After that, you sue the city for relying on a database that they know is not correct. You sue the PD for false imprisonment. You sue the FBI for slander/libel. You sue the Justice Dept for allowing these idiots to ruin your standing in the community.
And watch all your suits get thrown out because the relevant info is not made available to the court, on the grounds that it would "impact national security" for the FBI to provide statistics on the reliability of the database...
Yes, which is why the scientist said that it would be significant if it's been going on for a century or so. That would be a 5% increase (actually more, due to the wonders of compound interest), which certainly would be important.
Remember that in the early eps Jadzia was dating the scientist with the transparent skull and the very large brain. Which does make you wonder what she saw in Worf....
Oh, come on. Just look at the cranial volume he had available...
A few pennies more won't make any difference to AdVal, why should they care? They'll just pass the cost onto their customers. Duh.
Wow, didn't pay attention in econ 101, did you? If they "pass it onto their customers", then they've reduced the value their customers see in spamming. If it costs enough -- and a 1 cent per message for, say, 500,000 messages, we're still talking $50,000 -- then the customers will stop sending the spam. Of course, these companies will eventually pass the cost onto the people who respond to spam (and who are they, anyway)? A few people willing to splurge will stop. Indeed, I suspect that the number of responses is a strong function of price, but I haven't seen data for that.
But you've got to recognize a few economic facts here:
Companies who hire spammers are generally operating on razor-thin margins.
Currently, the marginal cost for sending one extra spam message is very close to zero... probably in the millionth of a cent range. Ironically, this is what drives a spammer to send as many messages as possible.
Raising the marginal rate would make spamming less profitable, which would lead to there being less of it.
The only possible democracy that you can be thinking of has to be the Weimar Republic. That was the "imposed democracy" to which I referred, and it simply did not function. It began life as unstable; the instability grew until Hitler could get himself -- legally! appointed Chancellor, and thereupon he immediately ended the democracy.
The Weimar Republic was an attempt to graft democracy onto a population that was not clamoring for it and did not want it. It failed. Postwar Germany was an attempt to graft democracy onto a nation that had not demanded it. It worked. That's the irony and the riddle -- how to make post-war Iraq more like 1945 Germany and not like 1920 Germany.
Someone wrote today that you cannot force democracy, it has to grow out of the people.
That sounds nice. How do you explain the Germans and the Japanese, then? There were no home-grown democratic fronts in either, before Allied occupation.
Ironically, the Germans serve as examples for both when democracy can be imposed (de-Nazification) and when it cannot (Weimar Republic). In other words, the world is a complicated place and anyone who pretends it isn't, is lying or deluded.
The Second World War is still alive in peoples minds today, there are still reminders everywhere about what has happend. That is something the US doesn't have, never experienced, and that is where the US arrogance comes from.
I wish people would stop acting as if Europe "learned the lessons" of World War II and the US did not. It simply isn't true. What the Iraq tussle has made evidence is that Europe learned different lessons from WW II than the US. An awful lot of American diplomacy from 1945 forward can be read as our reaction to WW II, and the failures that led to it.
It might be that Europeans, faced with constant reminders of the scourge of war, have actually risen above their bloody past. But one could equally argue that the Europeans, traumatized by the constant reminders of war, are no longer about to think rationally about force. Which view is correct? It seems to depend on which camp you fall into. The fundamental difference seems to be this: Many Europeans feel that the use of force cannot be justified, ever. Many Americans feel that the world is not a civilized place.
There is arrogance in the European position every bit as much as in the American. That's the real failure here... neither side is listening anymore.
In this case, the western world has interfered in the middle east ever since we became "civilised", and now we are reaping the rewards for our actions.
Charles Martel might remind you that, in fact, the meddling has been mutual... the difference is, the West -- with guns and nationalism -- was able to do it more effectively. Maybe. (and maybe the difference is, the West is civilized enough to feel guilt over it.)
Really? The US made it pretty meaningful to Afghanistan, and have made it pretty meaningful to Libya, Grenada, Panama and others in the past.
Hmmm. I state that retaliation is meaningless to terrorist groups. You then "riposte" by naming a list of states against whom the US has initiated military force. What point, exactly, are you trying to make?
Sure, we ran the Taliban out of Afghanistan. It might even have shaken up some of the other states that support terrorism. But do you think it has seriously acted as a deterrent to al Queada? Why then do we keep hearing how they're close to their next attempt?
