The OP's kid is 6. A 6-year-old shouldn't be spending a lot of time in front of a screen. Period. Send him outside to play with toy trucks in the dirt, preferably with other 6-year-olds. If the kid is only spending a small amount of time in front of a screen, then there's no problem, because Mom and Dad can provide appropriate supervision.
I have two daughters who are older than the OP's kid. I don't really care if they read things or see pictures on the web that have to do with deeply disturbing subjects like masturbation or Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech. Similarly, when we go to the public library I don't care if they read books with disturbing ideas in them. Disturbing is good. They can think for themselves. The issue we've worked on harder with them is how to avoid online sexual predators, and that's pretty easy to handle. They just know that they're not supposed to give their real names, etc., online.
The WP article describes a ton of problems with SafeSearch. IMO these problems are probably intrinsically hard to solve. I'm sure incremental improvements could be made, but they would be *expensive* to make, because, e.g., they would require more human input. What is Google's economic incentive to spend that money? They're in the advertising business. I suppose their incentive to spend the money would be to make people feel that it was "safer" to let their small children surf the web without parental involvement, thereby increasing the number of 6-year-olds who click through on ads for Froot Loops. Yes, there is a lot of money involved in advertising to kids, but it seems implausible to me that money spent on improving SafeSearch would give a net increase in Google's bottom line.
My university has hotspots just like any wireless service. You can connect to it with whatever OS or device you like. They don't support Linux directly, but they certainly don't block it from the network.
Ditto at the school where I teach. People these days (including administrators) expect to be able to connect to wifi with all kinds of handheld devices, including Android. IT does claim authority over who's allowed to connect what device to an ethernet socket, but in reality they are reasonably flexible with employees who want to do that. They provide cables sticking out of the lecturer's podium specifically so that a professor can hook up a laptop to the wired network and the classroom's projector, so it wouldn't make much sense to claim that there's some inherent problem with hooking up people's computers to the wired network. They do have legitimate concerns about having infected windows boxes on their network.
A whistleblower at the NSA told the press about mismanagement that led to massive waste of tax money. He never disclosed any secrets to the press. He was prosecuted under a law meant to apply to spies who worked for foreign governments, with penalties that could have meant spending the rest of his life in jail.
Thanks for posting that link. I was upset as hell after reading it last week. Anyone who doesn't fully understand the gravity of this case should read the whole thing.
This ruling partially restores my hope that the US will return to the rule of law and respect for the bill of rights.
Well, the thing is that voluntary taxes don't really work, as no-one pays them. So you do need to compel people to pay them. Some of these taxes will inevitably be used for ideas one or more people don't agree with. I, personally, don't like the idea that my taxes helped fund the Iraq and Afghanistan clusterfucks. But unless you abandon the idea of wider society and government entirely, you have to have taxes and people have to pay them.
Sure, those are valid points, and I agree with you about needing to break the US's dysfunctional habit of getting into wars in the Middle East (five within recent years, since I consider Pakistan to be a war). But if Stallman's idea, which he proposed for Brazil, were applied in the US, it would certainly represent an extremely radical change in the role of government in this country. The reason the founders put freedom of the press in the bill of rights was that they distrusted governmental power over written expression. Socializing the entire publishing industry would mean granting the government massive power over a huge sector of society. I can't believe that the government would refrain from misusing that power. For example, there are surely books out there advocating man-boy sex or glorifying Al Qaeda's struggle against the US. Do you really believe that Senator Holyroller from Mississippi would allow tax money to subsidize those books? (Under Stallman's proposal, they'd actually be subsidized out of proportion to their popularity, since he proposes subsidies proportional to the cube root of popularity.) Hell, no. Senator Holyroller would introduce legislation cutting off the flow of subsidies to the authors of such objectionable material. So now that the publishing industry has been 100% nationalized, where do the authors of books expressing unpopular views go in order to make a buck for their work? There's no place for them to go. They're locked out of commercial publishing completely, because commercial publishing has been made into a government monopoly.
The slashdot summary contains a total non sequitur: His suggested remedy? Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or "designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments". The part about "His suggested remedy?" implies, incorrectly, that Stallman is suggesting the tax idea as a solution to the DRM problem. Actually there is no logical connection between them, and Stallman hasn't suggested there is. If you want to see what Stallman actually said, here is his analysis of the DRM issue, and here is his proposal about taxes.
I hadn't realized until today that Stallman was politically so far to the left. I assume that I didn't know that for so long because he has tried to keep his left-wing orientation about government and capitalism separate from his libertarian approach to civil liberties and freedom of speech. There are a lot of people in the computer/internet world who are vaguely libertarian, and there's no point in alienating them gratuitously when they actually have common ground. It does, however, seem to me like there's somewhat of a philosophical contradiction between the voluntaristic approach he usually pushes (don't buy products that aren't free-as-in-speech, etc.) and the idea of compelling individuals to pay taxes in order to support ideas that they don't agree with.
