Perhaps you'd clarify a few items for me? (1) What exactly is your strategy for defending yourself against a government run amok when they possess tanks, heavy artilley, high-performance aircraft, a formidable navy, well-trained infantry, extremely capable commando units, high explosives, germ warfare stockpiles, and nuclear weapons? (2) If you are under the impression that a revolution will happen, I'd like to know how exactly you are going to organize the revolution when the government can control at will all forms of communication except your voice. Yeah, you can shout things out over your rooftop, but that would also make you a marked man for the first government sniper.
Simply put, this "defense against the government" argument put forward by the righ-wing nuts, may have been valid in the 1800's but is just so much horseshit these days. I'd urge you to go see the documentary "The Revolution will not be televised" now playing in US theatres and keep in mind one thing - the inequity between the firepower and capabilities of first world governments when compared to the general population far exceeds the the inequity between the government of Venezuela and its people.
Yeah, I know. This is offtopic. Unfortunately, it is never wise to not respond to right-wing nuts - they are prone to take silence as meaning that they won the argument.
That depends on the nature of the problem doesnt it? If the problem was caused by a dust storm blowing a rock onto Spirit (just a silly example - dont take it literally), there wouldnt be anything to fix on Opportunity, right? Actually, the question you asked was asked by a journalist during one of the NASA briefings, and the answer was something along the lines of "..it depends on the root cause of the problem....". And if its a hardware failure, there might not be a software fix anyway (even though there might be a procedural fix to avoid causing the hardware failure).
Uh....they did show one of the "checkers" using a slide-rule in the movie. I remember this vividly as I recently re-watched that movie (whiling away the time waiting for MER-A to touchdown).
Sigh. Do they not teach comprehension anymore in schools?
If you want to use some other license, please go ahead and use it. I just told you why I prefer the GPL. I didnt ask you to follow my choice.
Freedom is not applied to the code, but to the person who wishes to do something useful with the code. The code is not something that has or lacks freedom - its the possessor of the code that has or lacks the freedom.
Well....yes! This whole BSD style vs GPL style licenses really boils down to individual preferences. Your attitude and reason for choosing the ASF / BSD licenses is perfectly valid and I have no quarrel with you over that. I myself would prefer the GPL for all the reasons that the BSD-style license advocates disparage. I do want freedom on my terms or not all all, but then again, isnt that the definition of freedom? I mean, would it make a slave "free" if the slave-owner declared that he is "free" while continuing to subjugate him? It is the slave's point of view that is the ONLY point of view to consider when deciding if he is free. In summary, if you consider the BSD style license to produce free software, thats fine by me. But what I consider free is really GPL style software. Thats just my $0.02 and I'm sticking to it.
I hate seeing people suffer in poverty while the technology exists that could put an end to it.
(1) I'm curious as to what the solution is and (2) Why are you convinced that a technological solution will solve a social problem. History seems to show us otherwise.
If we survive as a species to get there our ancesters will call it home. But do you really think we'll get out of the solar system after that? I know, I know, they said man could not fly, but have you ever heard of the law of diminishing returns?
Yes I have. Its used in the humanities. And "law" in the humanities means something very different from the scientific definition or the definition from logic. It roughly means : "Here is what we think will happen, because this is what happened before in this particular field". So while a law of diminishing returns might apply to production profit margins, it may not necessarily apply to the rate of technological progress. In fact, if you look at the history of technology, it appears that the opposite of this "law" applies - the higher the technological level of a state, the faster its level appears to advance. This is just an empirical observation of course - not a predictor of the future. But the same is true of your statement too. That is why I dont believe that using what we may or may not be able to do at some point in the future as an argument for not doing something now is not a argument.
If living on Mars or the moon is the end goal, then sure, your argument has some merit. However, that isnt the end goal at all. To quote a popular TV show, our goal as a species has always been "...to go boldy forth where no man has gone before..". If we establish a presence on Mars, there will always be a rock further away that we will want to land on. And if we land on that rock too, there will be yet another rock further away. The reason to go into space is not because of tangible or intangible payoffs, or because we havent got anything better to do, but because it is our destiny.