This is actually one of the exasperating points about this war: I believe that one simple reason Bush & co. have focused with laserlke intensity on Iraq is simply that Iraq is a state and can be targeted by the overwhelming military apparatus available to us. Bush wants to take on Iraq for the same reason why sports outweights academics at many schools: Because it's intellectually easy -- easy to tell if you're winning, easy to see what you're doing.
Fighting terrorism, on the other hand, is the proverbial long twilight struggle, requiring unconventional methods and holding out no clear-cut victory parade.
In Europe, we're all forced to understand that there are other cultures, and other ways of thinking. This expands the mind somewhat, and stops the narrow, blinkered view that your way is the only way.
Ah, yes, Europe -- known for centuries as the eden free of bloodshed...
Every person on earth knows that if a single nuke were launched from any rougue nation (like Iraq), they'd be vasprozed from the planet by every nuclear power that existed. They'd get only one shot.
Oh, don't be naive. It's not the use of a nuclear weapon that you have to worry about -- except by a terrorist group, against whom retaliation would be essentially meaningless. The concern about nations getting nukes is exactly that they will use them to blackmail their neighbors. Doubt it? Take a close look at our approach to N. Korea right now, which is entirely different due to the handful of nukes they already have.
As Theodore Roosevelt once said, it is even more important for the people of America to scrutinize their leader's actions of time of war than in time of peace.
Roosevelt also said something about carrying a big stick.
Yeah but remember, that was linked to walking softly. I don't think the President's diplomacy -- what little there was -- could be characterized as "walking softly". One wonders what happened to the promised "humnble" approach to foreign affairs...
but this is SCIENCE. The primary goal is to communicate current (or valid) concepts and ideas instead of those already obsolete.
That is almost the exact opposite of what the primary goal is. The goal is to teach students how scientitists think -- partly to produce new scientists and partly to give non-scientists the skills needed, as members of a technological democracy, to evaluate the claims of scientists. To do that, you need at least some idea of what was believed before and -- much more importantly -- why the view changed, and how it might change again.
The "current (or valid) concepts and ideas" are themselves possibly on their way to being "obsolete". Science is always undergoing worldview revolutions, as we advance our understanding and our instruments. It's a wonderful, vibrant, human endeavour. And it teaches us to be humble in our assertions. That's what the citizens of the 21st century will need to know.
And, if you are teaching about science, would you rather people remember the science and how the science fits together to describe something, or a bunch of life stories that have nothing to do with the science?
This is a false dichotomy. The point is -- and I am a high school physics teacher; assign your own weights to what I say -- the point is, current books utterly fail to teach science. They generally teach anti-science: Here is a collection of "facts". They have been known for 5000 years, after having fallen to Earth from who knows where. Humans don't discover these facts and heaven knows, there's no relationship among them. And of course, these facts never change.
But real science is a human endeavour. The story of how something is discovered does in fact influence what is discovered and how. Things we take as "fact" do change with time.
Pop quiz: How many self-proclaimed scientifically literate geeks out there think that dry friction is the result of velcro-like hook-and-ridge interactions, and that you spend energy raising the bumps of one surface past the valleys of the other? Bzzt. Sounded good twenty years ago -- isn't at all what we think friction is, today.
The facts are not irrelevant but they aren't all-important, either. And yes, it doesn help me to understand relativity to know that Einstein had trouble with authority in school -- it took an intellectual rebel to break out of the Euclidean box.
Wonder why so many people believe in crystals and angels and aromatherapy? Poor grounding in basic science, and an ignorance of the fundamentals.
and a habit of believing "arcane, obtuse language" == "truth"... said habit being established by textbooks that focus on technical jargon to the exclusion of actual content. I stress for my kids: They actually understand a lot of what they think gives them trouble. They just lack the formal language to say what they understand. By all means, include the jargon -- but don't pretend that learning the jargon is the same as learning the subject. Too many textbooks make that pretension.
Physics first, Chemistry second, Biology last. Then Physics again. Leave equation solving till later and for algebra class until they're grown up enough to understand what the concept of a model is.
Leave out the equations, and you won't be doing Physics first. Physics without the equations is sort of like Marine Science without the water. There might be a case to be made for some sort of Physical Science before Chemistry, but take out the math and nothing's left.
That's what makes Physics so exciting and so frustrating: It's not just another math course, but it requires all of the math course stuff.
