Your claims about the gym are foolish too; treadmills help you keep a more constant pace, and I doubt those bodybuilders would be as big from doing their dishes and laundry by hand.
As brainwashed consumers, what counts to us is the purchase of exercise equipment, gym memberships, and workout fashions, not what we actually do with them. Every American knows that you can't really benefit from exercise unless you've paid money to someone for the privilege!
Some great writers are poor spellers, and some poor spellers are great writers.
Not so sure I agree with that. Any examples?
If any American stereotype is being fulfilled here, it is that they are loud and opinionated despite being ill-informed
Now that I do agree with. It's not (so much) that Americans are any more stupid or ignorant than people in any other country; it's that we are able to take such pride in it that makes us so wonderful.
If you conduct 20 studies of a statistical relationship that each accept significance at the 5% level, then the probability is excellent (64%, actually) that at least one of them will show a positive result completely by chance.
Since positive results tend to get published and negative results do not, too many studies of a hypothesis will likely show it to be true, completely spuriously.
when you have the gov't throw around billions like candy at halloween, why are we surprised that people will do this kind of stuff?
There is a great deal of money involved, as you suggest, but these grants are not at all easy to get and involve a lengthy review process. The competition for them is very fierce. Unfortunately, as an academic researcher your career may depend on your ability to win awards that are denied close to 90% of the time on average. Hence the incentive to bend the truth or commit outright fraud is quite strong, not because there is too much money being "thrown around", but rather because the process is so competitive and success rates are so low.
The conviction and sentence is a good thing because, as the article says, there has to be a strong disincentive to this kind of behavior to prevent it from becoming rampant and compromising the entire scientific enterprise.
So once we've spent a few hundreds of billions on all of this whiz-bang security and surveillance technology, we'll all finally be completely safe from the bogeymen. And free, too, right?
But it's good for sellers, since somebody ends up paying more than any of the bidders originally intended.
Part of the problem is the psychology of "winning" an auction. This isn't really winning in the sense of winning the lottery or a poker hand; it merely means that you're paying more for something than anyone else is willing to pay. Yet for many people, the feeling is akin to "winning" and they're willing to pay more to achieve it. Strange and irrational, indeed...
Absolutely. When I was growing up back in the 60s, there were tons of kids in the neighborhood - baby boom, after all - and we all knew how to make our own fun without adult interference. The doors would fly open and kids would head out into their own world, and as long as you were back by dinnertime everything was cool. These days I see how tightly scheduled and supervised my nieces and nephews and neighbor kids are, and it makes me feel fortunate I grew up when I did. It's possible that kids now are getting something positive out of this new environment; perhaps they're learning to take instruction and be good employees, I don't know. What they're not learning, however, is leadership, creativity, and initiative. I often wonder what the long-term political consequences of that are, and whether I really want to be around to see it.
There's an article of faith to be taken here, I think. One of the most remarkable things about the physical world is that it turns out to be so universally mathematical, and to a high degree of precision. So when we are presented with mathematics that are particularly powerful and beautiful, it's tempting to believe that they are physical as well. And they very well may be, although we'll probably never know with any certainty.
IANAL, but I don't see how this liability could apply to someone who isn't accepting payment in return for the software. You're putting the code on a server somewhere where people can download it as they wish. Is there any more of an implied warranty than if I pick something out of your trash that then doesn't work properly? Things might be different if someone is paying you for support, though.
Companies like Microsoft may like this kind of thing only because they could then tout their own propriety software as "warranteed", while pointing out that FOSS is not. That may be enough to keep FOSS out of many corporate environments. As things stand now, EULAs pretty much absolve vendors of any responsibility whatsoever, and so most proprietary software is no better warranteed than FOSS is. They might be willing to accept some liability just to differentiate themselves.
Big companies know how to do the lawsuit game as well as anyone. It is the little mom-and-pop webshops that would not survive.
Oh, I dunno... A big class action suit, in which the individual plaintiffs don't have to do much of anything, could be a really big deal for a commercial software vendor, even one as big as Microsoft.
You can bet that MS and other big commercial vendors would never allow this kind of thing unless they also got a law that makes it very difficult to sue them, especially in a class action. Of course, the Republicans have been trying to make it more difficult for individuals to confront corporations for some time now; if they succeed it could change everything.
More like Cointelpro, actually, 35 years ago during the Nixon administration. Nixon was using the FBI and IRS to go after his critics and other political dissidents in a variety of underhanded ways.
