So if you want a nation worth living in, and the adults won't fix their own (or their children's) self-destructive cycles, who do you suggest does fix it? The choice is rather limited. Ideally, education would solve this problem, but the British chef Jamie Oliver was kicked around when he suggested US schools educate kids on better food. So clearly the schools don't give a crap. If nobody is willing to actually OWN their responsibility, to the point where the nation suffers (loss of productivity = loss of revenue and loss of GDP, loss of mental function = loss of progress and loss of investment), then surely since the Government is for the people and doing nothing is against the people, the Government must step in.
I believe that it may be too late to avoid some Government intervention, but it should be as limited as possible and to target the root causes. Those root causes include crappy education and parental malpractrice. The former is going to be hard to fix, as Governments routinely treat education as something of a dirty word. The latter is next-to-impossible, as parents generally reserve the right to abuse their kids and resent any restrictions on the kind of abuse they can inflict. Even if these issues could be solved, the existing attitudes at high levels of authority are so perverted and degenerate that they're rarely capable of actually "fixing" anything without making it worse. However, if the options are death-by-fat for an entire nation vs. videogame-lifesupport, the lifesupport makes better sense.
The Beast is sent to Hell, after the first battle, but only for a little while. It then returns until defeated in a second battle. Only then is it chained to Hell for all eternity. So this is clearly the rising of The Beast. The second battle sounds worse than the first, so expect it to take many years. However, IIRC, the tribulations (such as a plague of license fees) only apply to the first battle. The second is merely all-out anarchic war.
Shows how much you read what I wrote. I never said I disliked him, or that I disliked people who act like jerks, I never even assumed that other people disliked him or disliked those who acted like jerks.
I merely stated that it is a known fact that certain personalities will get convicted whether they are innocent or guilty, and that if this is truly a problem, then it is a problem that needs to be treated and not punished. Geek Syndrome is not a crime, although it is treated as such.
Re:This is a really really really bad precedent...
on
Terry Childs Found Guilty
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Of course you are. NDAs can last 5+ years, classified information remains classified for 50+ years, and networking between bosses on the golf course lasts forever. These are utterly unavoidable, which is why I believe corporations and governments should have obligations at least as stringent. It has to be symmetrical, or a damn good approximation. (Which is why I believe unions - if implemented and run correctly and fairly - are also essential. "Employment at will" does not exist in reality. What exists is employment at the employer's whim. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave - until the boss says so. Irritate the wrong boss, and you'll never work in that town, city, State or Country again, because that's how networking works at the upper levels. This makes it impossible to switch jobs, save by your boss' consent. The system is feudal and peons have no say in feudal systems. Peons will get walked over, and there is nothing they can do to stop it, no matter what "employment at will" rights they think they have.)
In office politics, the "right thing" is not what the book says, it's what the paymaster says. The Golden Rule: Whosoever Has The Gold Makes The Rules.
It was very probably being a jerk that got him convicted - people are much more likely to convict the headstrong than the guilty. I don't know if he really was guilty of anything, I've not really examined the evidence, but it's a well-documented psychological flaw of individuals that looks and personalities have a far far greater bearing on who is convicted than the actual evidence itself. There is no fix for this bug that is not worse than the bug itself.
Even if he were guilty, his real "crime" would be being a little too uptight, perhaps being an a-hole a little too often, and maybe being a little obnoxious. Note that these are only true if he actually is guilty of something. I fail to see how a purely punitive system is going to be useful in correcting these issues, which are not uncommon amongst those with Geek Syndrome (aka Asperger's). In the same way drunk drivers are sometimes ordered to attend AA meetings, the most suitable punishment (again IF he is guilty) would be to require him to attend an Asperger's group and/or get checked-out by a pdoc for some sort of treatment regimen. (Asperger's is not, technically, treatable but CAN aggravate other problems that are.) This would be cheaper than prison, by a LONG way, be far more likely to be effective, AND would be more likely to increase his value to society (whereas prison rots skills and therefore decreases value).
