The problem is, even on a site like slashdot where you'd think theres a degree of scientific literacy you still find people who actually believe climate change is some sort of vast left wing conspiracy, when we actually know that its both real, and overwelmingly caused by human CO2 output.
Its not a debate in science but for some messed up reason its still a debate in the public. I can certainly understand why a lot of the scientific community is pretty fed up with having to deal with a nutbags flooding the real debates, namely how serious the problem is, and how to fix it, with deceptive or stupid denialist junk.
Theres an easy solution: Don't let the soldiers name their robots. No "Sending ol' joe out to examine the bomb" or anything like that. People will anthomorphize anything. Back in the 90s I was involved with some forest protection activism and one trick we'd do (for a while) is we'd get activists to go out, name a tree as their own "personal" friend and talk to it. It was a bit of psychology to get people emotionally involved with the campaign and it worked amazingly because they'd get angry when the logging started wanting to protect their:"friend".
We stopped however, because people would flip the fuck out when their tree was cut down, and in some cases people would get quite depressed. We decided that a lot of folks in activism are already high strung enough as it is (The suicide rate is phenomenal amongst activists) , the last thing we wanted was to go screwing passionate people up even further.
I suspect a similar psychology is working here. Once people name their robot and start attaching affectionate feelings towards it (after all a bomb disposal bot has probably saved their ass more than once, given enough time), then its going to mess them up. And one thing activists and soldiers have in common, its anxiety.
Yeah it def happens in australia. When John Howard was in, my sister worked in climate research, and the government was regularly threatening researchers that if their research kept demonstrating potential hazards from climate change funding could be pulled or worse. She was pretty much told "The official government line is climate change is not real, and if you scientists dont start conforming we'll pull your funding". When the press started getting involved and her collegues started recieving death threats from crazed climate denialists (Apparently science is some sort of "communist plot") she left the country to go work in the UK.
Similar things happened to a friend of the family in the 1980s who was researching the effects of forestry on the water table, and after a report he wrote warning that the water table was getting salty due to logging in the Karri forests, his report was officially censured and he was ordered not to tell anyone. He also resigned.
Incidently this is why I sometimes want to slap assholes who claim climate scientists are doctoring reports for grants. Nothing could be further from the reality. Scientists in Australia, the US, and UK all report recieving threats from politicians that if they dont "tone down" the reports they could lose funding. As a result I believe the situation we are in, and this is a belief privately held by many researchers, is a lot worse than the official models show.
Petition by American who have earned degrees in science fields including a few PhDs with an actual statement that the science is not solid with a short review of pertinent data - http://www.petitionproject.org/review_article.php
That is not even a remotely interesting. it ends in a conspiracy theory statement about some sort of shady UN conspiracy for "global taxation", cites an article from the "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" , a crank organization ran out of a back shed, that once actually featured a couple of members who did biomedicine, but since its found its notoriety in creationism and far right conspiracy theorizing. The site also claims the paper is peer reviewed. It isn't. And it wouldn't pass peer review either, it makes elementary errors that a high school student wouldnt make, let alone a real science-by-post-doctorates type paper.
Finally, almost all of the "scientists" (and ALL of the PhDs) that signed it are not even remotely qualified to give an expert answer in it.
If the site is can't even get fundamental stuff like that in order, why on earth quote it on slashdot.
Why would an "Aeronautical engineer" have an opinion anymore itneresting than, say, a computer programmer, or a dentist? Being "A scientist" doesnt mean jack shit if the qualification isn't relevant.
Believe me, we're trying. Problem is our own governments are behaving just as offensively.
its actually something that needs to go to the UN, but god damn if the UN aint a tool of the governments anyway.
I think the UN is probably the most vital institution on the planet. But what it needs to fix it is that its positions be voted for by the citizenry of the world. That would be a spectacular development.
Pirate my music, its out there to be enjoyed so do it, just don't sell it without asking me first, and please don't make copies of my shirts (The stuff that actually DOES put food on my table).
Considering Copyright isnt even supposed to be a criminal offence but a civil one in any SANE legal system, deploying military extra-judicial surveilance to police it is completely out of control.
Really , this shit has to stop and people need to start actually monstering their reps to let them know who actually is supposed to be in charge, US.