Anyway, even if living on Mars was the end goal, there are still some issues with your argument. Today there are folks living in really harsh environments like the Sahara and the Arctic. They know about alternative places where the environment is much kinder to the human body, yet they choose to continue living there. While it is true that Mars is much more inhospitable than these environments, who is to say that future technological improvements wont make Mars so hospitable that people might actually want to call it "home".
As regards to your argument that "the money could be better spent elsewhere", that is your point of view and you are entitled to it. But the last I checked, the US has a democratic process, and your elected representatives are speaking for you. If you dont like how they spend the nations money, cast your vote accordingly. If the majority of the US voting population like the way they are spending money, you are SOL.
Those who dont vote, dont deserve to get their complaints listened to.
Yes - I do know that AI is not at that level - yet. And it will be a loooong time before it will advance to the point where it will begin to resemble Hollywood's ideas of it. What is striking though is that the pictures of these robots are uncannily similar to what hollywood depicts as cold, impersonal, killing machines. Imagine that these are larger and equipped with weapons. Now imagine that you are on the other side of the combat line. Not hard to imagine that you are in Cameron-esque world, isnt it?
So whats left is really only the development of AI. And who knows, maybe the defense organizations already have a working prototype....
If blowing up on launch was a problem that was known to you, then yes. Blowing up because of unforseen conditions isnt what I'm talking about. For example, the Columbia disaster - the breaking up of the foam which lead to the tragedy was not something that was forseeable - atleast to the degree that would make it a factor in planning. If on the other hand, your design constraints force you to say design something that can die in bad weather and if you have no control over whether it will encounter bad weather then yes, you are "shipping with a known sev 1".
Note that adverse weather conditions exist on earth for launch of spacecraft, but we can control that by picking and chosing the launch dates. There is no way to control the landing weather conditions for the Beagle 2. Atleast if they had designed the spacecraft to the able to pick and chose good weather conditions at the landing site as a moment for landing, that would have been an acceptable solution. This wasnt the case.
I think you are missing the point. If you combine all the choices you have to make and in the end you still end up with sev 1 issues, then you should consider the fact that your mission is impossible to achieve and abort in the planning / design stage.
PS. I should have made the headline read "Shipping with known sev 1 defects". sev 1 defects are not preventable. But its the ones that are known to you when you design / plan that I'm talking about.
Pardon we while I dissent with the group claiming that this failure (if it indeed it gets confirmed to be a failure) is one that is part and parcel of a complex engineering endeavour. From one of the links in an earlier/. story :
Winds on Mars are unpredictable but they must be low while Beagle enters.
Too much wind and Beagle will probably not survive. Its landing site has already been changed once to avoid a region of high winds.
The consequence of such a failure? Loss of spacecraft. Workaround? None mentioned. How can one trust the weather on Mars when the weather on earth isnt that predictable either? More stuff :
When Beagle gets to the surface its power is almost spent and it must immediately open up and expose its solar panels to the sunlight to charge its batteries and run its systems. Too much of a delay and it will die....
Beagle survives on the energy from its solar panels and has no way to clean them if they get dirty because of, say, a dust storm.
And there are dust storms brewing on Mars.
Consequence of this problem : loss of spacecraft. Workaround : none mentioned.
I come from the software world, and we call this as shipping with severity 1 defects. That is - there exists a defect in a product that can compromise its mission and there exists no work around for the defect. If you spend x dollars on a widget and a sev 1 defect is triggered, your $x is gone to that mystical money bucket in the sky.
I'm not assigning blame to any one particular group - they all contributed. Undoubtedly, sev 1 problems could have been addressed had a bigger budget been available. So in that sense, it is a problem that originated in the funding and management channels. On the other hand, the engineers who ship with sev 1 defects also have a responsibility to make sure that the funders understand that the existence of sev 1 defects can lead to a total waste of time and money. It might even have been better to not make the attempt.
