Hehe, I suppose the thing to worry about is that "War on $FOO" has resulted in that the US has ten times as many people in jail than your average social democracy in Europe....
A) Freedom of the press is a more predominant issue in the US than in Europe.
The Press Freedom Barometer is a good source of information on this topic, and press freedom in general. Note that many countries in Europe has a "good situation" whereas the US has just a "satisfactory situation".
I find teen pregnancy wrong, therefore I denounce it.
Sure. But there are many decades since having sex meant pregnancy. In fact, I think advocating abstinence is morally wrong, because good sex builds solid relationships. I also think that much of the entertainment industry does morally bad things, which doesn't help building solid relationships.
The problem here is that people in the US administration still equate sex with pregnancy. That's simply wrong. Norway has taken the opposite approach, really teaching details in sex ed. Teenage pregnancy rates has been low for long, but policy-makers have found that every new thing has to be met with a no-taboos approach. So, if researchers find that "whoops kids are actually having group sex", the response is to have teachers give objective information about group sex and it's risks and how to mitigate those risks. When every increase in STD and aborts are met with this approach, a corresponding decline is seen soon thereafter. It works.
The original poster had 20 class-mates getting pregnant. Among the many hundred kids in the schools I've been to, I have heard about teen pregnancies twice. My mother is a teacher, and she has never said anything about any of her pupils getting pregnant, but then, she probably wouldn't.
You can denounce teen pregnancy all you want, and you can try to mark it as socially unacceptable. But what we're dealing with here, is that this is about biology. The sexual drive is the strongest there is in mankind. You can't just fight that. It is silly and destructive to fight that.
The reality is that Bush is letting dogma stand in the way of a facts-based rational policy that is known to work.
Finally, do read this page. It is a former sex-ed site that closed, for various reasons. One of them being that freedom of expression isn't what it used to be. Take note.
Wasn't it the US who put Pinochet in power? Supported Osama bin Laden? And Saddam Hussein? Arrested Dmitry Sklyarov for breaking US laws in Russia? Attacked Iraq under false pretenses?
Yup. The first was even on Sept 11, 1973. 3000 died that day. Sound familiar...?
It could be possible to argue that PNAC had noble motives behind their idea to conquer to free the world, if they had at the same time supported some of the worst dictators on the planet, such as Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov.
I feel it is hard to get reliable reports on what people there think, but I have heard reliable reports that many in the democratic opposition welcomed America to central asia after 911, but has later been disappointed. Also, I have heard conflicting reports on whether the conditions have deteriorated with Bush's support, or has just been in status quo. However, judging from the few reports I see, it seems like Karimov has gained a stronger position, and that he is abusing the position heavily. I collaborated with scientists in Uzbekistan on a project, but there is nothing left now. Also, the Bush administration has recently withheld economic aid, but I'm unsure whether this is genuine change of policy, or a "we don't need you anymore, bye".
Either way, I'm surprised that this is not something that would come back and haunt Bush, as it is seems like a clearcut example of hypocricy to me, which directly undermines "we are creating free countries" rhetoric.
Well, surely good HTML could have helped in providing more semantics. For example, a table that had "price" in a TH could make it easier to guess that the numbers in the TDs associated where, well, prices for a product.
However, HTML is not so relevant in the Semantic Web. There are many reasons for this, but I guess one is that it is expected to never get beyond tagsoup... Well, I dunno...
It is RDF that is at the core of the Semantic Web. Funny, I have been interested in RDF for six years, still I haven't had time to really sit down and read the specs, and so, I often bump into rather fundamental things I haven't grokked.
BTW, a quick, funny and interesting way to get started with the Semantic Web is FOAF: Go and generate your FOAF profile here.
You really do have a choice, and you really don't have to go with the RIAA et al. Unless you really only want their music, and then you'll have to accept their terms.
I think I can say this also with my tin-foil hat off: There will be no choice. The problem is that as long as there exists a publishing channel that is not restricted by DRM, it can and will be used to distribute content that has been hacked. The fundamental problem with DRM is that it doesn't work: You can't use encryption to share a secret if one of the parties are not interested in keeping the secret.
For that reason, for DRM to work, any non-DRM distribution channel must be eliminated. This is totalitarianism. That's why they are talking about putting DRM on the routers: If you have a computer they don't trust, you will not be allowed to connect it to the Internet. That's the future we're looking at, and it is going to happen fast.