There's more to it than just new rules. Einstein's formulation had implications about the universe that were different from what Newton had assumed.
Um, isn't that what is meant by "new rules"? Of course Einstein's whole worldview was different from Netwon's. But the parent post said it well: Einstein had access to a more complex observable universe than Newton. Newton's laws continue to hold extraordinarily well, for the regime in which they were derived.
That being a given, I dont believe your arguments against my post hold much water. A few mispellings, a couple gramatical errors, and whatnot, but aparently you got my point... so whats wit the bitching??
Hmmm. Comprehension is enough? Then aren't we dumbing down slashdot to the lowest common denominator, those who haven't grasped the basic skills of writing and grammar?
So why is this so very different from college textbooks
Don't delude yourself. A lot of college textbooks are crap, too. The main difference seems to be that there is an actual market in college books -- bad ones can sink quickly and good ones get established. Is it because only a few people write them? No. It's because use of a given text generally depends only on one person -- the prof teaching the course. If a books sucks (and the prof cares), then it drops from the required list. If enough profs agree it sucks -- even if they never talk to one another -- the book vanishes because no one buys it.
On the other hand, at lower levels, books are bought once every n years, with n usually 5 or more. So a bad textbook sticks around. Teachers get used to using it, aligning their plans with it, pacing by it, etc. So when time comes to change, they're often antsy about it. And of course, the decision is not made by the teacher at all (esp. in public school) but by yet a different committee for the whole state.
Hmmmm. Individual profs choosing --> individual authors --> better books. Committee of educators choosings --> committe of writers --> bad books. Maybe it's just a case of a species protecting its own.:)
Damn, the stuff they had to know back then would blow your mind. Most of it was more advanced than anything I came across in university.
Nah, I've come across those things from time to time. My mom, a retired public school teacher, loves to forward them to me. But look carefully: The things that those tests test are facts and memorization -- the of the skills that are needed today and tomorrow. Never compete against a machine at the task for which it was designed -- computers store information better than humans. Computers also do arithmetic better than humans. Being able to convert 12.3 bushels into pecks simply isn't a life skill anymore.
One of the real issues is, we don't know what skills are relevant, we don't know how to teach said skills, and we don't know how to evaluate the outcomes. As a current physics teacher, I can assure you it's something I'm thinking about all the time, and I feel I am making only incremental progress.
Those "1890 finals" point more about how our society's conceptions of knowledge have remained limited, than about how the schools are failing.
Isn't social interaction what you are supposed to be doing in real life? Why would you want to play a game of what you do in real life?
Yeah. It's almost as silly as programming physical sports (baseball, football) into the computer... oh, wait.
The point is, social games on the computer allow interaction of a different and varied type. Your question is something like, "I can buy real estate in real life -- why would I ever play Monopoly?"
One side effect of technology has often been the erosion of jobs.
Well, I think it can be argued that the actual effect is a redistribution of jobs... Old jobs are replaced by machines/automation/whatever but new jobs open up. Of course, the new jobs require more education, flexibility, etc...
The actual effect of technological progress, believe it or not, seems to be democratization. Not just political, though that tags along. Power is, amazingly, put in more and more hands. The best example is the gun, which ended strict feudal hierarchies by allowing any old peasant to blow a nasty whole in any bloke even with the bluest of blood. Nukes continue the same trend, as do bioweapons: It used to take a state and millions of people to devestate a nation; now a bunch of thugs can conceivably do it on their day off.
It's the downside of tech and the dark side of democracy, and we never talk about it -- but we had better start, soon.
Slashdot Mirror
And watch all your suits get thrown out because the relevant info is not made available to the court, on the grounds that it would "impact national security" for the FBI to provide statistics on the reliability of the database...
Yes, which is why the scientist said that it would be significant if it's been going on for a century or so. That would be a 5% increase (actually more, due to the wonders of compound interest), which certainly would be important.
Oh, come on. Just look at the cranial volume he had available...
Temporal Investigation Agent #2: The man was a menace!
(paraphrased)
Wow, didn't pay attention in econ 101, did you? If they "pass it onto their customers", then they've reduced the value their customers see in spamming. If it costs enough -- and a 1 cent per message for, say, 500,000 messages, we're still talking $50,000 -- then the customers will stop sending the spam. Of course, these companies will eventually pass the cost onto the people who respond to spam (and who are they, anyway)? A few people willing to splurge will stop. Indeed, I suspect that the number of responses is a strong function of price, but I haven't seen data for that.