Do tell. Since your sig claims you are a rocket scientist, no doubt you have some insight into this situation. From reading the article, it seems to me that (1) the ESA has purchased a lottery ticket and (2) in the event that they have the winning number, we are going to see more of these lotteries.
Then there are the airbags. If anything goes wrong the engineers suspect it will be them. They failed their first tests and had to be designed and built without a full testing regime.
The bags werent fully tested? Havent they heard of Murphy's law?
This is proof positive that the marketing engine has started churning in the Linux / Open Source arena. The quoted statistics are meaningless. Here are is a short list of things (in no particular order) that are wrong with this "study" (who paid for it anyway?):
Lines of code is meaningless as a reliable measure of anything. The most this number can be used for is for assessing the high level complexity (i.e. simple, non-trivial, or hard) of an application / code construct. It is absolutely pointless to compare two different applications against each other by lines of code. This means that you can say that one is non-trivial and the other is complex or you can say that both are complex, but there is no valid way of determining (by using this particular metric) that one application is more complex than the other. I believe this is the fundamental flaw in this "study".
The study igores capabilities. If application A has feature a, b, and c, and application B has features a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h , is it even meaningful to compare the number of defects detected between applications A and B? And no - normalizing it by lines of code is not valid (see previous point).
Testing methodology : from the defects quoted in the article, it appears as if they "study" did white box testing on MySQL. This is hardly complete. While null pointer dereferences are certainly terrible, I would be also very very concerned about bugs pertaining to SQL capabilites, data integrity, performance, etc. If I go out and do a comparison of RDBMS's for a client, my report wouldnt be complete at all without covering these areas. How come the "study" doesnt mention any of these things?
Lets face it : this is a paid propaganda article by the marketing machinery. Much like Microsoft has done in the past.
Then you arent thinking very well. The primary objective of advertising is to publicize your product, and not to track who is watching your publicity. If you have to sacrifice one for the other, guess which one makes sense to be sacrificed?
With regards to your second point - if someone creates a fake trailer and distributes it, how is the recipient to know that there is a real trailer that is only available from the official site? If someone is going to be taken in by a fake, it doesnt really matter what the delivery mechanism is on the official site.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. I am currently working on a fairly large project from the I/T side and during the requirements gathering phase we noticed a pretty significant phenomenon. The customer teams and the I/T teams were distributed all over the US and we'd be on meetings ALL day on the phone, and the requirements werent really getting carved into stone. After 3 months of phone deliberations, we had a face to face meeting with everyone involved in requirements gathering, and bam! - in three days we jumped from 30% to 80% of the requirements getting "done".
Then onto the development phase - we noticed that when requirements are communicated to developers who are remote, this works much less efficiently than developers who are local. There are two reasons for this. (1) Developers simply do not read what is documented and prefer to hear the same thing on the phone (2) What is documented is quite often not covering every little aspect of the requirements and when developers ask questions on such unclear portions, the communication loop delays are very significant and drag out things.
Can someone explain that image to me please? What do they mean by noon meridian? I thought that noon at any given meridian is when the sun is at the apex of its daily path when viewed from the meridian in question.
un-normalized databases arent "bad". There is a reason why there are multiple normal forms. It's so that one can pick the normalization level most suited to one's application. Normalization is just a helpful process that usually results in the most efficient table structure, and not a mandatory rule. Sometimes, normalizing can make a design worse because of the additional work required to get hold of data from various tables when the different pieces are commonly used / retrieved together.
Enlighten me please - how does all the paraphernalia of J2EE not provide a solution where CORBA does?