There will be no indie bands. There will be no independent news outlets. There will be no hobby film-makers. All this would go against the idea of DRM and it cannot be allowed to exist.
You may want to wave goodbye to freedom of expression while you still see it on the horizon...
I do not agree (unsurprisingly...:-)) The copyright holders never had any such right. They had a limited right to control reproduction, not to decide what happens to reproduction. They are pretending they got more rights, and by designing DRM system, they can enforce rights they never had.
In the US, you are probably stuck, but here in Norway this was very clearly spelled out in the verdict that acquitted Jon Johansen: These are rights that copyright holders never had, it is illegitimate to try to rob the public of their rights. Thus, it wasn't illegal to develop DeCSS. We're so fortunate that we have this spelled out in court. Furthermore, we are not a member of the EU, and EUCD is not a part of the agreement we have with the EU, nor have we ratified the WIPO treaty which mandates DMCA and stuff like that.
So, in fact, what I outlined in my post is actually the current legal status around here.... It was in the US too before DMCA, but apparently you do not care enough...
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Mark that: Freely participate. It doesn't say that the choice of not listening is OK. It says that it is our right to be listening to music. This is a human rights issue. Sure, you may not care about human rights, but I do.
And I'm pretty sick of the suits pulling the same bag of tricks year after year, not getting the clue: It won't work. If you're not respecting me as a customer, I won't buy your stuff. Sorry. I'm not letting you push it down my throat. These are failures not because there are many people abusing the system, no, because very few people are actually able to work around this. It fails because people don't want the products.
It is very simple to get my money: 1) Provide content that I like. 2) Make it easy for my to find and check out your content, no strings, no barriers. 3) Make it easy for me to pay you. 4) Profit.
There's no ??? in that. They would get my money. And I know lots and lots of authors who fully appreciates these simple facts of life, there are just annoyingly many publishers that don't.
Well, yes, Iran has probably among the more vibrant blogging communities in the world. I follow a few Iranian blogs regularily. Hoder is a good starting point. And authorities are cracking down on it, pissing all the kids off. Iran is strange, on one hand, the majority of the people are highly educated, they understand democracy, and there are lots of good people in higher positions, in universities, for example. So, if one were to start a democratic revolution in the Middle East, what one should do is start cooperation with the progressive forces in Iran. Contrary to Iraq, you could actually come with a lot of support to people without aiding the mullahs. A good example of this is the CERN/Iran collaboration. With these forces gaining status and strength in society, a peaceful transition to democracy would be imminent. Many of these leading figures is of the
clear opinion that current US policy has been a severe setback.
Yep, in the visible wavelength, I agree with you.
The best seeing I've seen myself is 0.34", it didn't last long, though... However, it should be noted that DIMMs have seen better than 0.3", the Maidanak DIMM, had down below 0.2" (and below 0.3" 2% of the time), see this paper.
Also note that Roque de los Muchachos Observatory at La Palma (where I've been observing) has even better conditions, but the weather at the Roque can get really bad. I've had my share of that too... Too bad Maidanak is a country that has a mad dictator...:-(
Also, I wouldn't call the VLT interferometer "clunky"... It looks impressive to me, but then I have never had any use for it...
Anyway, the conclusion is that we really need space observatories for certain applications, not least to validate ground-based observations.
I was fortunate enough to meet Jack Steinberger (physics 1998), and he said pretty much the same thing. They had pretty much administered a huge project, and the only leader of the project who had actually done a lot of science was long dead. The real work was done by armies of graduate students, but Jack took every opportunity to give them credit.
I have also met Doug Osheroff and he actually got the nobel prize in 1996 for something he did as a graduate student. So, they exist too.
I'm in Norway, and I'm a physicist. I was pretty sure that there were no nuclear weapons. In fact I was very near 100% sure, and I saw absolutely no evidence for it, and when Rumsfeld used the good old, ufo/conspiracy-buff phrase "absense of evidence is not evidence of absense", well, it kind of gave it away....
It is true that the mainstream press did have quite a lot on the topic, and that the vast majority of people around here were against the war, and that they can say afterwards "what didn't we say".
Still the fact is, that neither the popular press, nor this vast majority had any clue whatsoever.
They were totally incapable of arguing about it, and there wasn't really any public debate about it here. Thus, leading politicians, such as Norway's Foreign Minister Jan Petersen could not do his job based on a solid opinion by his own people. The man is a total idiot. For one thing, after the Powellpoint-presentation, that contained nothing substantial at all, he said that it was "impressive". This guy really wanted to believe.
