I've considered Progeny and may make use of them. However, they are a stop gap as there is no path forward (kernel 2.6 and so on).
If enough people are using the service I'm sure they'll be providing support for Fedora Core whatever.
However, $5/machine/year is fine.
It's $5/month/machine. It would be completely ridiculous to try and support something at $5/year. There is no possible business model that would allow that.
RHEL is $179/machine/year. And that's really workstation, not intended by Redhat for server use.
No. Go look at the link again. Red Hat Enterprise Linux consists of three products only one of which is a desktop workstation. The other two are servers. I was suggesting that you look at the ES Enterprise Server which is about $350 per year. If stability is as crucial to your business that you can't use the WS or have special server needs then you need the higher level of support: and that's going to cost you. Either in your time and skill or in cash in exchange for someone elses.
Perhaps I should have stated more clearly I was talking SERVERS, not desktop.
What you should have stated is how many machines you have, what your budget and needs for their administration is and why it is that such an operation can't afford to either pay for a rock-solid distro like RedHat or else you can't maintain it yourself.
Hate to say it, but it sounds like you're whining and bitching because you're not getting something for free and you can't do it yourself. No one owes you free support.
I'd gladly pay for patches, but the Enterprise options are why too expensive both for my current workplace and me personally.
How much would you pay for patches? How many RedHat machines does your current workplace hold and how much is a fair price for having patches available for those machines? Have you considered Progeny's transition service? Seems cheap to me at $5 per machine per month unless you have over 8 machines in which case you might as well purchase RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux)
Forgot to mention that it also has an FM radio and will also act as a voice-recorder and can record off the radio.
A friend has the previous model (Nex IIe) and says that the major problem is that the ability to arrange the songs in different subfolders or to select subsets of them easily is not as handy as in other players (unspecified) that he's looked at.
FrontierLabs Nex 'A ($239) 1Gb Microdrive CFlash USB MP3,WMA,OggVorbis 3.1"(80mm) X 2.5"(65mm) X 0.9"(22mm)
Apparently they're very active in releasing BIOS updates etc.
Yeah, I'd read a little bit about the fingerprinting rubbish: IIRC it was based on selecting out a few "significant" regions (ie it's not a whole print comparison) and seeing whether or not they're common in the compared prints. So, if you don't use all and exactly those points (and there's a real problem in objective decision of what the location of those points is each time) then the distribution that was constructed from the initial samples can't give the investigator a confidence interval.
Supposedly there's been only one large scale review of this stuff during an appeal against conviction in the late 80's and the suspects prints were sent to tens of law-enforcement labs which all replied with contradictory results.
The company said that a state police agency in the Midwest found the lie detector 89 percent accurate, compared with 83 percent for a traditional polygraph.
Anyone that accepts that the traditional polygraph has an 83% "accuracy" is obviously starting from a different viewpoint than the rest of us. Still with law-enforcement agencies being willing to hire psychics and dowsers we shouldn't be too surprised at seeing contra-rational thinking being employed by people that don't understand science.
That depends entirely on the Uni you're attending.
That is certainly true and I would guess that the standard of students entering Caltech is going to decrease the chances of them being desparate enough to cheat. In other words: you're in an elite institution and the starting pool of undergraduates is probably savvy enough and disciplined enough that cheating is a complete last resort for a small minority rather than a way of life for a large minority.
That said I'm interested in the fact that the profs have to recommend to the student-body that someone be investigated for cheating. Again, this has the potential to be biased by social pressure. Which prof wants to be the a**hole that makes people cry? Which prof isn't going to wonder how his evaluations and, more importantly, his enrollments will be affected?
The advantage of an automated system is that it would make it very hard for a prof to turn a blind-eye. I suspect a much greater level of plagiarism than is admitted in most institutions.
I'll agree that universities should have their own in-house or inter-academic-institution services for this instead of using an exterior private company.
I expressed myself a little more harshly than appropriate above because I've actually come across this situation as a TA and seen the professor avoid the issue because of the strong disincentives created by the university administration in terms of his time and career.
Frankly I think that too many cheaters get away with it and it's at a level where people that don't deserve it are graduating at the expense of their peers.