Hungarian notation is sometimes useful
on
Software Fashion
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· Score: 1
As with some well-concieved but ill-implemented ideas, the trick is to use the Hungarian notation in the right places. When doing database design, for example, if all the columns in a table are given the same prefix, and each table has a distinct prefix, you can avoid using correlation names a lot of times when dealing with joins. Whats more, you can simply look at the column name and figure out which table it is coming from - and this is the intent of the notation.
I confess that I am still dipping my toes into RDF, but I think I know the answer to your specific objection : reification
Think about it : how does one deal with truths, half truths and lies in the real world? One internally assimilates various sources and ascribes trust levels to them. If Joe is known to be a liar, then most statements coming from him are suspect. RDF doesnt make that inference, but it does allow you to record the fact that the source of a particular statement is Joe, and not Mary, who you trust a lot more.
I assume that this is the reason for the reliability of Google. Its database not only records statements (webpages), but it also records who is making those statements and the ranking function probably associates a trust level to the source of the statements.
RDF is not an inference engine. But it does provide the infrastructure to build an inference engine upon.
Damn! You beat me to this. Reading the article, it isnt obvious to me as to what exactly is "new" about this research. Perhaps the "facts" quoted by Mr. Hitchcock in the "Three Investigator" books werent really facts after all, but speculations / common knowledge among film industry technicians, and this is really the first time someone has conducted a scientific study on this matter. I remember reading these books in the 1980 - 84 range, and at that time, the books were a few years old already, so this is quite old knowledge / speculation.
Probably not. More likely, some money-wad holding executive in the administration who loved Macs, disagreed with the Ph.d's 5.2 million times. The probability is that you are a pimply faced teenager who hasnt yet had a chance to learn how the real world works. Hence your statement.
Certainly, if there is a high correlation between one set of problems and another, one should excercise intelligence and consider the risks of having a child. Not too long ago, there was a story on/. about a woman with a family history of early onset Alzheimer's choosing to have a child. That sort of stupidity is not something I'd advocate. However, you are assuming an as yet unknown correlation between a natural inability to bear children and some very serious quality-of-life threatening defects. That is what I am challenging. If there is a correlation, yes, what you advocate makes sense. But without proper science backing this up, your statement is akin to the Catholic church forbidding the use of contraceptives simply because it wasnt what God intended. Get with the times.
You argument doesnt hold true on other counts too. All of the problems that I mentioned in my previous post were serious, quality-of-life or life threatening ailments in the past. I grew up in a land, in a time where inhalers were not available, and the standard advice that doctors gave me to control my asthma was to NOT excercise. I would have been dead by age 5 had I lived a few thousand years ago since I would have neither been able to hunt or farm.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you'd clarify a few items for me? (1) What exactly is your strategy for defending yourself against a government run amok when they possess tanks, heavy artilley, high-performance aircraft, a formidable navy, well-trained infantry, extremely capable commando units, high explosives, germ warfare stockpiles, and nuclear weapons? (2) If you are under the impression that a revolution will happen, I'd like to know how exactly you are going to organize the revolution when the government can control at will all forms of communication except your voice. Yeah, you can shout things out over your rooftop, but that would also make you a marked man for the first government sniper.
Simply put, this "defense against the government" argument put forward by the righ-wing nuts, may have been valid in the 1800's but is just so much horseshit these days. I'd urge you to go see the documentary "The Revolution will not be televised" now playing in US theatres and keep in mind one thing - the inequity between the firepower and capabilities of first world governments when compared to the general population far exceeds the the inequity between the government of Venezuela and its people.
Yeah, I know. This is offtopic. Unfortunately, it is never wise to not respond to right-wing nuts - they are prone to take silence as meaning that they won the argument.
That depends on the nature of the problem doesnt it? If the problem was caused by a dust storm blowing a rock onto Spirit (just a silly example - dont take it literally), there wouldnt be anything to fix on Opportunity, right? Actually, the question you asked was asked by a journalist during one of the NASA briefings, and the answer was something along the lines of "..it depends on the root cause of the problem....". And if its a hardware failure, there might not be a software fix anyway (even though there might be a procedural fix to avoid causing the hardware failure).