Which is a point that has not escaped the fringes who believe that Satanists are either attempting to seize control of the Vatican or have already done so.
To me, it's less important as to whether there is a God or a Satan than it is that people believe there are. That's how religious violence starts, and there's no shortage of that in the world right now. With many extremists sects in the US already believing that the Pope is the Antichrist, this could really fan the flames.
Is actual open violence likely? I'm going to say that it's probably not, at least for now. The problem is that the Vatican's attitude is pure, high-grade food for the delusions of the paranoid and the schizophrenic.
In my mind, that is the worst thing they could be doing. Everyone has bad press, once in a while. If the situation is actually dealt with, it blows over and everyone latches onto the next fiasco. If it's allowed to fester and worsen, it can become exceedingly nasty.
It's Internet transparency that has been uncovering and unraveling the abuse scandal that has brought on a crisis within the Catholic Church. Although I'd be hard-pressed to say I was "shocked" that the Pope has no apparent interest in uncovering a network of evil, horror and corruption within the Church, I can and will say that I am disappointed. This was his golden opportunity to both prove to the world the relevance of the Church (through active demonstration) and to prove that fears (inspired by books like "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", "The Da Vinci Code", etc, and by right-wing Baptist loonies) that the Church was an active participant in satanic activities was crud. Instead, he's chosen a path of reinforcing the worst paranoias of the deluded, seemingly preferring the genuine dangers and very real threat of inflating religious extremist violence over and above having the Church fulfill its actual* mission. *Ok, purported. It's hard to say that peace, kindness and charity have anything to do with any actual mission the Church has performed these past 2,000 or so years.
Cops in the US can usually claim Sovereign Immunity. Which is one reason I dislike the concept so very much. (Even the Magna Carta had - in its original form - that sovereign immunity does not apply in cases of rights violation.)
I seriously doubt the cops will get punished, and quite possibly they'll never even have to stand trial. If there's an inquiry, it'll be internal and kept secret.
The problem is that, ever since the days of the Wild West, cops have seen themselves as absolute authorities with total power over the citizenry, the laws and the very facts of the case.
Not really. Because the dishes were handled in unrecorded ways (the biologists discounted the importance of such things, which is why you had contamination) and because the biologists did not record any information abut what they detected, knowing that milk could get mould spots would tell others nothing new.
Yes, there may well be an interesting signal there, which is why the original signal MUST be preserved. However, because the conditions of data collecting would have focused around the data of interest, there will be little/no information on conditions relating to any additional signal.
Where the data conflicts with the conclusion (such as engineers looking at sensor data rather than timestamps and thus drawing false conclusions* because of inaccurate interpretation), referees MUST have the capacity to detect the flaw and be able to block false conclusions.
*An engineer assuming that the space probes were on the correct trajectory because they shouldn't be anywhere else would be concluding something other than what the data says. In this case, it is less a matter of extracting new data and more a case of preventing the willfully-invalid abuse of the data to make a false claim.
Interesting signals will almost certainly be in the data, and should be available to those studying the archaeology of science. Absolutely. However, there is one special case I didn't cover and you alluded to:- where data mining is more practical than data replication.
It's hard to build a new LHC, and the Square Kilometer Array telescope will be a one-of-a-kind. Firing a probe into Halley's Comet's tail won't be possible again for another few decades. There are less extreme, but also difficult to replicate, environments. In these cases, the usual rules need to be bent. It may be possible to produce a similar experiment, but it is not possible to control conditions enough to make an identical experiment (within the bounds of normal experimental error).
Even then, the LHC costs a lot to run, as do many other high-end labs. Daresbury Laboratory, over in England, is permanently in danger of closure despite having some staggering facilities and some amazingly bright minds.*
*Yes, I did work for them once.