Yeah, and then when you get caught you'll cry and appeal and threaten to sue the college and the professor will have to spend more of his valuable time which is already stretched thin proving that you're a dishonest f*ck who won't take no for answer and most professors don't like to deal with all that shit, so you'll get away with a plea-bargain from the Academic-"Integrity"-Board, or whatever newspeak term your university uses. Add to this that the administration of the university don't like students being caught cheating because then they have to expel them and then the university which is a business loses their fees. Add to this that lots of rich kids with no talent, no brains and no honesty want an easy university to hand them a piece of paper that says they graduated and you have the makings of a degraded education system.
Spare me all this special pleading about the students being "assumed innocent until proven guilty". If that were the case then TAs shouldn't be so nasty as to check out a suspiciously well-written passage, they shouldn't even consider it a possibility.
This is all about cheaters whining because they'll be caught more easily. I agree that it's exactly like drug-testing in athletics and as someone that's been involved in both academia and athletics and hasn't cheated I welcome the introduction of these tests.
The choice of potato-variety (if indeed there was a conscious choice occurring -- I know nothing about that) was presumably again dictated by the desire to obtain as high a yield as possible from a very small plot of land. So again an external constraint dictated the choice, hence the external constraint is the root cause.
I'm only considering these two causes and their relation to each other because I am not aware of any others. There may be, and if so I look forward to hearing them.
I was unaware of varieties of potatoes resistant to Phytophthora infestans being available at the time. Could you provide a reference for that?
Your argument seems to insist on ignoring one contributing factor (structural constraints in choice of crop imposed from without) and focusing on another (lack of diversity in crop). That seems partial, especially when there's reason to believe that the "monoculture" would not have occured without the structural constraint. In other words the English misrule was a deeper rooted cause in the chain.
Further, your assertion that "everything would have been OK, that is not up to debate" ignores the regular evictions that took place throughout the 19th century in Ireland of families that couldn't grow enough to feed themselves and turn a handsome profit for their rackrenting landlords.
Re:The famine was due to the British, not potatoes
on
The Software Monoculture
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Just to provide a reference to the famine originating in British hands, the Von Mieses institute have a good article on the protectionist corn laws. I don't agree with much of the spin, but in essence it's correct.
The famine was due to the British, not potatoes
on
The Software Monoculture
·
· Score: 3, Informative
To make my point very clear: British theft of Irish land and the systematic exclusion of the Irish from all occupations except farming and laboring meant that the only crop which was high-yield enough to be viable on the tiny plots of land left to the Irish was the potato.
All during the famine Ireland exported corn grown on the landlord-owned estates to Britain.
I realize that this isn't the central point of the post, but the phrasing implies a foolish choice on the part of those who suffered from the forced monopoly.
Case 1: IPv4 vs IPv6 - IPv4 with NAT presents all sorts of complications and problems when trying to implement IPsec. Not least are the problems of NAT traversal which have only partial solutions available in the form of the NAT-T patches for linux-2.4 and are integrated into linux-2.6 and which can't do AH. Even if this is sorted out then there are still problems with MTU sizes leading to fragmentation as the result of protocol headers being layered within each other. IPv6 avoids these problems.
Case 3: Perl 5.x vs Perl 6 - Perl6 development is tied to the fact that the interpreter was hard to maintain due to the structure of Perl5. So, in order to maintain the interpreter and continue to make incremental developments (as the author wishes) it's necessary to clean house. There is also the desire to keep developers (people that can make improvements) involved by allowing interesting new ideas to be incorporated (such as Parrot: a multi-language interpreter)
Case 5: Netscape 4.x vs Mozilla - Well, I run mozilla on a 466MHz Celeron with 196Mb RAM and I don't see the speed difference that the author talks about.
Case 6: HTML 4 vs XHTML + CSS + XML - There's no question that CSS and XHTML make webpage scripting easier and cleaner. Thank god for these developments. The author makes no substantive argument here
Explain please what you mean by "that film" which is being looked at?
Examples of how your privacy is decreased by pervasive widespread gathering of visual images include cases where insurance companies have gathered data on people who are supposedly indisposed in some way, the consolidation of data from private shop cameras in the hunt for IRA suspects in the Isle of Dogs bombings circa late 90s. These demonstrate that the technical capacity to identify people that weren't being specifically being tracked exists.
Now construct a scenario in which you want to do something but not be caught doing it: you can't, not any more. Yes this will affect speeders but it'll also affect you.
Oh, you don't do anything wrong? Good for you, better hope the beliefs of those governing society cohere with yours.
Of course, the energy expended in retrieving the helium-3 would negate any benefit from fusing it.
Really? What estimates do you base that upon? I'm totally ignorant on the subject so I'd appreciate any insights you have.