I think they did put in a bit more effort than that. low level EMF radiation is not a trivial issue. And if you read the reports instead of concentrating on being shrill they did identify particular groups at risk, such as infants whose parents use cellphone music to keep their toddlers quiet and basically park an active phone next to young developing skulls and brains for hours on end. It also depended a lot on shape, Many flip phones because of their geometry kept the radiating part sufficiently away to be much less a concern, but almsot all smartphones today are unibody designs which means the EMF emitting body and screen is in direct contact with your head.
All of this is irrelevant, because radio waves are nonionizing radiation.
Consciousness is weird. Quantum theory is weird. Therefore quantum theory must explain consciousness.
That's essentially the argument here, and it's pretty easily seen as fallacious.
Well, the slashdot link, and the New Statesman story linked to from it, don't really do justice to Penrose's idea, so it's not surprising that you've gotten the impression that there's absolutely nothing there. Actually there's something to it, and although as a physicist I don't buy it, it's not completely stupid.
My own take on it is that Copenhagen and MWI are just different words for talking about the theory, so the distinction isn't empirically testable. Copenhagen does a good job of depicting the psychological experience of doing experiments with quantum-mechanical systems, but Copenhagen is illogical because it gives a special role to measurement, which is actually a physical process like any other.
Penrose's idiosyncratic idea is that he takes Copenhagen seriously, so he says that measurement is somehow *different* from other physical processes. That suggests that consciousness is somehow different from other physical processes. He also claims that his idea is at least in principle empirically testable, that we should be able to see this process happen by studying neurons. He thinks there is something special going on in microtubules.
Slashdot's readers would have been a lot better off just reading the WP article on Penrose's theory.
Well, I'm not sure what I'll be doing at 6:00, but I do have plans for 6:01. Certain people claim the Bible unambiguously predicts that the world is going to end at 6:00. Assuming that this prediction turns out to be false, at 6:01 I will be waiting expectantly to hear the news that those people now believe the Bible is not 100% true.
2) 1/3rd of the human population in the US on food stamps.
Huh? Do you have a source for this? The population of the US is about 309 million. WP's article on food stamps says there were about 43 million people on food stamps in the US as of November. That makes 14%, which is quite a bit less than 1/3.
You say this poses no real risk to you, because your passwords are immune to dictionary attacks. But ftp sends passwords in cleartext, so it actually does pose a risk to you if someone is able to sniff your packets on the public internet.
But anyway, if you feel that the risk to you is insignificant, then why are you asking the question? Are you asking it on behalf of other people who might want to security-harden their ftp servers? If those people are worried, why wouldn't they have already switched from ftp to sftp? And if they're running sftp, they can protect against attacks of the type you're describing by installing denyhosts:http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/ Denyhosts does have a cooperative blacklisting facility of the type you were asking about.
I could be wrong, but since ftp is inherently insecure, I would be surprised if someone had created software with the same functionality as denyhosts that would work with ftp. That would be like retrofitting a tricycle to make it supersonic.
You do realize that some people do use *BSD for a desktop, right? It's stable, flexible, and with the coming of projects like PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, it's more or less trivial to get it running for a user. As trivial as it is to get some of the more consumer oriented Linux distros up and running.
I used BSD as my desktop system for several years, back in the early 2000's, then switched to linux because of endless hassles trying to get a full set of desktop apps working. Last year, because of hassles with poor quality in some ubuntu releases, I decided to try switching back to BSD. It would be fair to say that PC-BSD was "more or less trivial to get it running." However, I was only able to get about half of my desktop apps to work, which was exactly the reason that I had originally switched from BSD to linux years earlier.
It has amazed me how long the current academic publishing regime has lasted. This dystopian fantasy by the publishers is the logical extension of a broken business model, where the publishers provide essentially zero value yet charge enormous fees. GA Tech should use this moment as a clean break point, and demand that all campus materials be either in the public domain or be available under Creative Commons license. Award tenure based only on publications which are under CC license.
Spiritually I'm in sympathy with you, but:
You're assuming that free course materials don't already exist, and that profs need to be coerced by schools into writing them. That's not the case -- see my sig for a few hundred examples.
You're lumping together textbooks and research. Those are completely different beasts. Your argument that publishers provide "essentially zero value" is fairly valid for research papers, but not really valid for most textbooks. If you look at the free textbooks catalogued at the site linked to in my sig, most of them are clearly not as fancy as commercial textbooks from the big publishers. Some of that fanciness is useless frippery, like colored section headers, but a lot of it really is significant. I've written several CC-licensed physics textbooks, and it's been a huge amount of work to try to make them look semi-professional without a commercial publishing house's resources to help me. In the case of research papers, nearly all academics in my field (physics) make their papers available on arxiv.org. They also publish them in non-free journals, because that's how you get tenure. In other fields, there are free journals such as PLOS.