Yeah as someone who had the displeasure of having to erradicate my house of these horrifying bugs I picked up from a hotel (Seriously, it took nearly 6 months to finally be able to say they where gone. I have nightmares about those damn things and to this day I still have scars) , they do NOT just exist in one room. The little bastards spread as fast as they can and set up escape routes when sprayed.
Any hotel with bedbugs should be SHUT DOWN until a health department inspector can verify ALL of the bugs are gone, no ifs, no buts, mandatory shutdown. These things are a dangerous pandemic.
Why do we some how become ignorant to the point and continually forget if the authority or power is NOT EXPLICITLY granted to the Federal Government it doesn't exist.
Yeah sorry dude but there hasn't been a judge, founding father, legislator or even constitutional clause since foundation thats actually said this. This is a fantasy of the tea party whackys. In this case, it'd be nice if it was true, but the whole bit about the US turning into a violent bloodbath of roadless hospitaless mayhem would quickly spur the courts to realise prohibiting any natural function of government not specifically enumerated in the counstituion is a pretty screwed up idea and strike it down.
Yeah the difference between a depressed dumpster diving hipster and a depressed dumpster diving hobo is the hobo isn't getting sent a $1K a week by their beverly hill parents to spend on designer faux opshop clothing. My guess is the hipster is actually pretty pleased with his ridiculous beard, and the hobo just can't afford a nice shave.
Heh, though one rather clever one that I keep hitting, if you try to interact with it, claims your IP address has been blocked by the admin and supplies an address you can message for further information. I have a feeling it just dumps you into a spam list for sale or something.
That'd be wikipedia, and they WARNED you about posting goatse, buddy.
No the contract reverts to the state. you know that whole deal where someone dies, and the kids suddenly get slapped with some sort of horrible mortgage?
Thats whats going on there. (And its why you don't cut your kids out of your inheretence if you've got large debts. They'll still get the debt, and the church/boy-scouts/whatever will get the money to actually pay it effectively bankerupting your children.)
The difference is bitcoin is sold on Magic The Gathering Online Exchange (No seriously, thats actually what Mt Gox stands for lol) and WOW gold is sold on World Of Warcraft Online Exchange.
One is wizard money, the other is warlock money. One exploits gullible libertarians the other exploits poverty stricken chinese macro-miners
Obviously this doesn't apply to Bitcoin, since the intrinsic value of Bitcoins don't relate to the operation of an individual corporation. Additionally - Bitcoin is designed to be so independent that price fixing can't really occur - hence no need for the SEC.
The bitcoin market is incredibly malleable and fixable. If the major exchanges all decided the rate is going to be glued at $15 a bitcoin, it will fix at that point because buyers wount buy more expensive and sellers wont sell more cheaply.
But more to the point the fact that the guys on Something awful managed to accidently crash the market by running around shouting "SELL SELL SELL THE MARKET IS CRASHING" for a prank indicates that its a *very very* unstable and manipulatable market anyway.
In Australia, only transactions in AU dollars are regulated by the government - most foreign exchange transactions are not regulated (the exception being the retail cash exchange outlets - so that travellers don't get ripped off).
This is completely untrue. Foreign currency exchanges are regulated by the Banking act of 1959 and all its various updates since.
In fact we're probably more heavily regulated than most countries in the world, which is part of why our banks didnt shit themselves and die in the GFC.
Oh come on, this is the sort of conspiracy thinking that has lead to Bitcoin being a perpetual source of amusement to the less tinfoil inclined.
Its a federal courts simply following procedure now that Bitcoin has been declared a currency. If its a currency there are legislative requirements, and the courts are just ensuring that the Bitcoin brigade are following that legislation.
Considering bitcoins history of being an enabler of all sorts of messed up scams, bitcoin users should be celebrating this. The fed is getting involved and thats [i]a good thing[/i] to non paranoid schizophrenics.
"I disagree. I understand "supernatural" as one of the characteristics of "divine"."
So, no budhists (Well certain varieties, nothing did it), unitarians (Make no real claims either way, whoever you think did it), sikhs (The universe did it, and its reallly trippy guys), scientologists (Aliens did it) , raelians (Aliens did it) , Animists (The earth did it) then?