Manned space flight is a solution searching desperately for a problem. Please solve it with your own cash. We have better uses for the money here on Earth.
I don't know if you're just regurgitating a pre-formatted polemic there, but you are laboring under the misunderstanding that I'm in favor of manned space flight.
Just to make my position clear: I see this announcement as a boondoggle for the Military-Industrial complex. I'm in favor of non-manned space missions and pure science which obtains information and knowledge. I'm also in favor of spending a hell of a lot more money (obtained by ramping up taxes on anyone making more than $80,000 per annum) on schools, welfare and healthcare.
There's an stream of an interview with Bruce Gagnon and James Van Allen (of Van Allen Belt fame) on DemocracyNOW! which raises some of my concerns.
Thanks in any event for your response above.
Links to media from the University of Wisconsin about helium-3
Monitoring will catch those people after the fact and decrease your privacy into the bargain. Better solution is to ban private automobiles in high-denisty urban environments and replace them with buses and trains and cycling.
In the school instance, i was in a small rural school, and we borrowed math textbooks from a neighboring school because we "couldn't afford them". Yet, during that same year, the school began construction on a $2,000,000 Gym and put $45,000 of new sod on the baseball field. We need to restructure and reorganize most of the gov't. And o yeah - Go Bush!:) Flame away libs:)
1. A personal anecdote (especially one unsupported by any verifiable reference) doesn't contribute anything to the debate. The facts are that On a further note, I'd agree with you that reform of government is needed: the introduction of voucher/privatization schemes has been massively inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with a publically accountable redistribution of money from the wealthy to public school programs. In other words let's crank up the welfare state and big government so that it really works instead of starving it of funds.
Even if your example is kosher it seems to prove my point in that the situation you describe is a microcosm of what is happening with the funnelling of public monies into the space program. If we continue down this path then kids will remain without textbooks (and possibly gyms and sports fields) while the nation basks in the glory of manned space missions.
Honestly, can't any of you people think? All this squabbling about Bush or "libs" is so beside the point that it's not even funny. Drop your high-school pom-pom and start looking at the wider picture.
Interesting points. Thanks for sticking to the topic rather than engaging in the (anti)Bush bunfight.
1) Very little to control.
2) The pursuit of such warfare is ultimately as futile and self destructive as nuclear weaponry.
I hadn't thought about the huge mass of space debris and it's an interesting problem. But how much would it cost to get up enough debris to blanket every possible shell of orbit? I know that people have proposed anti-satellite weapons that essentially release a cloud of sand-grain sized particles, but how large a volume of orbit would that be able to cover?
Also if a country succeeds in establishing military bases on the moon then all they'll have to do is to travel through the aread between earth/moon. The moon itself has been reported to contain a significant mass of Helium-3 which would be a vast resource of energy in the hands of whoever gets there first. This could be used for powering whatever "control of the space volume around earth" plans that country has.
On a final note, one of the links above is to Counterpunch.org article by Bruce Gagnon and details the plans for Project Prometheus which apparently entails the use of nuclear powered rockets: a significant development in terms of risk.
Agree with your post in general, but one factor that hasn't been mentioned so far (which surprises me) but is alluded to in your post is the military aspect of all this.
The place to cut is in military spending. The war in Iraq would have paid for a lot of space travel, unfortunately it paid for blowing up buildings instead. We have lots of highly specialized weapons that are very expensive - millions of dollars per explosion. Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money. Cut back on unilateral foreign wars, and you'd save even more.
However there are those that argue that the whole space program is entirely about the military and I find this argument persuasive from several angles. Control of space is currently up for grabs. The International Space Station has been an interesting experiment, but for practical control of space a moon-base would probably be more practical. The control of space has always been an issue and has recently become a policy goal of the USA.
The presence of a large slush-fund for "space exploration" provides a huge amount of money for the companies in the Military Industrial Complex who are able to apply technologies developed for that ostensible purpose back to military and commercial projects.
So, guess where the money is going? To the kids that lack textbooks, healthcare and lobbyists or to the slick, plausible, verbose representatives of millions of dollars in campaign funds?
But there would have been at least one positive aspect mentioned: mp3 support would be available and there would be no confusing multiplicty of applications!
Why oh why, if you aren't interested in Lego stories did you take the time to post a comment about it?