As a result, there will be some experiments which churn up the unexpected but will never be repeated. The raw data should be exposed in full, immediately, the moment it is known that the experiment is of this kind. It's a one-off, there's no point in waiting for someone to reproduce the results, but there's valuable information there.
There will also be experiments which are reproduced but where some element of what is classed as noise is ALSO reproduced. This data, together with sufficient technological information to test if the noise is created by the experiment itself, should ALSO be released. In this case, the data should include all runs in which the excess data is reproduced.
(Noise is random, so if it were noise, it would not be replicated. Thus, it's something else.)
But these are all very special cases, not the general rule. I have nothing against specific conditions which trigger a full disclosure of all data, and strongly recommend it. But it should not be the general rule as there'd be too much data (leading to an unmineable flood) and too little new experimentation.
Indeed, within the special cases I've listed or anything scientifically/academically comparable in circumstance or nature, I would argue immediate full disclosure should be mandatory.
In all other cases, a sensible, SHORT delay should be introduced prior to full disclosure - long enough for other branches of science to be able to understand mundane causes for extraneous data, thus allowing superior cleaning of the data prior to mining.
But note especially I do not believe that the release of such data should be prohibited, merely that until the means exists to usefully process it, it's a distraction and not a help. I believe that in such cases, the partial or full release of lab notes
*laughs hysterically at the strawman comparison between preventing people from copying data and saying there is no added value to it - I've not seen anything so deluded since I last visited K5!*
*looks at your 7-digit UID. Ah, a newbie. That explains it.*
Because the BBC isn't a theorum. On the other hand, the BBC funded the development of the Dirac codec. You =DO= use Dirac, don't you? No? Then don't complain about what the BBC does or does not provide.
Examining old data has one value and one value alone - verifying that the claim made for the data matches up with the data. It does not verify that the data is ok, or that the experiment is valid, but only that the conclusions match up with the data. This is something I'd totally approve of for refereeing papers, rather than the standard routine skim-through. Referees aren't glorified spell-checkers and should be given sufficient information to confirm that the paper is self-consistent.
Access to historic data (data in excess of, say, 25-30 years old) might be interesting - less from the perspective of the scientific discipline and more from the perspective of historians and those studying the way science is done.
Access to raw data for any other reason is pointless.
If decisions needed to be well-reasoned, virtually no politicians, journalists, CEOs or financial executives would be permitted within a mile of their workplace, advertising in its current form would be outlawed, and the Sci Fi channel would be showing Doctor Who.
According to "Meteorite Men", the Geek version of Home Shopping Network, meteorite fragments are worth $20/gram as a basic value. If you get a big piece that has shape to it, you could expect more. Multiple fragments that fit together (where it fragmented in the atmosphere, not from a hammer) would also logically fetch more, as would rare types.
First, I said "long-term", so your qualifier of "long periods of time" is already taken into consideration.
Secondly, I noted elsewhere that mutations can have multiple traits where the result is both good AND bad, where it is the net good/bad which matters, not the presence of the bad in and of itself. This takes care of your sickle cell mutation example.
Although I greatly appreciate additions/corrections to any post I make, I would ask that the post be read first. Your objections are merely restatements of what it is you are objecting to, which means they cannot be objections at all, they can only be a lack of comprehension of what it is you thought you were objecting to.
Yes, I write lengthy posts, yes I use lots of qualifier, and there's a reason for that. Science isn't simple. Yes, the result is that my posts do require a greater reading age than (a) most other posts on Slashdot, and (b) most reading matter at Oxford or MIT.
Please do read, please do criticize (where appropriate), but above all, please make sure you understand what you've read before criticizing.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you want a nation worth living in, and the adults won't fix their own (or their children's) self-destructive cycles, who do you suggest does fix it? The choice is rather limited. Ideally, education would solve this problem, but the British chef Jamie Oliver was kicked around when he suggested US schools educate kids on better food. So clearly the schools don't give a crap. If nobody is willing to actually OWN their responsibility, to the point where the nation suffers (loss of productivity = loss of revenue and loss of GDP, loss of mental function = loss of progress and loss of investment), then surely since the Government is for the people and doing nothing is against the people, the Government must step in.