Also, he never realized that the US was going to war no matter what. Norway has a tradition for sticking to the UN, but also looks to the US for guarantees for its security. It hasn't been a conflict there until recently. Until the last day before the attack he insisted that sticking to the UN was the right thing to do, and that the US would follow the will of the Security Council. Yeah sure...
I myself was pretty much paralyzed: I thought "it is just plain obvious that there is no nukes in Iraq, why aren't anybody saying anything". There wasn't ever anything substantial in the critique of the US WMD scaremongering. There are many physicists out there who could have said some very solid, informative and educational things, that would enable people to form a solid opinion. I guess I could have myself. But we didn't... I tried to write journalists, point them to good resources (iaea.org, for example), but failed. I was really just thinking, "somebody else with greater authority than myself have to do it." I guess everybody thought that way.
So, you USians shouldn't be too hard on yourself. We didn't "know" here either, for any sensible definition of "know". People here believed things that were contrary to the belief of many USians, but it wasn't a well-formed belief based on scientifically sound facts. They were superficial belief systems, and the reasons for them were probably similar for both sides of the pond, allthough they came out with different conclusions.
The whole thing is a total failure of the open, public debate in the entire West. There wasn't a problem of content not created. Following the iaea.org website, lending the ear to Scott Ritter now and then, writings by nuclear physists on production of arms, and the occasional opinion piece by physicists should do the trick. The blame must be shared by the media, by people in general and by the scientists who could have spoken, but did not.
But, since this is slashdot, let me blame copyright as well. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights lines up two rights, the rights of people to take advantage of scientific and artistic advancements of society and the rights of creators to be awarded. As we know, there is a balance here, and it has been distorted. This distortion has resulted in that distribution of content to advance people's understanding of issues is not a legitimate exercise in it's own right, and so, the public, open debate has suffered dramatically.
The dramatic failure of the public and open debate is largely the reason why nobody got through to the general public with substantial arguments against the WMD scare.
b) Work with the UN to take care of any problems we personally have with this country.
Well, supposedly, that's the correct answer, but I think it is also important to note that the UN is unfortunately not suited for this purpose at the moment.
As much as I am a leftie myself, I think it is extremely important for the left to realize that all the talk about oil was a mistake (even if it is partly true), and that the UN has some very real issues that prevents it from being efficient against dictators.
The UN has been built on sovereignity of nations, a good idea in principle, because people should be free to choose their own course, free to govern their own community without undue intervention from foreign parties.
Unfortunately, it happens that communities are taken over by dictators, and in that situation, I believe it is a moral imperative that mankind must come together to help those. Also, it is not universal that the nation-state is the best vehicle for a community to be built.
It is here that the UN has, and is failing so miserably. There exists no well-developed and recognized instrument to overrule nation's sovereignity, even in the case where the nation has a brutal dictator. The problem has been realized, the International Crimes Court is the first instrument the UN has that can overrule sovereignity.
It is a step in the right direction, but a very small one. Instead of whining about oil, the left should have taken the opportunity to see the flaws of the UN, and start working on resolving them urgently. I really don't see a good future for the UN if the left doesn't get working on this.
Yep, but the hose and the water is paid with my tax money. Freedom to be stupid stops when it costs me money (I do not really mean that very seriously, but you get the idea)....
We do not have these laws here in Norway, but I would have no problem advocating it.
I experienced an exploding front tire at 40 km/h, that sent me head-first into the asphalt. I did use a helmet, the helmet was completely destroyed, but it did its job. I had some severe scratch wounds (all the way down to the bone), the blood on the ground was cleaned out by the next rain... That's free...:-) I admit that I needed to see a doctor, but at least I recruited two new helmet users: The doctor who saw me told me afterwards that seeing how bad my wounds were and how well protected my skull had been made her go out and buy helmets for herself and her boyfriend...
I had been cycling for years in the woods, and flown many times before this, but never crashed. It was a reasonable thing for me to use a helmet.
However, you hear people say "I'm cycling so slow", but it doesn't matter. It isn't my demographics (somewhat experienced mountainbikers) that suffer head injuries, it is Joe Average, and around here 80% of reported bicycle accidents result in head injuries.