Why oh why, do you assume that I'm "not interested" in Lego stories when I post a comment about there being too many Lego stories? No I can't filter it out because I'm interested in the "Toys" section and a category for "Mind-numbingly boring follow ups that should have been posted as additions to the thread of a few days ago" doesn't exist. Get off your high-horse and stop assuming that you're part of the Lego-fans-crucified-by-fascists.
This comment was posted to the story because 1)it's about the story, 2)the editors are likely to see it here
Believe it or not, there are people on this site who care about Lego. This is not "Slashdot- News for crush. Stuff that only matters to crush."
Believe it or not there are people on this site who care about Lego but don't want the site stuffed full of information about Lego's latest business plans. This is not "Slashdot-News only about Lego. Stuff that only matters to Lego shareholders".
this is a lame follow-up to the story about Mindstorms being dropped. "Slashdot - News that you don't care about. Stuff that you've heard about already". Come on editors -- there's lots of interesting science and tech stories.
I agree with the author in the broad thrust of his argument: that there is something useful in the technique of deconstruction but it's hard to tell what it is because there are no objective standards by which to measure things. I thought the sample deconstruction was excellent -- did no one else wonder why anyone would bother to discuss whether or not John F. Kennedy were homosexual?
I do wonder whether or not his assertion that commercial pressures keep engineers and others more "realistic" is true though. What about all the work done by scientists and statisticians in the employ of tobacco companies? Did they just look in the wrong place for the evidence? It can be plausibly argued that commercial pressures distort objectivity and hide truths as argued in this essay by Edward S. Herman:
Democratic and consumer-oriented systems would place testing in the hands of the EPA or independent (non-corporate funded) testing agencies. But the producers successfully prevent this. They have also been unwilling to place money into a blind pool for independent testing--they want testing to be left in their own hands, to assure an appropriate bias.
The point is supported by other essays on the subject Science, Rationality, Post-Modernism and the Left. The nice thing about this, however, is that there are objective scientific standards that can be used to inform public policy if we decide to apply those standards: if there weren't then the managerial-PoMos would walk all over us.
Other posters have already mentioned the Sokal's Hoax affair and might find another essay on the subject Post-Modernism and Science interesting.
WARNING: all the above information comes from people who agree with Karl Marx on many things. Edward S. Hermann was Noam Chomsky's co-author on Manufacturing Consent and Michael Albert is the editor/publisher of Z Magazine. To be sure these people are more anarchist or social-libertarian than anything, but they're probably in agreement with Marx about significant numbers of things. So, if you're afraid of reading ideas you may not agree with don't, for the love of mike, open any of those links. Just open another tin of Instant Dismissal and whip it up well with some bile until it froths.
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Hate to say it, but it sounds like you're whining and bitching because you're not getting something for free and you can't do it yourself. No one owes you free support.
Forgot to mention that it also has an FM radio and will also act as a voice-recorder and can record off the radio.
A friend has the previous model (Nex IIe) and says that the major problem is that the ability to arrange the songs in different subfolders or to select subsets of them easily is not as handy as in other players (unspecified) that he's looked at.
FrontierLabs Nex 'A ($239) 1Gb Microdrive CFlash USB MP3,WMA,OggVorbis 3.1"(80mm) X 2.5"(65mm) X 0.9"(22mm)
Apparently they're very active in releasing BIOS updates etc.
Yeah, I'd read a little bit about the fingerprinting rubbish: IIRC it was based on selecting out a few "significant" regions (ie it's not a whole print comparison) and seeing whether or not they're common in the compared prints. So, if you don't use all and exactly those points (and there's a real problem in objective decision of what the location of those points is each time) then the distribution that was constructed from the initial samples can't give the investigator a confidence interval.
Supposedly there's been only one large scale review of this stuff during an appeal against conviction in the late 80's and the suspects prints were sent to tens of law-enforcement labs which all replied with contradictory results.
Anyone that accepts that the traditional polygraph has an 83% "accuracy" is obviously starting from a different viewpoint than the rest of us. Still with law-enforcement agencies being willing to hire psychics and dowsers we shouldn't be too surprised at seeing contra-rational thinking being employed by people that don't understand science.
That is certainly true and I would guess that the standard of students entering Caltech is going to decrease the chances of them being desparate enough to cheat. In other words: you're in an elite institution and the starting pool of undergraduates is probably savvy enough and disciplined enough that cheating is a complete last resort for a small minority rather than a way of life for a large minority.
That said I'm interested in the fact that the profs have to recommend to the student-body that someone be investigated for cheating. Again, this has the potential to be biased by social pressure. Which prof wants to be the a**hole that makes people cry? Which prof isn't going to wonder how his evaluations and, more importantly, his enrollments will be affected?