Universities need to remember that they are the folks that generate *all* the content that publishers want to use against them. They can stop giving it away to these guys any time they like.
This is true in the case of research papers, not true in the case of textbooks. Universities don't write textbooks, professors write textbooks, and professors don't give them away for free to commercial publishers.
In this era of global networking, there is essentially no added value in distribution, warehousing, and organizing papers into journals. Publishers need to be reminded of this fact.
But this would only apply to research papers. What fraction of the material in course packs in a university bookstore is research papers? I would guess only a small percentage. When it comes to other kinds of academic writing besides research papers, publishers really do contribute a lot more than the things you're talking about.
The slashdot headline says "8 of China's Top 9 Govt. Officials Are Engineers." The slashdot summary says, "8 out of China's top 9 government officials are scientists or engineers," in a link to singularityhub.com. Singularityhub says "In fact, 8 out of China's top 9 government officials are scientists," in a link to forbes.com. Forbes.com doesn't say anything about 8 out of 9 anything.
So we have some possibilities: (a) 8/9 are engineers (slashdot headline); (b) 8/9 are scientists (singularityhub); (c) 8/9 are scientists or engineers (slashdot summary); (d) none of the above (original source, forbes.com).
This stuff about comparing the US's science and engineering to China's is just plain dumb, and not only is it dumb, it's getting really, really old. Didn't we have enough of this in the Sputnik era?
Some reality checks: (1) Science is not a zero-sum game. If someone in China publishes a really good scientific paper, it makes the US better off, not worse off. (2) The US is a capitalist country, where labor is a market, and the value of a particular skill is set by supply and demand. If employers are having trouble hiring enough scientists, they'll offer higher pay for scientists. Ditto for engineers. (3) Chinese higher education sucks to high heaven. US higher education is the envy of the world. (How many US college graduates do you know who go to China for grad school?) (4) Science and engineering are two different things.
If anything, Hugh Pickens' summary paints too rosy a picture.
The title, "The Cost of US Security," has the words "cost" and "security" in it.
"Security" implies that the US's four wars since 2001 (I count Pakistan as a war) have some positive correlation with US Security. If anything, they have decreased US security. The second Iraq war happened because Bush got Powell to go to the UN and tell them lies about how Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a security threat. The Pakistan war involves our giving the Pakistani government lots of money so they can work hand in glove with terrorists. What exactly has the Afghanistan war accomplished, other than killing lots of young Americans and putting a corrupt Afghan government in power and allowing it to fake elections?
The word "cost," along with all the dollar figures, encourages us to measure the outcome in terms of money. The outcome should be measured in terms of the destruction of domestic civil liberties, crapping on the constitution, torturing people who didn't do anything wrong, crippling and killing teenage Americans, and killing innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
People have always filtered their sources of news. This goes back to at least the 19th century. Basically, as literacy became widespread, the phenomenon of self-filtering became widespread. I'm sure it also existed before widespread literacy, but we don't have written records of how illiterate people got their information in ancient Sumeria.
In the 19th century, people in the US and Britain typically subscribed to newspapers that were affiliated with a political party they agreed with, or that had an editorial stance they agreed with. Somehow in the late 20th and early 21st century people have gotten the impression that there was something like journalistic impartiality. An impartial source of news, such as Walter Cronkite, was supposed to even-handedly represent "both sides of the story." Wait, what if the story had more than two sides? What if "both" sides meant the USian Republican and Democratic parties, both of which were ready to bomb the world back into the stone age over the Cuban Missile Crisis? What if "both" sides meant the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which were in favor of the Vietnam War? Of the PATRIOT act? Of the second Iraq war?
Thank god we're not still in the age of Walter Cronkite, the Brady Bunch, and all that other groupthink mass-media. People who couldn't think for themselves could never think for themselves. People who can't think for themselves still can't think for themselves. The difference now is that I have more than 12 TV channels' worth of access to information.
Actually the "banana equivalent dose" was scientifically wrong. Your body maintains a certain amount of potassium in it. If you add more, you just excrete the excess in your urine. Therefore eating a banana doesn't add significantly to your radiation exposure.
Better examples are Brazil nuts (which contain radium) or the "cuddle-equivalent dose" -- sleeping with someone exposes you to radiation from their body. One month's worth of sleeping with someone is about the same as what people have been saying (incorrectly) was the excess dose from eating a banana.