I believe that it may be too late to avoid some Government intervention, but it should be as limited as possible and to target the root causes. Those root causes include crappy education and parental malpractrice. The former is going to be hard to fix, as Governments routinely treat education as something of a dirty word. The latter is next-to-impossible, as parents generally reserve the right to abuse their kids and resent any restrictions on the kind of abuse they can inflict. Even if these issues could be solved, the existing attitudes at high levels of authority are so perverted and degenerate that they're rarely capable of actually "fixing" anything without making it worse. However, if the options are death-by-fat for an entire nation vs. videogame-lifesupport, the lifesupport makes better sense.
Given how dirty the fight has been, I refuse to believe that "Soap" should be in the title. This is Sumo Mudwrestling.
I expect this to be on one of the lolcat family of sites. Please provide a link when you've created a suitable image.
Can you link to the appropriate Netcraft page for the victims of Lawyer-feeding?
The Beast is sent to Hell, after the first battle, but only for a little while. It then returns until defeated in a second battle. Only then is it chained to Hell for all eternity. So this is clearly the rising of The Beast. The second battle sounds worse than the first, so expect it to take many years. However, IIRC, the tribulations (such as a plague of license fees) only apply to the first battle. The second is merely all-out anarchic war.
...is it a formerly-functional volcano, it is usually one that has collapsed due to crumbling infrastructure.
Shows how much you read what I wrote. I never said I disliked him, or that I disliked people who act like jerks, I never even assumed that other people disliked him or disliked those who acted like jerks.
I merely stated that it is a known fact that certain personalities will get convicted whether they are innocent or guilty, and that if this is truly a problem, then it is a problem that needs to be treated and not punished. Geek Syndrome is not a crime, although it is treated as such.
Of course you are. NDAs can last 5+ years, classified information remains classified for 50+ years, and networking between bosses on the golf course lasts forever. These are utterly unavoidable, which is why I believe corporations and governments should have obligations at least as stringent. It has to be symmetrical, or a damn good approximation. (Which is why I believe unions - if implemented and run correctly and fairly - are also essential. "Employment at will" does not exist in reality. What exists is employment at the employer's whim. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave - until the boss says so. Irritate the wrong boss, and you'll never work in that town, city, State or Country again, because that's how networking works at the upper levels. This makes it impossible to switch jobs, save by your boss' consent. The system is feudal and peons have no say in feudal systems. Peons will get walked over, and there is nothing they can do to stop it, no matter what "employment at will" rights they think they have.)
In office politics, the "right thing" is not what the book says, it's what the paymaster says. The Golden Rule: Whosoever Has The Gold Makes The Rules.
It was very probably being a jerk that got him convicted - people are much more likely to convict the headstrong than the guilty. I don't know if he really was guilty of anything, I've not really examined the evidence, but it's a well-documented psychological flaw of individuals that looks and personalities have a far far greater bearing on who is convicted than the actual evidence itself. There is no fix for this bug that is not worse than the bug itself.
Even if he were guilty, his real "crime" would be being a little too uptight, perhaps being an a-hole a little too often, and maybe being a little obnoxious. Note that these are only true if he actually is guilty of something. I fail to see how a purely punitive system is going to be useful in correcting these issues, which are not uncommon amongst those with Geek Syndrome (aka Asperger's). In the same way drunk drivers are sometimes ordered to attend AA meetings, the most suitable punishment (again IF he is guilty) would be to require him to attend an Asperger's group and/or get checked-out by a pdoc for some sort of treatment regimen. (Asperger's is not, technically, treatable but CAN aggravate other problems that are.) This would be cheaper than prison, by a LONG way, be far more likely to be effective, AND would be more likely to increase his value to society (whereas prison rots skills and therefore decreases value).