The advantage of an automated system is that it would make it very hard for a prof to turn a blind-eye. I suspect a much greater level of plagiarism than is admitted in most institutions.
I'll agree that universities should have their own in-house or inter-academic-institution services for this instead of using an exterior private company.
I expressed myself a little more harshly than appropriate above because I've actually come across this situation as a TA and seen the professor avoid the issue because of the strong disincentives created by the university administration in terms of his time and career.
Frankly I think that too many cheaters get away with it and it's at a level where people that don't deserve it are graduating at the expense of their peers.
Spare me all this special pleading about the students being "assumed innocent until proven guilty". If that were the case then TAs shouldn't be so nasty as to check out a suspiciously well-written passage, they shouldn't even consider it a possibility.
This is all about cheaters whining because they'll be caught more easily. I agree that it's exactly like drug-testing in athletics and as someone that's been involved in both academia and athletics and hasn't cheated I welcome the introduction of these tests.
The choice of potato-variety (if indeed there was a conscious choice occurring -- I know nothing about that) was presumably again dictated by the desire to obtain as high a yield as possible from a very small plot of land. So again an external constraint dictated the choice, hence the external constraint is the root cause.
I'm only considering these two causes and their relation to each other because I am not aware of any others. There may be, and if so I look forward to hearing them.
I was unaware of varieties of potatoes resistant to Phytophthora infestans being available at the time. Could you provide a reference for that?
Your argument seems to insist on ignoring one contributing factor (structural constraints in choice of crop imposed from without) and focusing on another (lack of diversity in crop). That seems partial, especially when there's reason to believe that the "monoculture" would not have occured without the structural constraint. In other words the English misrule was a deeper rooted cause in the chain.
Further, your assertion that "everything would have been OK, that is not up to debate" ignores the regular evictions that took place throughout the 19th century in Ireland of families that couldn't grow enough to feed themselves and turn a handsome profit for their rackrenting landlords.
Just to provide a reference to the famine originating in British hands, the Von Mieses institute have a good article on the protectionist corn laws. I don't agree with much of the spin, but in essence it's correct.
To make my point very clear: British theft of Irish land and the systematic exclusion of the Irish from all occupations except farming and laboring meant that the only crop which was high-yield enough to be viable on the tiny plots of land left to the Irish was the potato.
All during the famine Ireland exported corn grown on the landlord-owned estates to Britain.
I realize that this isn't the central point of the post, but the phrasing implies a foolish choice on the part of those who suffered from the forced monopoly.
Explain please what you mean by "that film" which is being looked at?
Examples of how your privacy is decreased by pervasive widespread gathering of visual images include cases where insurance companies have gathered data on people who are supposedly indisposed in some way, the consolidation of data from private shop cameras in the hunt for IRA suspects in the Isle of Dogs bombings circa late 90s. These demonstrate that the technical capacity to identify people that weren't being specifically being tracked exists.
Now construct a scenario in which you want to do something but not be caught doing it: you can't, not any more. Yes this will affect speeders but it'll also affect you.
Oh, you don't do anything wrong? Good for you, better hope the beliefs of those governing society cohere with yours.
I don't know if you're just regurgitating a pre-formatted polemic there, but you are laboring under the misunderstanding that I'm in favor of manned space flight.
Just to make my position clear: I see this announcement as a boondoggle for the Military-Industrial complex. I'm in favor of non-manned space missions and pure science which obtains information and knowledge. I'm also in favor of spending a hell of a lot more money (obtained by ramping up taxes on anyone making more than $80,000 per annum) on schools, welfare and healthcare.
There's an stream of an interview with Bruce Gagnon and James Van Allen (of Van Allen Belt fame) on DemocracyNOW! which raises some of my concerns.
Thanks in any event for your response above.
Links to media from the University of Wisconsin about helium-3Monitoring will catch those people after the fact and decrease your privacy into the bargain. Better solution is to ban private automobiles in high-denisty urban environments and replace them with buses and trains and cycling.
- 1. A personal anecdote (especially one unsupported by any verifiable reference) doesn't contribute anything to the debate. The facts are that On a further note, I'd agree with you that reform of government is needed: the introduction of voucher/privatization schemes has been massively inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with a publically accountable redistribution of money from the wealthy to public school programs. In other words let's crank up the welfare state and big government so that it really works instead of starving it of funds.