We're a country that's lagging behind on STEM (science, technical, engineering & math) education and experiencing somewhat of a shortage of people from the technical fields to fill jobs in our country because our educational system is a joke.
This kind of factoid goes floating around and never gets checked. In fact, it's impossible to check. The job market is a market, and it's one in which both supply and demand are elastic. Employers will always complain that they can't attract enough good candidates. Workers will always complain that they can't get a job they enjoy with good pay and benefits. When you hear that there is a shortage of STEM students, what that really means is that employers would like the market to tilt more in their favor -- they're unhappy that they're having to offer such high pay and benefits in order to attract the type of people they need.
The other thing that makes this kind of claim meaningless is that it assumes a widget model of education. Not enough students coming out with STEM degrees? Just ramp up production! But that doesn't work. Not everyone is talented at math and science. If you want more STEM graduates, you can certainly produce them -- but you need to encourage people with good genetics for that part of the brain to stop using birth control.
If you want to charge STEM majors more money for their degree, then fine, but don't go crying when you start attracting less talent to your school and your research grants start to dry up. In the short run, you'll raise a few bucks. In the long run, you're killing your most productive and profitable departments so you can have a tiny shortfall today.
This argument doesn't work, because the article is about undergraduate education, but the research grants require grad students to run them, not undergrads. And in fact in graduate education you do see STEM students being treated much better than their peers in the liberal arts -- for exactly the reasons you've outlined.
Another good reason to doubt whether IQ is meaningful is the Flynn effect, which is a long-term upward trend in IQ scores (which is swept under the rug by curving the tests downward). Nobody is really sure what the Flynn effect means, or what causes it, but it's such a huge effect that based on their IQ scores, average people from 1930 would be classified as dull or borderline retarded today. What it really suggests is that IQ testing is pseudoscience -- and that is exactly what a lot of psychometricians consider it to be.
According to GR, the change in the gravitational field would propagate at the speed of light, so we wouldn't get any change in the gravitational field until 8 minutes later -- at the same time that the change became visibly detectable.
I agree with the basic thrust of your post, but have one nitpick to make:
But Newton's model makes no sense when asking questions such as "what would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly disappeared.
Actually, general relativity doesn't answer this either, because GR has local conservation of mass-energy, so it doesn't allow the sun to disappear. A better example would be "What would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly zoomed away from us at nearly the speed of light." Admittedly I'm being totally pedantic here.
Thanks for the link, I will dig through it;D but I fear it might be beyond my last physics class, hehe.
If you want to learn some relativity, the first book I always suggest to people is Gardner, Relativity Simply Explained. You could also try Geroch, Relativity from A to B. At a somewhat higher mathematical level, there is Exploring Black Holes by Taylor and Wheeler, or various upper-division undergrad books like Hartle.
I just need to figure out a (cheap) way to turn testing rooms into Faraday cages.
Yeah, that would be a great trick if you could pull it off. Prisons can't even seem to manage it -- they have rules that say prisoners are only allowed to use pay phones (which are monitored), but the prisoners all have cell phones. Jamming is illegal. I could pull the plug on the wifi router, but that would probably affect other rooms. Many students are able to text on a cell phone that's in their pocket. Network access is becoming more and more ubiquitous. I go hiking a lot, and I'll often be standing on a summit and listening to someone next to me talking on their cell phone.
You are mistaken, I did not talk about gravitation, I talked about acceleration. (Gravitation however is also a factor, but was not my topic)
The equivalence principle says they're the same thing.
Speed is completely irrelevant as long as it is not close to light speed. It is the acceleration that brought you to that speed, that matters.
No, this is completely incorrect. There is a small effect when your speed is far below the speed of light. All of the effects we're talking about are small.
You may want to take a look at the classic papers by Hafele and Keating and Alley from the 1970's. A good summary of Alley's work is available here: In NASA. Goddard Space Flight Center Proc. of the 13th Ann. Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Appl. and Planning Meeting, p. 687-724, 1981 (SEE N82-20494 11-36) You can access scans online at http://www.pttimeeting.org/archivemeetings/index9.html If you take a look at the analysis you'll see that the kinematic and gravitational effects are similar in size.
I teach physics for a living. Different profs run their courses in different ways, but personally I feel that memorization is evil, so I give open-notes exams. Therefore I don't really care whether students use graphing calculators that can store all their equations for them. To me, the bigger issue is preventing students from accessing internet and cell networks. I don't want them communicating with someone outside the room who will help them on the exam. This is why I let them use a calculator on an exam but not a netbook. Outside the context of a test at school, my opinion is that graphical calculators are pointless because their price lies in between the price of a $10 calculator and a $600 netbook, but they are no more useful than a $10 calculator.