What we have going now under Bush is potentially far more efficent, though. Instead of making life miserable for just a few hundred selected targets, they'll be able to cast a dragnet that will snare millions of political undesirables. Initially, the intent will be to intimidate, rather than imprison them. We'll all think twice about posting that insightful comment on Slashdot once we suspect that there might be real and significant consequences.
That project of course is the "Dumbing Down of America" -project that started with politics and social sciences, then went on to encompass history, then geography and now I guess science is next.
If you want to understand why the Republican Party (in particular) is so hostile to science and scientists, consider something that Jeff Bezos (the Amazon founder) said in an interview a few months ago, in a completely different context.
To paraphrase, he said that there are two kinds of decisions that executives face: those that are based on facts, and those that require mainly intuition. The former kind tend to subvert the hierarchy, because anyone who has the facts and the ability to interpret them can win the day, regardless of where he/she is on the organizational chart. Decisions of the latter type, however, demand seasoned, experienced executives who have been around the block a few times.
Now, what science does is to move more decisions from the realm of the intuitive to the realm of the fact-based. If you're a despot or a despot-wannabe, this is not acceptable. When scientists and experts can tell you what you have to do, your power is being limited by people way down the hierarchy. Your power isn't truly absolute unless it's completely arbitrary, and you can do whatever you want for whatever reason you want. That's pretty much a requirement if you want to maintain and expand your power by consistently rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.
Seen in this way, the actions and attitudes of the Bush administration with regard to science start to make a lot of sense.
I'm glad you care about those 5000 workers. Thats nice. Unfortunately, its also stupid.
Well, you know, it's possible to have a little compassion for the people who are going to lose their jobs without suggesting that Sun was wrong to let them go. Nowhere in the parent post was it implied that the RIF was wrong or even unnecessary. So why all the righteous indignation? It's one thing not to have empathy, but quite another to be actively offended by it in others.
Bet good money that most of the people who are or will be advesely affected by this surveilance have little or no connection with terrorism.
Everyone's aware of the likelihood that it will be used against political opponents and dissidents (think Watergate without the messy breakin), but imagine the potential for gathering valuable commercial intelligence. For the price of a substantial campaign contribution to the right political party (which one, I wonder?), your company can have access to all sorts of information about what your competitors, suppliers, and customers are up to. That'll pull in way more cash than any anti-terrorism sideline they may be running.
Of course that would require a culture of corruption in government, something that the voters would never tolerate...
I'm surprised I had to read so far down to find this, the real reason. Stuff gets shipped because somebody needs to make their numbers, now. Sometimes the survival of the company is at stake, and sometimes it's just an individual climbing the career ladder.
In a previous life I was in charge of software development for a smallish company whose business was scientific software and systems. To my repeated horror, the CEO and the Sales & Marketing VP would get together and decree - perhaps for reasons that were very compelling to them - that major software packages would be released to customers with no testing whatsoever. Stuff went straight from the compiler to the customer, sometimes even without a cursory walkthrough of functionality. For objecting, we, the software people, were branded as troublemakers and criticized for not being "team players". Once labeled in that way, I would be pretty much ignored any time I had to report that a new product or an update was not ready to ship. Needless to say, I left that company in a hail of bullets.
To this day, I still laugh when I hear people say that Open Source software can never measure up to "commercial standards". Depends on whose commercial standards you're talking about...
But what if you work hard for a well-connected company, say, like Halliburton, and you find that some other upstart company is bidding against you for big juicy contracts to relocate the old Berlin Wall to southern Texas. Wouldn't you want your friends in the NSA to let you in on what your pesky competitors are talking about? I would - a lot of money could be at stake.
Further, if the case went through and won it would mean that nothing could be given away for free, and possibly that the internet is illegal because it takes away from the market for books on the subject.
Yet it's the same basic strategy followed by the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk. Of course they want to limit piracy of copyrighted materials, but they also want to close down low-cost channels for the distribution of large binary files whether copyrighted or not. Their cartels are based on control over distribution, and a world in which any artist can distribute efficiently and at little cost is a big, big threat to that control.
Back in the day, we used these thingies called "text editors" to do all that stuff. But definitely, it's worth sending everybody in the company off to a two-week training course so's they can learn to format real purdy-like.
I bought a ThinkPad 600E on eBay several years ago and have had no problems with it or with running Linux on it. It's slow by today's standards, of course (366 MHz), but still does everything I ask. The same money that I paid for that (around $400-450) will now get you a T-23 or T-30. I'm thinking of doing that, but please don't all start bidding against me at once.