I think part of what made django/rails/etc the sorts of frameworks that J2EE/etc SHOULD have been is their ability to utilize the dynamicness that the duck typing in python/ruby/etc provides that traditionally wasnt available or appropriate to javas striict typedness. I believe modern java has been addressing that, which is good because duck typing in the dynamic languages (python/ruby/etc) , whilst superior to PHP/Javascripts broken ass loose typing, still has a few traps that can be fallen into without religious linting and unit testing. Things might change, or they might not. Who knows!
The chest beating about Java vs C is kinda sad. Look, I've spent the past 20 years hating java with the fire of a 1000 suns, but having been kinda forced to use it lately I've realised its actually not a bad language, in fact its quite neat and well thought out (But god help me, somehow its date handling is even more broken than javascript)
The problem is all the verbose cruft that goes with it. The giant overly complicated frameworks that require configuring 50 different XML files fed through a labrynith undocumented build process that allows you to write terse and insane pattern-madness code....or alternatively just fire up JDBC and write a bloody SQL query instead.
I think JAVA could shine if people just threw out about 15 years of insane and overly complicated frameworks and took some tips from the python and perl people and replace them with some simple but effective libraries that do one thing and do it well.
Yeah islam actually uses both the old and new testamant (Islam is in a strange way an offshoot of christianity, in that it has jesus as the messiah, etc).
Well you know all those weird little laws people love to gasp about with islam? They are in the bible too, right down to pork bans, silly hats, long fasts and everything.
And for the most part the sillier ones traditionally got about as much attention as we gave them in christianity. Except for the fact a bunch of fundie jerks got control over some countries and started enforcing the silly laws. But you know the worst part? Most of those fundie jerks are only in power thanks to meddling by western oil powers. Iranians being the exception (Shia has its own type of whackiness)
To be honest, I sort of softened on ruby on rails after being forced to endure a project on it, and must to my teeth-grinding resentment, actually found it a decent and productive environment (Although I'd say Django more so because of its relative lack of magic, and hey who doesn't enjoy screwing around with python).
Now don't get me started on javascript on the server and NoSQL systems. Somewhere between "lets call ourselves amazing because we got a god damn web browser script environment to implement a pattern that was considered dubious 20 years ago" and "Fuck integrity shits faster in memory also lets just forget 40 years of database academia and make a HTML5 slideshow instead", you can see where my greying heckles start to rise.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, even on a site like slashdot where you'd think theres a degree of scientific literacy you still find people who actually believe climate change is some sort of vast left wing conspiracy, when we actually know that its both real, and overwelmingly caused by human CO2 output.
Its not a debate in science but for some messed up reason its still a debate in the public. I can certainly understand why a lot of the scientific community is pretty fed up with having to deal with a nutbags flooding the real debates, namely how serious the problem is, and how to fix it, with deceptive or stupid denialist junk.
Theres an easy solution: Don't let the soldiers name their robots. No "Sending ol' joe out to examine the bomb" or anything like that. People will anthomorphize anything. Back in the 90s I was involved with some forest protection activism and one trick we'd do (for a while) is we'd get activists to go out, name a tree as their own "personal" friend and talk to it. It was a bit of psychology to get people emotionally involved with the campaign and it worked amazingly because they'd get angry when the logging started wanting to protect their :"friend".
We stopped however, because people would flip the fuck out when their tree was cut down, and in some cases people would get quite depressed. We decided that a lot of folks in activism are already high strung enough as it is (The suicide rate is phenomenal amongst activists) , the last thing we wanted was to go screwing passionate people up even further.
I suspect a similar psychology is working here. Once people name their robot and start attaching affectionate feelings towards it (after all a bomb disposal bot has probably saved their ass more than once, given enough time), then its going to mess them up. And one thing activists and soldiers have in common, its anxiety.
Yeah it def happens in australia. When John Howard was in, my sister worked in climate research, and the government was regularly threatening researchers that if their research kept demonstrating potential hazards from climate change funding could be pulled or worse. She was pretty much told "The official government line is climate change is not real, and if you scientists dont start conforming we'll pull your funding". When the press started getting involved and her collegues started recieving death threats from crazed climate denialists (Apparently science is some sort of "communist plot") she left the country to go work in the UK.
Similar things happened to a friend of the family in the 1980s who was researching the effects of forestry on the water table, and after a report he wrote warning that the water table was getting salty due to logging in the Karri forests, his report was officially censured and he was ordered not to tell anyone. He also resigned.