Slashdot Mirror
The OP's kid is 6. A 6-year-old shouldn't be spending a lot of time in front of a screen. Period. Send him outside to play with toy trucks in the dirt, preferably with other 6-year-olds. If the kid is only spending a small amount of time in front of a screen, then there's no problem, because Mom and Dad can provide appropriate supervision.
I have two daughters who are older than the OP's kid. I don't really care if they read things or see pictures on the web that have to do with deeply disturbing subjects like masturbation or Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech. Similarly, when we go to the public library I don't care if they read books with disturbing ideas in them. Disturbing is good. They can think for themselves. The issue we've worked on harder with them is how to avoid online sexual predators, and that's pretty easy to handle. They just know that they're not supposed to give their real names, etc., online.
The WP article describes a ton of problems with SafeSearch. IMO these problems are probably intrinsically hard to solve. I'm sure incremental improvements could be made, but they would be *expensive* to make, because, e.g., they would require more human input. What is Google's economic incentive to spend that money? They're in the advertising business. I suppose their incentive to spend the money would be to make people feel that it was "safer" to let their small children surf the web without parental involvement, thereby increasing the number of 6-year-olds who click through on ads for Froot Loops. Yes, there is a lot of money involved in advertising to kids, but it seems implausible to me that money spent on improving SafeSearch would give a net increase in Google's bottom line.
My university has hotspots just like any wireless service. You can connect to it with whatever OS or device you like. They don't support Linux directly, but they certainly don't block it from the network.
Ditto at the school where I teach. People these days (including administrators) expect to be able to connect to wifi with all kinds of handheld devices, including Android. IT does claim authority over who's allowed to connect what device to an ethernet socket, but in reality they are reasonably flexible with employees who want to do that. They provide cables sticking out of the lecturer's podium specifically so that a professor can hook up a laptop to the wired network and the classroom's projector, so it wouldn't make much sense to claim that there's some inherent problem with hooking up people's computers to the wired network. They do have legitimate concerns about having infected windows boxes on their network.
A whistleblower at the NSA told the press about mismanagement that led to massive waste of tax money. He never disclosed any secrets to the press. He was prosecuted under a law meant to apply to spies who worked for foreign governments, with penalties that could have meant spending the rest of his life in jail.
Thanks for posting that link. I was upset as hell after reading it last week. Anyone who doesn't fully understand the gravity of this case should read the whole thing.
This ruling partially restores my hope that the US will return to the rule of law and respect for the bill of rights.
Well, the thing is that voluntary taxes don't really work, as no-one pays them. So you do need to compel people to pay them. Some of these taxes will inevitably be used for ideas one or more people don't agree with. I, personally, don't like the idea that my taxes helped fund the Iraq and Afghanistan clusterfucks.
But unless you abandon the idea of wider society and government entirely, you have to have taxes and people have to pay them.
Sure, those are valid points, and I agree with you about needing to break the US's dysfunctional habit of getting into wars in the Middle East (five within recent years, since I consider Pakistan to be a war). But if Stallman's idea, which he proposed for Brazil, were applied in the US, it would certainly represent an extremely radical change in the role of government in this country. The reason the founders put freedom of the press in the bill of rights was that they distrusted governmental power over written expression. Socializing the entire publishing industry would mean granting the government massive power over a huge sector of society. I can't believe that the government would refrain from misusing that power. For example, there are surely books out there advocating man-boy sex or glorifying Al Qaeda's struggle against the US. Do you really believe that Senator Holyroller from Mississippi would allow tax money to subsidize those books? (Under Stallman's proposal, they'd actually be subsidized out of proportion to their popularity, since he proposes subsidies proportional to the cube root of popularity.) Hell, no. Senator Holyroller would introduce legislation cutting off the flow of subsidies to the authors of such objectionable material. So now that the publishing industry has been 100% nationalized, where do the authors of books expressing unpopular views go in order to make a buck for their work? There's no place for them to go. They're locked out of commercial publishing completely, because commercial publishing has been made into a government monopoly.
The slashdot summary contains a total non sequitur: His suggested remedy? Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or "designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments". The part about "His suggested remedy?" implies, incorrectly, that Stallman is suggesting the tax idea as a solution to the DRM problem. Actually there is no logical connection between them, and Stallman hasn't suggested there is. If you want to see what Stallman actually said, here is his analysis of the DRM issue, and here is his proposal about taxes.
I hadn't realized until today that Stallman was politically so far to the left. I assume that I didn't know that for so long because he has tried to keep his left-wing orientation about government and capitalism separate from his libertarian approach to civil liberties and freedom of speech. There are a lot of people in the computer/internet world who are vaguely libertarian, and there's no point in alienating them gratuitously when they actually have common ground. It does, however, seem to me like there's somewhat of a philosophical contradiction between the voluntaristic approach he usually pushes (don't buy products that aren't free-as-in-speech, etc.) and the idea of compelling individuals to pay taxes in order to support ideas that they don't agree with.