At this point, it is not a personal matter anymore, it actually costs society a lot to take care of people with these injuries, that often results in permanent disabilities. They are neglecting to use a very simple protective measure that actually works, whatfor? "oooh, it would destroy my haaaiiir!" Yep, sure, you crashing destroys my wallet, go buy a helmet!
It is plain stupidity not to use a helmet with bicycling. I have some tolerance for stupidity, but not when there exists a simple fix and it hurts others. If laws are needed to give the cluewhack, so be it.
I suspect the answer to that one are immense social networks, user participation and webs of trust.
The WWW also has Annotea, to allow for people to submit annotations. Now, you can imagine lots of people having a simple way to rate pages, a rating option could for example be "Supplied metadata are bad/fraudulent", or something like that.
You would first and foremost make decisions based on ratings from people you trust. That is, people who are close to you in your FOAF-based social network.
When every Internet user becomes a reviewer, and people are well connected in a social network, so that there is a review available of most pages, there is going to be a very strong incentive for authors to supply accurate metadata. Think of it as moderation.
Face it, allthough it happens that you stumble upon pr0n involuntarily, the vast majority of pr0n surfers do it on purpose. Pr0n0graphers (this is getting a bit too leet for me...) then will have strong incentive to refrain from such tactics, they will be modded into oblivion anyway, and accurate metadata is going to bring them traffic, since they are modded up by those who actually surf pr0n.
So, unless the goatse guy is a friend of yours, I don't think it is a big worry.
Provided SW becomes a reality that is.
FOAF is a really good start, though, go create it now!
I remember gopher, and I really can't agree... There are many good reasons why gopher didn't make it, the self-FUDing they did is one good. Another was that it was just painful to find things, despite Veronica. I know a few gopher nostalgics, but I for one is glad the world moved on, and the improvements TimBL did over gopher were huge. YMMV.
See my other comment about differences with IDL and MATLAB. However, I think you should be going with C or FORTRAN if memory and speed is important to you. R has no advanced concept of typing, at least it didn't when I last looked careful. Everything is double-precision floats, and while you have some control over it, if this is important, don't...
However, the C and FORTRAN bindings in R are excellent. So, if you're doing statistics on the stuff you find, you might want to look at doing the high-performance stuff in C, and wrap R around it.
Keep in mind that most of the statistics in R has undergone the most extensive peer-review by the most qualified statisticians in the field of any software (it could be true for other systems where the code is open too, but often some essential things are not). So, use the statistics in R, if you have uses for it, it is rigorous.
Well, it is been two years since I really used R, but I'm really in love with the system...
I know IDL (*shrug*) a bit too, since the rest of my Institute uses it. I just got itches from it all over, and dumped it...:-)
Anyway, what it doesn't do as well as IDL (*shrug*) is visualization. Its graphing is limited to, well, graphs. Interactive analysis with funny widgets and stuff isn't R's selling point.
Nor is R very well developed for image analysis and stuff like that. I think they have multi-D fourier transforms now, but they didn't two years ago.
IDL, OTOH, doesn't really do statistics at all. For example, it doesn't come with something as fundamental as QQ-plots. Believe it or not, but every paper that comes with an assumption of normality should come with QQ-plot... Or at least have done it.
The syntax of IDL (*shrug*) is unbeliably nasty (*shrug*, aargh, sorry, couldn't resist). I heard they have done something about it now, but two years ago, IDLs concept of scoping was at best, uhm, well, unclear. You could easily modify variables in other peoples badly designed code without being aware of it. Then, the COMMON blocks you often needed to pass parameters...? I have a hard time understanding people would actually use anything like IDL (*shrug*). R has a very clearcut lexical scoping of objects. You've got to really design your code veeery badly to fall in the same traps IDL programmers fall in on a regular basis. I've seen IDL programmers who's been in it since the beginning go WTF over scoping... It was better being a lone R user than an IDL user with a lot of support...
Also IDL attempted to get in OO in version 5 (IIRC), but it is a mess. OO designers would be rolling in their graves over this. R, OTOH, has decided not to incorporate all OO concepts, but the stuff they have done, is very clean, very easy to understand, and perfectly sound.
But the real point of R is to have very clear mapping between code and mathematics. You code your math, it is so easy to see what happens. No iterating over array indices, it simply never happens. That's extremely appealing once you've got the hang of it.