Incidently this is why I sometimes want to slap assholes who claim climate scientists are doctoring reports for grants. Nothing could be further from the reality. Scientists in Australia, the US, and UK all report recieving threats from politicians that if they dont "tone down" the reports they could lose funding. As a result I believe the situation we are in, and this is a belief privately held by many researchers, is a lot worse than the official models show.
Petition by American who have earned degrees in science fields including a few PhDs with an actual statement that the science is not solid with a short review of pertinent data - http://www.petitionproject.org/review_article.php
That is not even a remotely interesting. it ends in a conspiracy theory statement about some sort of shady UN conspiracy for "global taxation", cites an article from the "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" , a crank organization ran out of a back shed, that once actually featured a couple of members who did biomedicine, but since its found its notoriety in creationism and far right conspiracy theorizing. The site also claims the paper is peer reviewed. It isn't. And it wouldn't pass peer review either, it makes elementary errors that a high school student wouldnt make, let alone a real science-by-post-doctorates type paper.
Finally, almost all of the "scientists" (and ALL of the PhDs) that signed it are not even remotely qualified to give an expert answer in it.
If the site is can't even get fundamental stuff like that in order, why on earth quote it on slashdot.
Which brings me to this....
An Aeronautical Engineer's look at global warming (and yes he has earned his chops in that arena) - http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf
Why would an "Aeronautical engineer" have an opinion anymore itneresting than, say, a computer programmer, or a dentist? Being "A scientist" doesnt mean jack shit if the qualification isn't relevant.
Believe me, we're trying. Problem is our own governments are behaving just as offensively.
its actually something that needs to go to the UN, but god damn if the UN aint a tool of the governments anyway.
I think the UN is probably the most vital institution on the planet. But what it needs to fix it is that its positions be voted for by the citizenry of the world. That would be a spectacular development.
Artist checking in.
Pirate my music, its out there to be enjoyed so do it, just don't sell it without asking me first, and please don't make copies of my shirts (The stuff that actually DOES put food on my table).
Considering Copyright isnt even supposed to be a criminal offence but a civil one in any SANE legal system, deploying military extra-judicial surveilance to police it is completely out of control.
Really , this shit has to stop and people need to start actually monstering their reps to let them know who actually is supposed to be in charge, US.
Yeah as someone who had the displeasure of having to erradicate my house of these horrifying bugs I picked up from a hotel (Seriously, it took nearly 6 months to finally be able to say they where gone. I have nightmares about those damn things and to this day I still have scars) , they do NOT just exist in one room. The little bastards spread as fast as they can and set up escape routes when sprayed.
Any hotel with bedbugs should be SHUT DOWN until a health department inspector can verify ALL of the bugs are gone, no ifs, no buts, mandatory shutdown. These things are a dangerous pandemic.
Why do we some how become ignorant to the point and continually forget if the authority or power is NOT EXPLICITLY granted to the Federal Government it doesn't exist.
Yeah sorry dude but there hasn't been a judge, founding father, legislator or even constitutional clause since foundation thats actually said this. This is a fantasy of the tea party whackys. In this case, it'd be nice if it was true, but the whole bit about the US turning into a violent bloodbath of roadless hospitaless mayhem would quickly spur the courts to realise prohibiting any natural function of government not specifically enumerated in the counstituion is a pretty screwed up idea and strike it down.
Yeah the difference between a depressed dumpster diving hipster and a depressed dumpster diving hobo is the hobo isn't getting sent a $1K a week by their beverly hill parents to spend on designer faux opshop clothing.
My guess is the hipster is actually pretty pleased with his ridiculous beard, and the hobo just can't afford a nice shave.
That'd be wikipedia, and they WARNED you about posting goatse, buddy.
Mining gold vs mining bitcoins , the Most ronpaul debate ever lol
Yes because clearly punishing innocent consumers is the right way to go about ethical corporate behaviors
No the contract reverts to the state. you know that whole deal where someone dies, and the kids suddenly get slapped with some sort of horrible mortgage?
Thats whats going on there. (And its why you don't cut your kids out of your inheretence if you've got large debts. They'll still get the debt, and the church/boy-scouts/whatever will get the money to actually pay it effectively bankerupting your children.)
The difference is bitcoin is sold on Magic The Gathering Online Exchange (No seriously, thats actually what Mt Gox stands for lol) and WOW gold is sold on World Of Warcraft Online Exchange.