- Even if your example is kosher it seems to prove my point in that the situation you describe is a microcosm of what is happening with the funnelling of public monies into the space program. If we continue down this path then kids will remain without textbooks (and possibly gyms and sports fields) while the nation basks in the glory of manned space missions.
Honestly, can't any of you people think? All this squabbling about Bush or "libs" is so beside the point that it's not even funny. Drop your high-school pom-pom and start looking at the wider picture.I hadn't thought about the huge mass of space debris and it's an interesting problem. But how much would it cost to get up enough debris to blanket every possible shell of orbit?
I know that people have proposed anti-satellite weapons that essentially release a cloud of sand-grain sized particles, but how large a volume of orbit would that be able to cover?
Also if a country succeeds in establishing military bases on the moon then all they'll have to do is to travel through the aread between earth/moon. The moon itself has been reported to contain a significant mass of Helium-3 which would be a vast resource of energy in the hands of whoever gets there first. This could be used for powering whatever "control of the space volume around earth" plans that country has.
On a final note, one of the links above is to Counterpunch.org article by Bruce Gagnon and details the plans for Project Prometheus which apparently entails the use of nuclear powered rockets: a significant development in terms of risk.
Agree with your post in general, but one factor that hasn't been mentioned so far (which surprises me) but is alluded to in your post is the military aspect of all this.
However there are those that argue that the whole space program is entirely about the military and I find this argument persuasive from several angles. Control of space is currently up for grabs. The International Space Station has been an interesting experiment, but for practical control of space a moon-base would probably be more practical. The control of space has always been an issue and has recently become a policy goal of the USA.
The presence of a large slush-fund for "space exploration" provides a huge amount of money for the companies in the Military Industrial Complex who are able to apply technologies developed for that ostensible purpose back to military and commercial projects.
So, guess where the money is going? To the kids that lack textbooks, healthcare and lobbyists or to the slick, plausible, verbose representatives of millions of dollars in campaign funds?
But there would have been at least one positive aspect mentioned: mp3 support would be available and there would be no confusing multiplicty of applications!
Was also unveiled. It is based around an iPod-like module which uses the same Toshiba harddrive as the iPod and a Transmeta chip.
Why oh why, do you assume that I'm "not interested" in Lego stories when I post a comment about there being too many Lego stories? No I can't filter it out because I'm interested in the "Toys" section and a category for "Mind-numbingly boring follow ups that should have been posted as additions to the thread of a few days ago" doesn't exist. Get off your high-horse and stop assuming that you're part of the Lego-fans-crucified-by-fascists.
This comment was posted to the story because 1)it's about the story, 2)the editors are likely to see it here
Believe it or not there are people on this site who care about Lego but don't want the site stuffed full of information about Lego's latest business plans. This is not "Slashdot-News only about Lego. Stuff that only matters to Lego shareholders".
this is a lame follow-up to the story about Mindstorms being dropped. "Slashdot - News that you don't care about. Stuff that you've heard about already". Come on editors -- there's lots of interesting science and tech stories.
I agree with the author in the broad thrust of his argument: that there is something useful in the technique of deconstruction but it's hard to tell what it is because there are no objective standards by which to measure things. I thought the sample deconstruction was excellent -- did no one else wonder why anyone would bother to discuss whether or not John F. Kennedy were homosexual?
I do wonder whether or not his assertion that commercial pressures keep engineers and others more "realistic" is true though. What about all the work done by scientists and statisticians in the employ of tobacco companies? Did they just look in the wrong place for the evidence? It can be plausibly argued that commercial pressures distort objectivity and hide truths as argued in this essay by Edward S. Herman:
The point is supported by other essays on the subject Science, Rationality, Post-Modernism and the Left. The nice thing about this, however, is that there are objective scientific standards that can be used to inform public policy if we decide to apply those standards: if there weren't then the managerial-PoMos would walk all over us.
Other posters have already mentioned the Sokal's Hoax affair and might find another essay on the subject Post-Modernism and Science interesting.
WARNING: all the above information comes from people who agree with Karl Marx on many things. Edward S. Hermann was Noam Chomsky's co-author on Manufacturing Consent and Michael Albert is the editor/publisher of Z Magazine. To be sure these people are more anarchist or social-libertarian than anything, but they're probably in agreement with Marx about significant numbers of things. So, if you're afraid of reading ideas you may not agree with don't, for the love of mike, open any of those links. Just open another tin of Instant Dismissal and whip it up well with some bile until it froths.