I think they did put in a bit more effort than that. low level EMF radiation is not a trivial issue. And if you read the reports instead of concentrating on being shrill they did identify particular groups at risk, such as infants whose parents use cellphone music to keep their toddlers quiet and basically park an active phone next to young developing skulls and brains for hours on end. It also depended a lot on shape, Many flip phones because of their geometry kept the radiating part sufficiently away to be much less a concern, but almsot all smartphones today are unibody designs which means the EMF emitting body and screen is in direct contact with your head.
All of this is irrelevant, because radio waves are nonionizing radiation.
Consciousness is weird. Quantum theory is weird. Therefore quantum theory must explain consciousness.
That's essentially the argument here, and it's pretty easily seen as fallacious.
Well, the slashdot link, and the New Statesman story linked to from it, don't really do justice to Penrose's idea, so it's not surprising that you've gotten the impression that there's absolutely nothing there. Actually there's something to it, and although as a physicist I don't buy it, it's not completely stupid.
The basic idea is that there are various ways to interpret quantum mechanics. The most popular interpretations are the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds interpretation (MWI).
My own take on it is that Copenhagen and MWI are just different words for talking about the theory, so the distinction isn't empirically testable. Copenhagen does a good job of depicting the psychological experience of doing experiments with quantum-mechanical systems, but Copenhagen is illogical because it gives a special role to measurement, which is actually a physical process like any other.
Penrose's idiosyncratic idea is that he takes Copenhagen seriously, so he says that measurement is somehow *different* from other physical processes. That suggests that consciousness is somehow different from other physical processes. He also claims that his idea is at least in principle empirically testable, that we should be able to see this process happen by studying neurons. He thinks there is something special going on in microtubules.
Slashdot's readers would have been a lot better off just reading the WP article on Penrose's theory.
Well, I'm not sure what I'll be doing at 6:00, but I do have plans for 6:01. Certain people claim the Bible unambiguously predicts that the world is going to end at 6:00. Assuming that this prediction turns out to be false, at 6:01 I will be waiting expectantly to hear the news that those people now believe the Bible is not 100% true.
2) 1/3rd of the human population in the US on food stamps.
Huh? Do you have a source for this? The population of the US is about 309 million. WP's article on food stamps says there were about 43 million people on food stamps in the US as of November. That makes 14%, which is quite a bit less than 1/3.
You say this poses no real risk to you, because your passwords are immune to dictionary attacks. But ftp sends passwords in cleartext, so it actually does pose a risk to you if someone is able to sniff your packets on the public internet.
But anyway, if you feel that the risk to you is insignificant, then why are you asking the question? Are you asking it on behalf of other people who might want to security-harden their ftp servers? If those people are worried, why wouldn't they have already switched from ftp to sftp? And if they're running sftp, they can protect against attacks of the type you're describing by installing denyhosts:http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/ Denyhosts does have a cooperative blacklisting facility of the type you were asking about.
I could be wrong, but since ftp is inherently insecure, I would be surprised if someone had created software with the same functionality as denyhosts that would work with ftp. That would be like retrofitting a tricycle to make it supersonic.
You do realize that some people do use *BSD for a desktop, right? It's stable, flexible, and with the coming of projects like PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, it's more or less trivial to get it running for a user. As trivial as it is to get some of the more consumer oriented Linux distros up and running.
I used BSD as my desktop system for several years, back in the early 2000's, then switched to linux because of endless hassles trying to get a full set of desktop apps working. Last year, because of hassles with poor quality in some ubuntu releases, I decided to try switching back to BSD. It would be fair to say that PC-BSD was "more or less trivial to get it running." However, I was only able to get about half of my desktop apps to work, which was exactly the reason that I had originally switched from BSD to linux years earlier.
It has amazed me how long the current academic publishing regime has lasted. This dystopian fantasy by the publishers is the logical extension of a broken business model, where the publishers provide essentially zero value yet charge enormous fees. GA Tech should use this moment as a clean break point, and demand that all campus materials be either in the public domain or be available under Creative Commons license. Award tenure based only on publications which are under CC license.
Spiritually I'm in sympathy with you, but:
You're assuming that free course materials don't already exist, and that profs need to be coerced by schools into writing them. That's not the case -- see my sig for a few hundred examples.