As was mentioned in the first post, the main problem to watch out for is WiFi compatibility. Not all manufacturers of wireless cards are good about making their specs available to driver developers. Try the Linux & Wireless LANs page for more information on what works and what doesn't...
Slashdot Mirror
Your claims about the gym are foolish too; treadmills help you keep a more constant pace, and I doubt those bodybuilders would be as big from doing their dishes and laundry by hand.
As brainwashed consumers, what counts to us is the purchase of exercise equipment, gym memberships, and workout fashions, not what we actually do with them. Every American knows that you can't really benefit from exercise unless you've paid money to someone for the privilege!
Not so sure I agree with that. Any examples?
If any American stereotype is being fulfilled here, it is that they are loud and opinionated despite being ill-informed
Now that I do agree with. It's not (so much) that Americans are any more stupid or ignorant than people in any other country; it's that we are able to take such pride in it that makes us so wonderful.
A simple example:
If you conduct 20 studies of a statistical relationship that each accept significance at the 5% level, then the probability is excellent (64%, actually) that at least one of them will show a positive result completely by chance.
Since positive results tend to get published and negative results do not, too many studies of a hypothesis will likely show it to be true, completely spuriously.
when you have the gov't throw around billions like candy at halloween, why are we surprised that people will do this kind of stuff?
There is a great deal of money involved, as you suggest, but these grants are not at all easy to get and involve a lengthy review process. The competition for them is very fierce. Unfortunately, as an academic researcher your career may depend on your ability to win awards that are denied close to 90% of the time on average. Hence the incentive to bend the truth or commit outright fraud is quite strong, not because there is too much money being "thrown around", but rather because the process is so competitive and success rates are so low.
The conviction and sentence is a good thing because, as the article says, there has to be a strong disincentive to this kind of behavior to prevent it from becoming rampant and compromising the entire scientific enterprise.
Could this finally be the gadget through which I find True Happiness?
All of the others have been disappointments in that regard...
So once we've spent a few hundreds of billions on all of this whiz-bang security and surveillance technology, we'll all finally be completely safe from the bogeymen. And free, too, right?
But it's good for sellers, since somebody ends up paying more than any of the bidders originally intended.
Part of the problem is the psychology of "winning" an auction. This isn't really winning in the sense of winning the lottery or a poker hand; it merely means that you're paying more for something than anyone else is willing to pay. Yet for many people, the feeling is akin to "winning" and they're willing to pay more to achieve it. Strange and irrational, indeed...
Keep in mind that "winning" an auction only means that you're willing to pay more for something than anyone else...
Absolutely. When I was growing up back in the 60s, there were tons of kids in the neighborhood - baby boom, after all - and we all knew how to make our own fun without adult interference. The doors would fly open and kids would head out into their own world, and as long as you were back by dinnertime everything was cool. These days I see how tightly scheduled and supervised my nieces and nephews and neighbor kids are, and it makes me feel fortunate I grew up when I did. It's possible that kids now are getting something positive out of this new environment; perhaps they're learning to take instruction and be good employees, I don't know. What they're not learning, however, is leadership, creativity, and initiative. I often wonder what the long-term political consequences of that are, and whether I really want to be around to see it.
There's an article of faith to be taken here, I think. One of the most remarkable things about the physical world is that it turns out to be so universally mathematical, and to a high degree of precision. So when we are presented with mathematics that are particularly powerful and beautiful, it's tempting to believe that they are physical as well. And they very well may be, although we'll probably never know with any certainty.
Perhaps we can find a way to exempt ourselves and our top campaign contributors from any such restrictions, however...
IANAL, but I don't see how this liability could apply to someone who isn't accepting payment in return for the software. You're putting the code on a server somewhere where people can download it as they wish. Is there any more of an implied warranty than if I pick something out of your trash that then doesn't work properly? Things might be different if someone is paying you for support, though.
Companies like Microsoft may like this kind of thing only because they could then tout their own propriety software as "warranteed", while pointing out that FOSS is not. That may be enough to keep FOSS out of many corporate environments. As things stand now, EULAs pretty much absolve vendors of any responsibility whatsoever, and so most proprietary software is no better warranteed than FOSS is. They might be willing to accept some liability just to differentiate themselves.
Oh, I dunno... A big class action suit, in which the individual plaintiffs don't have to do much of anything, could be a really big deal for a commercial software vendor, even one as big as Microsoft.