Which is a point that has not escaped the fringes who believe that Satanists are either attempting to seize control of the Vatican or have already done so.
To me, it's less important as to whether there is a God or a Satan than it is that people believe there are. That's how religious violence starts, and there's no shortage of that in the world right now. With many extremists sects in the US already believing that the Pope is the Antichrist, this could really fan the flames.
Is actual open violence likely? I'm going to say that it's probably not, at least for now. The problem is that the Vatican's attitude is pure, high-grade food for the delusions of the paranoid and the schizophrenic.
In my mind, that is the worst thing they could be doing. Everyone has bad press, once in a while. If the situation is actually dealt with, it blows over and everyone latches onto the next fiasco. If it's allowed to fester and worsen, it can become exceedingly nasty.
It's Internet transparency that has been uncovering and unraveling the abuse scandal that has brought on a crisis within the Catholic Church. Although I'd be hard-pressed to say I was "shocked" that the Pope has no apparent interest in uncovering a network of evil, horror and corruption within the Church, I can and will say that I am disappointed. This was his golden opportunity to both prove to the world the relevance of the Church (through active demonstration) and to prove that fears (inspired by books like "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", "The Da Vinci Code", etc, and by right-wing Baptist loonies) that the Church was an active participant in satanic activities was crud. Instead, he's chosen a path of reinforcing the worst paranoias of the deluded, seemingly preferring the genuine dangers and very real threat of inflating religious extremist violence over and above having the Church fulfill its actual* mission. *Ok, purported. It's hard to say that peace, kindness and charity have anything to do with any actual mission the Church has performed these past 2,000 or so years.
Only if the topic veers into Scientology.
Partly because it's a tit-for-tat deal.
Cops in the US can usually claim Sovereign Immunity. Which is one reason I dislike the concept so very much. (Even the Magna Carta had - in its original form - that sovereign immunity does not apply in cases of rights violation.)
I seriously doubt the cops will get punished, and quite possibly they'll never even have to stand trial. If there's an inquiry, it'll be internal and kept secret.
The problem is that, ever since the days of the Wild West, cops have seen themselves as absolute authorities with total power over the citizenry, the laws and the very facts of the case.
Not really. Because the dishes were handled in unrecorded ways (the biologists discounted the importance of such things, which is why you had contamination) and because the biologists did not record any information abut what they detected, knowing that milk could get mould spots would tell others nothing new.
Yes, there may well be an interesting signal there, which is why the original signal MUST be preserved. However, because the conditions of data collecting would have focused around the data of interest, there will be little/no information on conditions relating to any additional signal.
Where the data conflicts with the conclusion (such as engineers looking at sensor data rather than timestamps and thus drawing false conclusions* because of inaccurate interpretation), referees MUST have the capacity to detect the flaw and be able to block false conclusions.
*An engineer assuming that the space probes were on the correct trajectory because they shouldn't be anywhere else would be concluding something other than what the data says. In this case, it is less a matter of extracting new data and more a case of preventing the willfully-invalid abuse of the data to make a false claim.
Interesting signals will almost certainly be in the data, and should be available to those studying the archaeology of science. Absolutely. However, there is one special case I didn't cover and you alluded to:- where data mining is more practical than data replication.
It's hard to build a new LHC, and the Square Kilometer Array telescope will be a one-of-a-kind. Firing a probe into Halley's Comet's tail won't be possible again for another few decades. There are less extreme, but also difficult to replicate, environments. In these cases, the usual rules need to be bent. It may be possible to produce a similar experiment, but it is not possible to control conditions enough to make an identical experiment (within the bounds of normal experimental error).
Even then, the LHC costs a lot to run, as do many other high-end labs. Daresbury Laboratory, over in England, is permanently in danger of closure despite having some staggering facilities and some amazingly bright minds.*
*Yes, I did work for them once.