I once translated 70 lines of MATLAB code to 7 lines of R code, some interpolation stuff that didn't exist in R. Never finished it though, because I found I didn't need it, but as a proof of concept it was great. And while MATLAB code was pretty hard to grok, the R code was very straightforward, you could just show it to anyone with basic training in math, and they would immediately see what it did. Try that with code from any of the others!
I think that the basic thing is that most numerical math for physics and astronomy is right now more advanced in IDL or MATLAB. If you do any kind of statistics, you should be going over to R.
If you are willing to code, I'd argue that R is a platform so much better than IDL and MATLAB, you should be migrating your code starting now. I know I'd be writing thousands of lines of R code rather than going back to IDL (*shrug*)...:-)
Then, you know, you can't inspect the code in the core of IDL or MATLAB. It is likely to be flaws in there, and they may not have meant anything for any other problems than yours.... I got hit with three bad bugs in R when I worked with it, I manage to narrow them down, and they were all corrected within hours. To me, this is extremely important. The implementation of math should be available for review just like a derivation of equations are.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, I suppose the thing to worry about is that "War on $FOO" has resulted in that the US has ten times as many people in jail than your average social democracy in Europe....
The Press Freedom Barometer is a good source of information on this topic, and press freedom in general. Note that many countries in Europe has a "good situation" whereas the US has just a "satisfactory situation".
The problem here is that people in the US administration still equate sex with pregnancy. That's simply wrong. Norway has taken the opposite approach, really teaching details in sex ed. Teenage pregnancy rates has been low for long, but policy-makers have found that every new thing has to be met with a no-taboos approach. So, if researchers find that "whoops kids are actually having group sex", the response is to have teachers give objective information about group sex and it's risks and how to mitigate those risks. When every increase in STD and aborts are met with this approach, a corresponding decline is seen soon thereafter. It works.
The original poster had 20 class-mates getting pregnant. Among the many hundred kids in the schools I've been to, I have heard about teen pregnancies twice. My mother is a teacher, and she has never said anything about any of her pupils getting pregnant, but then, she probably wouldn't.
You can denounce teen pregnancy all you want, and you can try to mark it as socially unacceptable. But what we're dealing with here, is that this is about biology. The sexual drive is the strongest there is in mankind. You can't just fight that. It is silly and destructive to fight that.
The reality is that Bush is letting dogma stand in the way of a facts-based rational policy that is known to work.
Finally, do read this page. It is a former sex-ed site that closed, for various reasons. One of them being that freedom of expression isn't what it used to be. Take note.
Yup. The first was even on Sept 11, 1973. 3000 died that day. Sound familiar...?
It could be possible to argue that PNAC had noble motives behind their idea to conquer to free the world, if they had at the same time supported some of the worst dictators on the planet, such as Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov.
I feel it is hard to get reliable reports on what people there think, but I have heard reliable reports that many in the democratic opposition welcomed America to central asia after 911, but has later been disappointed. Also, I have heard conflicting reports on whether the conditions have deteriorated with Bush's support, or has just been in status quo. However, judging from the few reports I see, it seems like Karimov has gained a stronger position, and that he is abusing the position heavily. I collaborated with scientists in Uzbekistan on a project, but there is nothing left now. Also, the Bush administration has recently withheld economic aid, but I'm unsure whether this is genuine change of policy, or a "we don't need you anymore, bye".
Either way, I'm surprised that this is not something that would come back and haunt Bush, as it is seems like a clearcut example of hypocricy to me, which directly undermines "we are creating free countries" rhetoric.
However, HTML is not so relevant in the Semantic Web. There are many reasons for this, but I guess one is that it is expected to never get beyond tagsoup... Well, I dunno...
It is RDF that is at the core of the Semantic Web. Funny, I have been interested in RDF for six years, still I haven't had time to really sit down and read the specs, and so, I often bump into rather fundamental things I haven't grokked.
BTW, a quick, funny and interesting way to get started with the Semantic Web is FOAF: Go and generate your FOAF profile here.
I think I can say this also with my tin-foil hat off: There will be no choice. The problem is that as long as there exists a publishing channel that is not restricted by DRM, it can and will be used to distribute content that has been hacked. The fundamental problem with DRM is that it doesn't work: You can't use encryption to share a secret if one of the parties are not interested in keeping the secret.
For that reason, for DRM to work, any non-DRM distribution channel must be eliminated. This is totalitarianism. That's why they are talking about putting DRM on the routers: If you have a computer they don't trust, you will not be allowed to connect it to the Internet. That's the future we're looking at, and it is going to happen fast.