Uh....they did show one of the "checkers" using a slide-rule in the movie. I remember this vividly as I recently re-watched that movie (whiling away the time waiting for MER-A to touchdown).
Sigh. Do they not teach comprehension anymore in schools?
Well....yes! This whole BSD style vs GPL style licenses really boils down to individual preferences. Your attitude and reason for choosing the ASF / BSD licenses is perfectly valid and I have no quarrel with you over that. I myself would prefer the GPL for all the reasons that the BSD-style license advocates disparage. I do want freedom on my terms or not all all, but then again, isnt that the definition of freedom? I mean, would it make a slave "free" if the slave-owner declared that he is "free" while continuing to subjugate him? It is the slave's point of view that is the ONLY point of view to consider when deciding if he is free. In summary, if you consider the BSD style license to produce free software, thats fine by me. But what I consider free is really GPL style software. Thats just my $0.02 and I'm sticking to it.
(1) I'm curious as to what the solution is and (2) Why are you convinced that a technological solution will solve a social problem. History seems to show us otherwise.
Yes I have. Its used in the humanities. And "law" in the humanities means something very different from the scientific definition or the definition from logic. It roughly means : "Here is what we think will happen, because this is what happened before in this particular field". So while a law of diminishing returns might apply to production profit margins, it may not necessarily apply to the rate of technological progress. In fact, if you look at the history of technology, it appears that the opposite of this "law" applies - the higher the technological level of a state, the faster its level appears to advance. This is just an empirical observation of course - not a predictor of the future. But the same is true of your statement too. That is why I dont believe that using what we may or may not be able to do at some point in the future as an argument for not doing something now is not a argument.
If living on Mars or the moon is the end goal, then sure, your argument has some merit. However, that isnt the end goal at all. To quote a popular TV show, our goal as a species has always been "...to go boldy forth where no man has gone before..". If we establish a presence on Mars, there will always be a rock further away that we will want to land on. And if we land on that rock too, there will be yet another rock further away. The reason to go into space is not because of tangible or intangible payoffs, or because we havent got anything better to do, but because it is our destiny.
Anyway, even if living on Mars was the end goal, there are still some issues with your argument. Today there are folks living in really harsh environments like the Sahara and the Arctic. They know about alternative places where the environment is much kinder to the human body, yet they choose to continue living there. While it is true that Mars is much more inhospitable than these environments, who is to say that future technological improvements wont make Mars so hospitable that people might actually want to call it "home".
As regards to your argument that "the money could be better spent elsewhere", that is your point of view and you are entitled to it. But the last I checked, the US has a democratic process, and your elected representatives are speaking for you. If you dont like how they spend the nations money, cast your vote accordingly. If the majority of the US voting population like the way they are spending money, you are SOL.
Those who dont vote, dont deserve to get their complaints listened to.
Yes - I do know that AI is not at that level - yet. And it will be a loooong time before it will advance to the point where it will begin to resemble Hollywood's ideas of it. What is striking though is that the pictures of these robots are uncannily similar to what hollywood depicts as cold, impersonal, killing machines. Imagine that these are larger and equipped with weapons. Now imagine that you are on the other side of the combat line. Not hard to imagine that you are in Cameron-esque world, isnt it?
So whats left is really only the development of AI. And who knows, maybe the defense organizations already have a working prototype....
If blowing up on launch was a problem that was known to you, then yes. Blowing up because of unforseen conditions isnt what I'm talking about. For example, the Columbia disaster - the breaking up of the foam which lead to the tragedy was not something that was forseeable - atleast to the degree that would make it a factor in planning. If on the other hand, your design constraints force you to say design something that can die in bad weather and if you have no control over whether it will encounter bad weather then yes, you are "shipping with a known sev 1".