As a result, there will be some experiments which churn up the unexpected but will never be repeated. The raw data should be exposed in full, immediately, the moment it is known that the experiment is of this kind. It's a one-off, there's no point in waiting for someone to reproduce the results, but there's valuable information there.
There will also be experiments which are reproduced but where some element of what is classed as noise is ALSO reproduced. This data, together with sufficient technological information to test if the noise is created by the experiment itself, should ALSO be released. In this case, the data should include all runs in which the excess data is reproduced.
(Noise is random, so if it were noise, it would not be replicated. Thus, it's something else.)
But these are all very special cases, not the general rule. I have nothing against specific conditions which trigger a full disclosure of all data, and strongly recommend it. But it should not be the general rule as there'd be too much data (leading to an unmineable flood) and too little new experimentation.
Indeed, within the special cases I've listed or anything scientifically/academically comparable in circumstance or nature, I would argue immediate full disclosure should be mandatory.
In all other cases, a sensible, SHORT delay should be introduced prior to full disclosure - long enough for other branches of science to be able to understand mundane causes for extraneous data, thus allowing superior cleaning of the data prior to mining.
But note especially I do not believe that the release of such data should be prohibited, merely that until the means exists to usefully process it, it's a distraction and not a help. I believe that in such cases, the partial or full release of lab notes
*laughs hysterically at the strawman comparison between preventing people from copying data and saying there is no added value to it - I've not seen anything so deluded since I last visited K5!*
*looks at your 7-digit UID. Ah, a newbie. That explains it.*
You're right. Nobody uses notebooks. Netbooks, yes, but notebooks are SOOO last decade.
Because the BBC isn't a theorum. On the other hand, the BBC funded the development of the Dirac codec. You =DO= use Dirac, don't you? No? Then don't complain about what the BBC does or does not provide.
Examining old data has one value and one value alone - verifying that the claim made for the data matches up with the data. It does not verify that the data is ok, or that the experiment is valid, but only that the conclusions match up with the data. This is something I'd totally approve of for refereeing papers, rather than the standard routine skim-through. Referees aren't glorified spell-checkers and should be given sufficient information to confirm that the paper is self-consistent.
Access to historic data (data in excess of, say, 25-30 years old) might be interesting - less from the perspective of the scientific discipline and more from the perspective of historians and those studying the way science is done.
Access to raw data for any other reason is pointless.
The City. Townsville. Where the Powerpuff girls live. You know.
If decisions needed to be well-reasoned, virtually no politicians, journalists, CEOs or financial executives would be permitted within a mile of their workplace, advertising in its current form would be outlawed, and the Sci Fi channel would be showing Doctor Who.
It landed, but was towed away for not having a parking permit.
According to "Meteorite Men", the Geek version of Home Shopping Network, meteorite fragments are worth $20/gram as a basic value. If you get a big piece that has shape to it, you could expect more. Multiple fragments that fit together (where it fragmented in the atmosphere, not from a hammer) would also logically fetch more, as would rare types.
First, I said "long-term", so your qualifier of "long periods of time" is already taken into consideration.
Secondly, I noted elsewhere that mutations can have multiple traits where the result is both good AND bad, where it is the net good/bad which matters, not the presence of the bad in and of itself. This takes care of your sickle cell mutation example.
Although I greatly appreciate additions/corrections to any post I make, I would ask that the post be read first. Your objections are merely restatements of what it is you are objecting to, which means they cannot be objections at all, they can only be a lack of comprehension of what it is you thought you were objecting to.
Yes, I write lengthy posts, yes I use lots of qualifier, and there's a reason for that. Science isn't simple. Yes, the result is that my posts do require a greater reading age than (a) most other posts on Slashdot, and (b) most reading matter at Oxford or MIT.
Please do read, please do criticize (where appropriate), but above all, please make sure you understand what you've read before criticizing.