There will be no indie bands. There will be no independent news outlets. There will be no hobby film-makers. All this would go against the idea of DRM and it cannot be allowed to exist.
You may want to wave goodbye to freedom of expression while you still see it on the horizon...
That's the choice you have.
In the US, you are probably stuck, but here in Norway this was very clearly spelled out in the verdict that acquitted Jon Johansen: These are rights that copyright holders never had, it is illegitimate to try to rob the public of their rights. Thus, it wasn't illegal to develop DeCSS. We're so fortunate that we have this spelled out in court. Furthermore, we are not a member of the EU, and EUCD is not a part of the agreement we have with the EU, nor have we ratified the WIPO treaty which mandates DMCA and stuff like that.
So, in fact, what I outlined in my post is actually the current legal status around here.... It was in the US too before DMCA, but apparently you do not care enough...
And before you go "tough it's their product", may I remind of you of what the Universal Declaration of Humans Rights has to say about the matter:
Mark that: Freely participate. It doesn't say that the choice of not listening is OK. It says that it is our right to be listening to music. This is a human rights issue. Sure, you may not care about human rights, but I do.
It is very simple to get my money: 1) Provide content that I like. 2) Make it easy for my to find and check out your content, no strings, no barriers. 3) Make it easy for me to pay you. 4) Profit.
There's no ??? in that. They would get my money. And I know lots and lots of authors who fully appreciates these simple facts of life, there are just annoyingly many publishers that don't.
Stock, Aitken & Waterman was a disaster to pop music, the amount of crap these guys pushed was amazing...
This is the guy who actually destroyed pop music, and yet, somebody finds him worthwhile to listen to... That's just great...
Nope, we invited then on separate occasions to the Norwegian Conference for Physics Students... :-)
Well, yes, Iran has probably among the more vibrant blogging communities in the world. I follow a few Iranian blogs regularily. Hoder is a good starting point. And authorities are cracking down on it, pissing all the kids off. Iran is strange, on one hand, the majority of the people are highly educated, they understand democracy, and there are lots of good people in higher positions, in universities, for example. So, if one were to start a democratic revolution in the Middle East, what one should do is start cooperation with the progressive forces in Iran. Contrary to Iraq, you could actually come with a lot of support to people without aiding the mullahs. A good example of this is the CERN /Iran collaboration. With these forces gaining status and strength in society, a peaceful transition to democracy would be imminent. Many of these leading figures is of the
clear opinion that current US policy has been a severe setback.
Also note that Roque de los Muchachos Observatory at La Palma (where I've been observing) has even better conditions, but the weather at the Roque can get really bad. I've had my share of that too... Too bad Maidanak is a country that has a mad dictator... :-(
Also, I wouldn't call the VLT interferometer "clunky"... It looks impressive to me, but then I have never had any use for it...
Anyway, the conclusion is that we really need space observatories for certain applications, not least to validate ground-based observations.
I have also met Doug Osheroff and he actually got the nobel prize in 1996 for something he did as a graduate student. So, they exist too.
I'm in Norway, and I'm a physicist. I was pretty sure that there were no nuclear weapons. In fact I was very near 100% sure, and I saw absolutely no evidence for it, and when Rumsfeld used the good old, ufo/conspiracy-buff phrase "absense of evidence is not evidence of absense", well, it kind of gave it away....
It is true that the mainstream press did have quite a lot on the topic, and that the vast majority of people around here were against the war, and that they can say afterwards "what didn't we say".
Still the fact is, that neither the popular press, nor this vast majority had any clue whatsoever.
They were totally incapable of arguing about it, and there wasn't really any public debate about it here. Thus, leading politicians, such as Norway's Foreign Minister Jan Petersen could not do his job based on a solid opinion by his own people. The man is a total idiot. For one thing, after the Powellpoint-presentation, that contained nothing substantial at all, he said that it was "impressive". This guy really wanted to believe. Also, he never realized that the US was going to war no matter what. Norway has a tradition for sticking to the UN, but also looks to the US for guarantees for its security. It hasn't been a conflict there until recently. Until the last day before the attack he insisted that sticking to the UN was the right thing to do, and that the US would follow the will of the Security Council. Yeah sure...