But you've got to recognize a few economic facts here:
Companies who hire spammers are generally operating on razor-thin margins.
Currently, the marginal cost for sending one extra spam message is very close to zero ... probably in the millionth of a cent range. Ironically, this is what drives a spammer to send as many messages as possible.
Raising the marginal rate would make spamming less profitable, which would lead to there being less of it.
The only possible democracy that you can be thinking of has to be the Weimar Republic. That was the "imposed democracy" to which I referred, and it simply did not function. It began life as unstable; the instability grew until Hitler could get himself -- legally! appointed Chancellor, and thereupon he immediately ended the democracy.
The Weimar Republic was an attempt to graft democracy onto a population that was not clamoring for it and did not want it. It failed. Postwar Germany was an attempt to graft democracy onto a nation that had not demanded it. It worked. That's the irony and the riddle -- how to make post-war Iraq more like 1945 Germany and not like 1920 Germany.
That sounds nice. How do you explain the Germans and the Japanese, then? There were no home-grown democratic fronts in either, before Allied occupation.
Ironically, the Germans serve as examples for both when democracy can be imposed (de-Nazification) and when it cannot (Weimar Republic). In other words, the world is a complicated place and anyone who pretends it isn't, is lying or deluded.
I wish people would stop acting as if Europe "learned the lessons" of World War II and the US did not. It simply isn't true. What the Iraq tussle has made evidence is that Europe learned different lessons from WW II than the US. An awful lot of American diplomacy from 1945 forward can be read as our reaction to WW II, and the failures that led to it.
It might be that Europeans, faced with constant reminders of the scourge of war, have actually risen above their bloody past. But one could equally argue that the Europeans, traumatized by the constant reminders of war, are no longer about to think rationally about force. Which view is correct? It seems to depend on which camp you fall into.
The fundamental difference seems to be this: Many Europeans feel that the use of force cannot be justified, ever. Many Americans feel that the world is not a civilized place.
There is arrogance in the European position every bit as much as in the American. That's the real failure here... neither side is listening anymore.
Charles Martel might remind you that, in fact, the meddling has been mutual
Hmmm. I state that retaliation is meaningless to terrorist groups. You then "riposte" by naming a list of states against whom the US has initiated military force. What point, exactly, are you trying to make?
Sure, we ran the Taliban out of Afghanistan. It might even have shaken up some of the other states that support terrorism. But do you think it has seriously acted as a deterrent to al Queada? Why then do we keep hearing how they're close to their next attempt?
This is actually one of the exasperating points about this war: I believe that one simple reason Bush & co. have focused with laserlke intensity on Iraq is simply that Iraq is a state and can be targeted by the overwhelming military apparatus available to us. Bush wants to take on Iraq for the same reason why sports outweights academics at many schools: Because it's intellectually easy -- easy to tell if you're winning, easy to see what you're doing.
Fighting terrorism, on the other hand, is the proverbial long twilight struggle, requiring unconventional methods and holding out no clear-cut victory parade.
Ah, yes, Europe -- known for centuries as the eden free of bloodshed...
Oh, don't be naive. It's not the use of a nuclear weapon that you have to worry about -- except by a terrorist group, against whom retaliation would be essentially meaningless. The concern about nations getting nukes is exactly that they will use them to blackmail their neighbors. Doubt it? Take a close look at our approach to N. Korea right now, which is entirely different due to the handful of nukes they already have.
Yeah but remember, that was linked to walking softly. I don't think the President's diplomacy -- what little there was -- could be characterized as "walking softly". One wonders what happened to the promised "humnble" approach to foreign affairs...
"increasingly short". Sort like getting more less.
That is almost the exact opposite of what the primary goal is. The goal is to teach students how scientitists think -- partly to produce new scientists and partly to give non-scientists the skills needed, as members of a technological democracy, to evaluate the claims of scientists. To do that, you need at least some idea of what was believed before and -- much more importantly -- why the view changed, and how it might change again.
The "current (or valid) concepts and ideas" are themselves possibly on their way to being "obsolete". Science is always undergoing worldview revolutions, as we advance our understanding and our instruments. It's a wonderful, vibrant, human endeavour. And it teaches us to be humble in our assertions. That's what the citizens of the 21st century will need to know.