You're lumping together textbooks and research. Those are completely different beasts. Your argument that publishers provide "essentially zero value" is fairly valid for research papers, but not really valid for most textbooks. If you look at the free textbooks catalogued at the site linked to in my sig, most of them are clearly not as fancy as commercial textbooks from the big publishers. Some of that fanciness is useless frippery, like colored section headers, but a lot of it really is significant. I've written several CC-licensed physics textbooks, and it's been a huge amount of work to try to make them look semi-professional without a commercial publishing house's resources to help me. In the case of research papers, nearly all academics in my field (physics) make their papers available on arxiv.org. They also publish them in non-free journals, because that's how you get tenure. In other fields, there are free journals such as PLOS.
Universities need to remember that they are the folks that generate *all* the content that publishers want to use against them. They can stop giving it away to these guys any time they like.
This is true in the case of research papers, not true in the case of textbooks. Universities don't write textbooks, professors write textbooks, and professors don't give them away for free to commercial publishers.
In this era of global networking, there is essentially no added value in distribution, warehousing, and organizing papers into journals. Publishers need to be reminded of this fact.
But this would only apply to research papers. What fraction of the material in course packs in a university bookstore is research papers? I would guess only a small percentage. When it comes to other kinds of academic writing besides research papers, publishers really do contribute a lot more than the things you're talking about.
The slashdot headline says "8 of China's Top 9 Govt. Officials Are Engineers." The slashdot summary says, "8 out of China's top 9 government officials are scientists or engineers," in a link to singularityhub.com. Singularityhub says "In fact, 8 out of China's top 9 government officials are scientists," in a link to forbes.com. Forbes.com doesn't say anything about 8 out of 9 anything.
So we have some possibilities: (a) 8/9 are engineers (slashdot headline); (b) 8/9 are scientists (singularityhub); (c) 8/9 are scientists or engineers (slashdot summary); (d) none of the above (original source, forbes.com).
This stuff about comparing the US's science and engineering to China's is just plain dumb, and not only is it dumb, it's getting really, really old. Didn't we have enough of this in the Sputnik era?
Some reality checks: (1) Science is not a zero-sum game. If someone in China publishes a really good scientific paper, it makes the US better off, not worse off. (2) The US is a capitalist country, where labor is a market, and the value of a particular skill is set by supply and demand. If employers are having trouble hiring enough scientists, they'll offer higher pay for scientists. Ditto for engineers. (3) Chinese higher education sucks to high heaven. US higher education is the envy of the world. (How many US college graduates do you know who go to China for grad school?) (4) Science and engineering are two different things.
If anything, Hugh Pickens' summary paints too rosy a picture.
The title, "The Cost of US Security," has the words "cost" and "security" in it.
"Security" implies that the US's four wars since 2001 (I count Pakistan as a war) have some positive correlation with US Security. If anything, they have decreased US security. The second Iraq war happened because Bush got Powell to go to the UN and tell them lies about how Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a security threat. The Pakistan war involves our giving the Pakistani government lots of money so they can work hand in glove with terrorists. What exactly has the Afghanistan war accomplished, other than killing lots of young Americans and putting a corrupt Afghan government in power and allowing it to fake elections?
The word "cost," along with all the dollar figures, encourages us to measure the outcome in terms of money. The outcome should be measured in terms of the destruction of domestic civil liberties, crapping on the constitution, torturing people who didn't do anything wrong, crippling and killing teenage Americans, and killing innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
People have always filtered their sources of news. This goes back to at least the 19th century. Basically, as literacy became widespread, the phenomenon of self-filtering became widespread. I'm sure it also existed before widespread literacy, but we don't have written records of how illiterate people got their information in ancient Sumeria.
In the 19th century, people in the US and Britain typically subscribed to newspapers that were affiliated with a political party they agreed with, or that had an editorial stance they agreed with. Somehow in the late 20th and early 21st century people have gotten the impression that there was something like journalistic impartiality. An impartial source of news, such as Walter Cronkite, was supposed to even-handedly represent "both sides of the story." Wait, what if the story had more than two sides? What if "both" sides meant the USian Republican and Democratic parties, both of which were ready to bomb the world back into the stone age over the Cuban Missile Crisis? What if "both" sides meant the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which were in favor of the Vietnam War? Of the PATRIOT act? Of the second Iraq war?
Thank god we're not still in the age of Walter Cronkite, the Brady Bunch, and all that other groupthink mass-media. People who couldn't think for themselves could never think for themselves. People who can't think for themselves still can't think for themselves. The difference now is that I have more than 12 TV channels' worth of access to information.
(2) don't eat bananas.
Actually the "banana equivalent dose" was scientifically wrong. Your body maintains a certain amount of potassium in it. If you add more, you just excrete the excess in your urine. Therefore eating a banana doesn't add significantly to your radiation exposure.
Better examples are Brazil nuts (which contain radium) or the "cuddle-equivalent dose" -- sleeping with someone exposes you to radiation from their body. One month's worth of sleeping with someone is about the same as what people have been saying (incorrectly) was the excess dose from eating a banana.