I myself was pretty much paralyzed: I thought "it is just plain obvious that there is no nukes in Iraq, why aren't anybody saying anything". There wasn't ever anything substantial in the critique of the US WMD scaremongering. There are many physicists out there who could have said some very solid, informative and educational things, that would enable people to form a solid opinion. I guess I could have myself. But we didn't... I tried to write journalists, point them to good resources (iaea.org, for example), but failed. I was really just thinking, "somebody else with greater authority than myself have to do it." I guess everybody thought that way.
So, you USians shouldn't be too hard on yourself. We didn't "know" here either, for any sensible definition of "know". People here believed things that were contrary to the belief of many USians, but it wasn't a well-formed belief based on scientifically sound facts. They were superficial belief systems, and the reasons for them were probably similar for both sides of the pond, allthough they came out with different conclusions.
The whole thing is a total failure of the open, public debate in the entire West. There wasn't a problem of content not created. Following the iaea.org website, lending the ear to Scott Ritter now and then, writings by nuclear physists on production of arms, and the occasional opinion piece by physicists should do the trick. The blame must be shared by the media, by people in general and by the scientists who could have spoken, but did not.
But, since this is slashdot, let me blame copyright as well. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights lines up two rights, the rights of people to take advantage of scientific and artistic advancements of society and the rights of creators to be awarded. As we know, there is a balance here, and it has been distorted. This distortion has resulted in that distribution of content to advance people's understanding of issues is not a legitimate exercise in it's own right, and so, the public, open debate has suffered dramatically.
The dramatic failure of the public and open debate is largely the reason why nobody got through to the general public with substantial arguments against the WMD scare.
Well, supposedly, that's the correct answer, but I think it is also important to note that the UN is unfortunately not suited for this purpose at the moment.
As much as I am a leftie myself, I think it is extremely important for the left to realize that all the talk about oil was a mistake (even if it is partly true), and that the UN has some very real issues that prevents it from being efficient against dictators.
The UN has been built on sovereignity of nations, a good idea in principle, because people should be free to choose their own course, free to govern their own community without undue intervention from foreign parties.
Unfortunately, it happens that communities are taken over by dictators, and in that situation, I believe it is a moral imperative that mankind must come together to help those. Also, it is not universal that the nation-state is the best vehicle for a community to be built.
It is here that the UN has, and is failing so miserably. There exists no well-developed and recognized instrument to overrule nation's sovereignity, even in the case where the nation has a brutal dictator. The problem has been realized, the International Crimes Court is the first instrument the UN has that can overrule sovereignity.
It is a step in the right direction, but a very small one. Instead of whining about oil, the left should have taken the opportunity to see the flaws of the UN, and start working on resolving them urgently. I really don't see a good future for the UN if the left doesn't get working on this.
Could you please give us a direct link to a New Scientist article on this topic?
Yep, but the hose and the water is paid with my tax money. Freedom to be stupid stops when it costs me money (I do not really mean that very seriously, but you get the idea)....
We do not have these laws here in Norway, but I would have no problem advocating it.
I experienced an exploding front tire at 40 km/h, that sent me head-first into the asphalt. I did use a helmet, the helmet was completely destroyed, but it did its job. I had some severe scratch wounds (all the way down to the bone), the blood on the ground was cleaned out by the next rain... That's free... :-) I admit that I needed to see a doctor, but at least I recruited two new helmet users: The doctor who saw me told me afterwards that seeing how bad my wounds were and how well protected my skull had been made her go out and buy helmets for herself and her boyfriend...
I had been cycling for years in the woods, and flown many times before this, but never crashed. It was a reasonable thing for me to use a helmet.
However, you hear people say "I'm cycling so slow", but it doesn't matter. It isn't my demographics (somewhat experienced mountainbikers) that suffer head injuries, it is Joe Average, and around here 80% of reported bicycle accidents result in head injuries.
At this point, it is not a personal matter anymore, it actually costs society a lot to take care of people with these injuries, that often results in permanent disabilities. They are neglecting to use a very simple protective measure that actually works, whatfor? "oooh, it would destroy my haaaiiir!" Yep, sure, you crashing destroys my wallet, go buy a helmet!
It is plain stupidity not to use a helmet with bicycling. I have some tolerance for stupidity, but not when there exists a simple fix and it hurts others. If laws are needed to give the cluewhack, so be it.
Whoaaa, 690 per 100k jailed...? That's just totally insane, I think for Norway it is like a tenth of that...
