be settled by experiment.
Pons and Fleischmann might have seen a real effect. Certainly, carefully-constructed experiments have consistently given hints of excess heat. But that doesn't make them "right". Lucretius wrote about "atoms" centuries before Dalton. That doesn't mean the ancient Greeks invented modern chemistry.
Pons and Fleischmann violated just about every tenet of the open, peer-reviewed scientific process. In so doing they abandoned any claim to legitimacy. If this effect turns out to be real, they didn't "get it right". They just got lucky. And if this effect turns out to be real, it will be the paintstaking, not-by-press-conference slow work of real researchers who understand how science works, that will ironically provide actual justification.
Later in the same FAQ
Oh, I'd say it's pretty clear that even for live music, they expect their cut.
Why do you say that the Addams Family suffer from mental illness? Their approach sounds perfectly healthy to me.
Because it's worked so well giving, say, Middle Eastern potentates a say on how much you can afford... Actually, in all this high-faluting econo talk flying about, it's interesting that petroleum's action as a currency hasn't been raised.
Great question. That's why I, unlike many others here, am not willing to exclude economics as a science a priori. There are however feedback effects in economics that make it currently doubtful whether any model can be made simultaneously (a) complex enough to shed light on the operations of the economy while remaining (b) simple enough to avoid being swamped by social noise.
Or to put it another way: When an economic model fails, there is always some reason why -- some "freak occurence" -- that allows the model to not have failed. Or, more simply: It seems impossible, with the current state of economics (and economists!) to actually settle anything via experiment or observation.
And that's exactly why I'm opposed to total free-market capitalism and libertarianism... because the ultimate effect is to concentrate all of the wealth and all of the power into the hands of just a few.
Sure, governments can give you the same problem. But the failure of straight democracy is not the same as a proof for oligarchy.
Essentially no practicing scientist actually follows the hallowed "Scientific Method". Taken as a whole, the endeavor we call "science" more or less follows the method. The Scientific Method as quote in Wikipedia and in middle school textbooks throughout the land, is a comforting fiction.
The essence of science is the construction of falsifiable theories whose falseness can, in principle, be established by experiment (or observation of a large number of systems, which admits astrophysics and quantum mechanics into the club). The problem with economics, as a whole, is that the system studied is so complex and so ill-constrained, that it's hard to design experiments (or studies) that rise above the social noise.
You observe a statistically huge number of events and see if the distributions match the theory. Most philosophers of science will, implicitly at least, add "statistical observation" to "controlled experimentation" as the methods of science.
'Course, it's the application of physical law (as derived and tested on Earth) to the celestial realm that makes it into astrophysics and not astronomy. Astronomy is to astrophysics as taxonomy is to biology.
Ah, yes, because the Middle Ages are known for their robust, flexible, and growing economies... In fact, it was the inability of the old system to match the needs of the growing international economy that lead to the rise of international banking and credit -- long before even these "fiat currencies" sprang into existence.