This is a false dichotomy. The point is -- and I am a high school physics teacher; assign your own weights to what I say -- the point is, current books utterly fail to teach science. They generally teach anti-science: Here is a collection of "facts". They have been known for 5000 years, after having fallen to Earth from who knows where. Humans don't discover these facts and heaven knows, there's no relationship among them. And of course, these facts never change.
But real science is a human endeavour. The story of how something is discovered does in fact influence what is discovered and how. Things we take as "fact" do change with time.
Pop quiz: How many self-proclaimed scientifically literate geeks out there think that dry friction is the result of velcro-like hook-and-ridge interactions, and that you spend energy raising the bumps of one surface past the valleys of the other? Bzzt. Sounded good twenty years ago -- isn't at all what we think friction is, today.
The facts are not irrelevant but they aren't all-important, either. And yes, it doesn help me to understand relativity to know that Einstein had trouble with authority in school -- it took an intellectual rebel to break out of the Euclidean box.
and a habit of believing "arcane, obtuse language" == "truth"
Blockquoth the poster:
Leave out the equations, and you won't be doing Physics first. Physics without the equations is sort of like Marine Science without the water. There might be a case to be made for some sort of Physical Science before Chemistry, but take out the math and nothing's left.
That's what makes Physics so exciting and so frustrating: It's not just another math course, but it requires all of the math course stuff.
Um, isn't that what is meant by "new rules"? Of course Einstein's whole worldview was different from Netwon's. But the parent post said it well: Einstein had access to a more complex observable universe than Newton. Newton's laws continue to hold extraordinarily well, for the regime in which they were derived.
Hmmm. Comprehension is enough? Then aren't we dumbing down slashdot to the lowest common denominator, those who haven't grasped the basic skills of writing and grammar?
Don't delude yourself. A lot of college textbooks are crap, too. The main difference seems to be that there is an actual market in college books -- bad ones can sink quickly and good ones get established. Is it because only a few people write them? No. It's because use of a given text generally depends only on one person -- the prof teaching the course. If a books sucks (and the prof cares), then it drops from the required list. If enough profs agree it sucks -- even if they never talk to one another -- the book vanishes because no one buys it.
On the other hand, at lower levels, books are bought once every n years, with n usually 5 or more. So a bad textbook sticks around. Teachers get used to using it, aligning their plans with it, pacing by it, etc. So when time comes to change, they're often antsy about it. And of course, the decision is not made by the teacher at all (esp. in public school) but by yet a different committee for the whole state.
Hmmmm. Individual profs choosing --> individual authors --> better books. Committee of educators choosings --> committe of writers --> bad books. Maybe it's just a case of a species protecting its own.
Nah, I've come across those things from time to time. My mom, a retired public school teacher, loves to forward them to me. But look carefully: The things that those tests test are facts and memorization -- the of the skills that are needed today and tomorrow. Never compete against a machine at the task for which it was designed -- computers store information better than humans. Computers also do arithmetic better than humans. Being able to convert 12.3 bushels into pecks simply isn't a life skill anymore.
One of the real issues is, we don't know what skills are relevant, we don't know how to teach said skills, and we don't know how to evaluate the outcomes. As a current physics teacher, I can assure you it's something I'm thinking about all the time, and I feel I am making only incremental progress.
Those "1890 finals" point more about how our society's conceptions of knowledge have remained limited, than about how the schools are failing.
Yeah. It's almost as silly as programming physical sports (baseball, football) into the computer... oh, wait.
The point is, social games on the computer allow interaction of a different and varied type. Your question is something like, "I can buy real estate in real life -- why would I ever play Monopoly?"
Well, I think it can be argued that the actual effect is a redistribution of jobs... Old jobs are replaced by machines/automation/whatever but new jobs open up. Of course, the new jobs require more education, flexibility, etc...
The actual effect of technological progress, believe it or not, seems to be democratization. Not just political, though that tags along. Power is, amazingly, put in more and more hands. The best example is the gun, which ended strict feudal hierarchies by allowing any old peasant to blow a nasty whole in any bloke even with the bluest of blood. Nukes continue the same trend, as do bioweapons: It used to take a state and millions of people to devestate a nation; now a bunch of thugs can conceivably do it on their day off.
It's the downside of tech and the dark side of democracy, and we never talk about it -- but we had better start, soon.
Just so long as we get to see more of Theora, er, Control