The WWW also has Annotea, to allow for people to submit annotations. Now, you can imagine lots of people having a simple way to rate pages, a rating option could for example be "Supplied metadata are bad/fraudulent", or something like that.
You would first and foremost make decisions based on ratings from people you trust. That is, people who are close to you in your FOAF-based social network.
When every Internet user becomes a reviewer, and people are well connected in a social network, so that there is a review available of most pages, there is going to be a very strong incentive for authors to supply accurate metadata. Think of it as moderation.
Face it, allthough it happens that you stumble upon pr0n involuntarily, the vast majority of pr0n surfers do it on purpose. Pr0n0graphers (this is getting a bit too leet for me...) then will have strong incentive to refrain from such tactics, they will be modded into oblivion anyway, and accurate metadata is going to bring them traffic, since they are modded up by those who actually surf pr0n.
So, unless the goatse guy is a friend of yours, I don't think it is a big worry.
Provided SW becomes a reality that is.
FOAF is a really good start, though, go create it now!
The RDF geeks are allready discussing a marriage of Reiser4 and RDF.
I remember gopher, and I really can't agree... There are many good reasons why gopher didn't make it, the self-FUDing they did is one good. Another was that it was just painful to find things, despite Veronica. I know a few gopher nostalgics, but I for one is glad the world moved on, and the improvements TimBL did over gopher were huge. YMMV.
However, the C and FORTRAN bindings in R are excellent. So, if you're doing statistics on the stuff you find, you might want to look at doing the high-performance stuff in C, and wrap R around it.
Keep in mind that most of the statistics in R has undergone the most extensive peer-review by the most qualified statisticians in the field of any software (it could be true for other systems where the code is open too, but often some essential things are not). So, use the statistics in R, if you have uses for it, it is rigorous.
Anyway, what it doesn't do as well as IDL (*shrug*) is visualization. Its graphing is limited to, well, graphs. Interactive analysis with funny widgets and stuff isn't R's selling point. Nor is R very well developed for image analysis and stuff like that. I think they have multi-D fourier transforms now, but they didn't two years ago.
IDL, OTOH, doesn't really do statistics at all. For example, it doesn't come with something as fundamental as QQ-plots. Believe it or not, but every paper that comes with an assumption of normality should come with QQ-plot... Or at least have done it.
The syntax of IDL (*shrug*) is unbeliably nasty (*shrug*, aargh, sorry, couldn't resist). I heard they have done something about it now, but two years ago, IDLs concept of scoping was at best, uhm, well, unclear. You could easily modify variables in other peoples badly designed code without being aware of it. Then, the COMMON blocks you often needed to pass parameters...? I have a hard time understanding people would actually use anything like IDL (*shrug*). R has a very clearcut lexical scoping of objects. You've got to really design your code veeery badly to fall in the same traps IDL programmers fall in on a regular basis. I've seen IDL programmers who's been in it since the beginning go WTF over scoping... It was better being a lone R user than an IDL user with a lot of support...
Also IDL attempted to get in OO in version 5 (IIRC), but it is a mess. OO designers would be rolling in their graves over this. R, OTOH, has decided not to incorporate all OO concepts, but the stuff they have done, is very clean, very easy to understand, and perfectly sound.
But the real point of R is to have very clear mapping between code and mathematics. You code your math, it is so easy to see what happens. No iterating over array indices, it simply never happens. That's extremely appealing once you've got the hang of it.
I once translated 70 lines of MATLAB code to 7 lines of R code, some interpolation stuff that didn't exist in R. Never finished it though, because I found I didn't need it, but as a proof of concept it was great. And while MATLAB code was pretty hard to grok, the R code was very straightforward, you could just show it to anyone with basic training in math, and they would immediately see what it did. Try that with code from any of the others!
I think that the basic thing is that most numerical math for physics and astronomy is right now more advanced in IDL or MATLAB. If you do any kind of statistics, you should be going over to R. If you are willing to code, I'd argue that R is a platform so much better than IDL and MATLAB, you should be migrating your code starting now. I know I'd be writing thousands of lines of R code rather than going back to IDL (*shrug*)... :-)
Then, you know, you can't inspect the code in the core of IDL or MATLAB. It is likely to be flaws in there, and they may not have meant anything for any other problems than yours.... I got hit with three bad bugs in R when I worked with it, I manage to narrow them down, and they were all corrected within hours. To me, this is extremely important. The implementation of math should be available for review just like a derivation of equations are.