One is wizard money, the other is warlock money. One exploits gullible libertarians the other exploits poverty stricken chinese macro-miners
The bitcoin market is incredibly malleable and fixable. If the major exchanges all decided the rate is going to be glued at $15 a bitcoin, it will fix at that point because buyers wount buy more expensive and sellers wont sell more cheaply.
But more to the point the fact that the guys on Something awful managed to accidently crash the market by running around shouting "SELL SELL SELL THE MARKET IS CRASHING" for a prank indicates that its a *very very* unstable and manipulatable market anyway.
This is completely untrue. Foreign currency exchanges are regulated by the Banking act of 1959 and all its various updates since.
In fact we're probably more heavily regulated than most countries in the world, which is part of why our banks didnt shit themselves and die in the GFC.
Oh come on, this is the sort of conspiracy thinking that has lead to Bitcoin being a perpetual source of amusement to the less tinfoil inclined.
Its a federal courts simply following procedure now that Bitcoin has been declared a currency. If its a currency there are legislative requirements, and the courts are just ensuring that the Bitcoin brigade are following that legislation.
Considering bitcoins history of being an enabler of all sorts of messed up scams, bitcoin users should be celebrating this. The fed is getting involved and thats [i]a good thing[/i] to non paranoid schizophrenics.
"I disagree. I understand "supernatural" as one of the characteristics of "divine"."
So, no budhists (Well certain varieties, nothing did it), unitarians (Make no real claims either way, whoever you think did it), sikhs (The universe did it, and its reallly trippy guys), scientologists (Aliens did it) , raelians (Aliens did it) , Animists (The earth did it) then?
THE SINISTER LIBERAL* AGENDA FOR FASTER INTERNET
(*Opposed by the Liberal party because our toilets go backwards in australia and conservatives are liberals here.)
I think part of what made django/rails/etc the sorts of frameworks that J2EE/etc SHOULD have been is their ability to utilize the dynamicness that the duck typing in python/ruby/etc provides that traditionally wasnt available or appropriate to javas striict typedness. I believe modern java has been addressing that, which is good because duck typing in the dynamic languages (python/ruby/etc) , whilst superior to PHP/Javascripts broken ass loose typing, still has a few traps that can be fallen into without religious linting and unit testing. Things might change, or they might not. Who knows!
Because I have a job and don't always get to choose what junk senior management decides to inflict on the developers.
The chest beating about Java vs C is kinda sad. Look, I've spent the past 20 years hating java with the fire of a 1000 suns, but having been kinda forced to use it lately I've realised its actually not a bad language, in fact its quite neat and well thought out (But god help me, somehow its date handling is even more broken than javascript)
The problem is all the verbose cruft that goes with it. The giant overly complicated frameworks that require configuring 50 different XML files fed through a labrynith undocumented build process that allows you to write terse and insane pattern-madness code ....or alternatively just fire up JDBC and write a bloody SQL query instead.
I think JAVA could shine if people just threw out about 15 years of insane and overly complicated frameworks and took some tips from the python and perl people and replace them with some simple but effective libraries that do one thing and do it well.
But hey, at least its not bloody javascript!
Yeah islam actually uses both the old and new testamant (Islam is in a strange way an offshoot of christianity, in that it has jesus as the messiah, etc).
Well you know all those weird little laws people love to gasp about with islam? They are in the bible too, right down to pork bans, silly hats, long fasts and everything.
And for the most part the sillier ones traditionally got about as much attention as we gave them in christianity. Except for the fact a bunch of fundie jerks got control over some countries and started enforcing the silly laws. But you know the worst part? Most of those fundie jerks are only in power thanks to meddling by western oil powers. Iranians being the exception (Shia has its own type of whackiness)
To be honest, I sort of softened on ruby on rails after being forced to endure a project on it, and must to my teeth-grinding resentment, actually found it a decent and productive environment (Although I'd say Django more so because of its relative lack of magic, and hey who doesn't enjoy screwing around with python).
Now don't get me started on javascript on the server and NoSQL systems. Somewhere between "lets call ourselves amazing because we got a god damn web browser script environment to implement a pattern that was considered dubious 20 years ago" and "Fuck integrity shits faster in memory also lets just forget 40 years of database academia and make a HTML5 slideshow instead", you can see where my greying heckles start to rise.