You can bet that MS and other big commercial vendors would never allow this kind of thing unless they also got a law that makes it very difficult to sue them, especially in a class action. Of course, the Republicans have been trying to make it more difficult for individuals to confront corporations for some time now; if they succeed it could change everything.
More like Cointelpro, actually, 35 years ago during the Nixon administration. Nixon was using the FBI and IRS to go after his critics and other political dissidents in a variety of underhanded ways.
What we have going now under Bush is potentially far more efficent, though. Instead of making life miserable for just a few hundred selected targets, they'll be able to cast a dragnet that will snare millions of political undesirables. Initially, the intent will be to intimidate, rather than imprison them. We'll all think twice about posting that insightful comment on Slashdot once we suspect that there might be real and significant consequences.
Then 10% know better, I'd say. Selling your equity for more, rather than less, certainly counts as "making money" in my book!
Um, where in the parent post was anything at all said about profit?
If you want to understand why the Republican Party (in particular) is so hostile to science and scientists, consider something that Jeff Bezos (the Amazon founder) said in an interview a few months ago, in a completely different context.
To paraphrase, he said that there are two kinds of decisions that executives face: those that are based on facts, and those that require mainly intuition. The former kind tend to subvert the hierarchy, because anyone who has the facts and the ability to interpret them can win the day, regardless of where he/she is on the organizational chart. Decisions of the latter type, however, demand seasoned, experienced executives who have been around the block a few times.
Now, what science does is to move more decisions from the realm of the intuitive to the realm of the fact-based. If you're a despot or a despot-wannabe, this is not acceptable. When scientists and experts can tell you what you have to do, your power is being limited by people way down the hierarchy. Your power isn't truly absolute unless it's completely arbitrary, and you can do whatever you want for whatever reason you want. That's pretty much a requirement if you want to maintain and expand your power by consistently rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.
Seen in this way, the actions and attitudes of the Bush administration with regard to science start to make a lot of sense.
Well, you know, it's possible to have a little compassion for the people who are going to lose their jobs without suggesting that Sun was wrong to let them go. Nowhere in the parent post was it implied that the RIF was wrong or even unnecessary. So why all the righteous indignation? It's one thing not to have empathy, but quite another to be actively offended by it in others.
Point proven, I'd say...
Everyone's aware of the likelihood that it will be used against political opponents and dissidents (think Watergate without the messy breakin), but imagine the potential for gathering valuable commercial intelligence. For the price of a substantial campaign contribution to the right political party (which one, I wonder?), your company can have access to all sorts of information about what your competitors, suppliers, and customers are up to. That'll pull in way more cash than any anti-terrorism sideline they may be running.
Of course that would require a culture of corruption in government, something that the voters would never tolerate...
In a previous life I was in charge of software development for a smallish company whose business was scientific software and systems. To my repeated horror, the CEO and the Sales & Marketing VP would get together and decree - perhaps for reasons that were very compelling to them - that major software packages would be released to customers with no testing whatsoever. Stuff went straight from the compiler to the customer, sometimes even without a cursory walkthrough of functionality. For objecting, we, the software people, were branded as troublemakers and criticized for not being "team players". Once labeled in that way, I would be pretty much ignored any time I had to report that a new product or an update was not ready to ship. Needless to say, I left that company in a hail of bullets.
To this day, I still laugh when I hear people say that Open Source software can never measure up to "commercial standards". Depends on whose commercial standards you're talking about...
But what if you work hard for a well-connected company, say, like Halliburton, and you find that some other upstart company is bidding against you for big juicy contracts to relocate the old Berlin Wall to southern Texas. Wouldn't you want your friends in the NSA to let you in on what your pesky competitors are talking about? I would - a lot of money could be at stake.
Yet it's the same basic strategy followed by the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk. Of course they want to limit piracy of copyrighted materials, but they also want to close down low-cost channels for the distribution of large binary files whether copyrighted or not. Their cartels are based on control over distribution, and a world in which any artist can distribute efficiently and at little cost is a big, big threat to that control.
Back in the day, we used these thingies called "text editors" to do all that stuff. But definitely, it's worth sending everybody in the company off to a two-week training course so's they can learn to format real purdy-like.
As was mentioned in the first post, the main problem to watch out for is WiFi compatibility. Not all manufacturers of wireless cards are good about making their specs available to driver developers. Try the Linux & Wireless LANs page for more information on what works and what doesn't...