We're a country that's lagging behind on STEM (science, technical, engineering & math) education and experiencing somewhat of a shortage of people from the technical fields to fill jobs in our country because our educational system is a joke.
This kind of factoid goes floating around and never gets checked. In fact, it's impossible to check. The job market is a market, and it's one in which both supply and demand are elastic. Employers will always complain that they can't attract enough good candidates. Workers will always complain that they can't get a job they enjoy with good pay and benefits. When you hear that there is a shortage of STEM students, what that really means is that employers would like the market to tilt more in their favor -- they're unhappy that they're having to offer such high pay and benefits in order to attract the type of people they need.
The other thing that makes this kind of claim meaningless is that it assumes a widget model of education. Not enough students coming out with STEM degrees? Just ramp up production! But that doesn't work. Not everyone is talented at math and science. If you want more STEM graduates, you can certainly produce them -- but you need to encourage people with good genetics for that part of the brain to stop using birth control.
If you want to charge STEM majors more money for their degree, then fine, but don't go crying when you start attracting less talent to your school and your research grants start to dry up. In the short run, you'll raise a few bucks. In the long run, you're killing your most productive and profitable departments so you can have a tiny shortfall today.
This argument doesn't work, because the article is about undergraduate education, but the research grants require grad students to run them, not undergrads. And in fact in graduate education you do see STEM students being treated much better than their peers in the liberal arts -- for exactly the reasons you've outlined.
Another good reason to doubt whether IQ is meaningful is the Flynn effect, which is a long-term upward trend in IQ scores (which is swept under the rug by curving the tests downward). Nobody is really sure what the Flynn effect means, or what causes it, but it's such a huge effect that based on their IQ scores, average people from 1930 would be classified as dull or borderline retarded today. What it really suggests is that IQ testing is pseudoscience -- and that is exactly what a lot of psychometricians consider it to be.
so... what would happen ?
According to GR, the change in the gravitational field would propagate at the speed of light, so we wouldn't get any change in the gravitational field until 8 minutes later -- at the same time that the change became visibly detectable.
I agree with the basic thrust of your post, but have one nitpick to make:
But Newton's model makes no sense when asking questions such as "what would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly disappeared.
Actually, general relativity doesn't answer this either, because GR has local conservation of mass-energy, so it doesn't allow the sun to disappear. A better example would be "What would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly zoomed away from us at nearly the speed of light." Admittedly I'm being totally pedantic here.
If you want to learn some relativity, the first book I always suggest to people is Gardner, Relativity Simply Explained. You could also try Geroch, Relativity from A to B. At a somewhat higher mathematical level, there is Exploring Black Holes by Taylor and Wheeler, or various upper-division undergrad books like Hartle.
I just need to figure out a (cheap) way to turn testing rooms into Faraday cages.
Yeah, that would be a great trick if you could pull it off. Prisons can't even seem to manage it -- they have rules that say prisoners are only allowed to use pay phones (which are monitored), but the prisoners all have cell phones. Jamming is illegal. I could pull the plug on the wifi router, but that would probably affect other rooms. Many students are able to text on a cell phone that's in their pocket. Network access is becoming more and more ubiquitous. I go hiking a lot, and I'll often be standing on a summit and listening to someone next to me talking on their cell phone.
You are mistaken, I did not talk about gravitation, I talked about acceleration. (Gravitation however is also a factor, but was not my topic)
The equivalence principle says they're the same thing.
Speed is completely irrelevant as long as it is not close to light speed. It is the acceleration that brought you to that speed, that matters.
No, this is completely incorrect. There is a small effect when your speed is far below the speed of light. All of the effects we're talking about are small.
You may want to take a look at the classic papers by Hafele and Keating and Alley from the 1970's. A good summary of Alley's work is available here:
In NASA. Goddard Space Flight Center Proc. of the 13th Ann. Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Appl. and Planning Meeting, p. 687-724, 1981 (SEE N82-20494 11-36)
You can access scans online at http://www.pttimeeting.org/archivemeetings/index9.html If you take a look at the analysis you'll see that the kinematic and gravitational effects are similar in size.
I teach physics for a living. Different profs run their courses in different ways, but personally I feel that memorization is evil, so I give open-notes exams. Therefore I don't really care whether students use graphing calculators that can store all their equations for them. To me, the bigger issue is preventing students from accessing internet and cell networks. I don't want them communicating with someone outside the room who will help them on the exam. This is why I let them use a calculator on an exam but not a netbook. Outside the context of a test at school, my opinion is that graphical calculators are pointless because their price lies in between the price of a $10 calculator and a $600 netbook, but they are no more useful than a $10 calculator.