Note that adverse weather conditions exist on earth for launch of spacecraft, but we can control that by picking and chosing the launch dates. There is no way to control the landing weather conditions for the Beagle 2. Atleast if they had designed the spacecraft to the able to pick and chose good weather conditions at the landing site as a moment for landing, that would have been an acceptable solution. This wasnt the case.
I think you are missing the point. If you combine all the choices you have to make and in the end you still end up with sev 1 issues, then you should consider the fact that your mission is impossible to achieve and abort in the planning / design stage.
PS. I should have made the headline read "Shipping with known sev 1 defects". sev 1 defects are not preventable. But its the ones that are known to you when you design / plan that I'm talking about.
Pardon we while I dissent with the group claiming that this failure (if it indeed it gets confirmed to be a failure) is one that is part and parcel of a complex engineering endeavour. From one of the links in an earlier /. story :
The consequence of such a failure? Loss of spacecraft. Workaround? None mentioned. How can one trust the weather on Mars when the weather on earth isnt that predictable either? More stuff :
Consequence of this problem : loss of spacecraft. Workaround : none mentioned.
I come from the software world, and we call this as shipping with severity 1 defects. That is - there exists a defect in a product that can compromise its mission and there exists no work around for the defect. If you spend x dollars on a widget and a sev 1 defect is triggered, your $x is gone to that mystical money bucket in the sky.
I'm not assigning blame to any one particular group - they all contributed. Undoubtedly, sev 1 problems could have been addressed had a bigger budget been available. So in that sense, it is a problem that originated in the funding and management channels. On the other hand, the engineers who ship with sev 1 defects also have a responsibility to make sure that the funders understand that the existence of sev 1 defects can lead to a total waste of time and money. It might even have been better to not make the attempt.
Do tell. Since your sig claims you are a rocket scientist, no doubt you have some insight into this situation. From reading the article, it seems to me that (1) the ESA has purchased a lottery ticket and (2) in the event that they have the winning number, we are going to see more of these lotteries.
The bags werent fully tested? Havent they heard of Murphy's law?
This is proof positive that the marketing engine has started churning in the Linux / Open Source arena. The quoted statistics are meaningless. Here are is a short list of things (in no particular order) that are wrong with this "study" (who paid for it anyway?):
Lines of code is meaningless as a reliable measure of anything. The most this number can be used for is for assessing the high level complexity (i.e. simple, non-trivial, or hard) of an application / code construct. It is absolutely pointless to compare two different applications against each other by lines of code. This means that you can say that one is non-trivial and the other is complex or you can say that both are complex, but there is no valid way of determining (by using this particular metric) that one application is more complex than the other. I believe this is the fundamental flaw in this "study".
The study igores capabilities. If application A has feature a, b, and c, and application B has features a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h , is it even meaningful to compare the number of defects detected between applications A and B? And no - normalizing it by lines of code is not valid (see previous point).
Testing methodology : from the defects quoted in the article, it appears as if they "study" did white box testing on MySQL. This is hardly complete. While null pointer dereferences are certainly terrible, I would be also very very concerned about bugs pertaining to SQL capabilites, data integrity, performance, etc. If I go out and do a comparison of RDBMS's for a client, my report wouldnt be complete at all without covering these areas. How come the "study" doesnt mention any of these things?
Lets face it : this is a paid propaganda article by the marketing machinery. Much like Microsoft has done in the past.
Then you arent thinking very well. The primary objective of advertising is to publicize your product, and not to track who is watching your publicity. If you have to sacrifice one for the other, guess which one makes sense to be sacrificed?
With regards to your second point - if someone creates a fake trailer and distributes it, how is the recipient to know that there is a real trailer that is only available from the official site? If someone is going to be taken in by a fake, it doesnt really matter what the delivery mechanism is on the official site.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. I am currently working on a fairly large project from the I/T side and during the requirements gathering phase we noticed a pretty significant phenomenon. The customer teams and the I/T teams were distributed all over the US and we'd be on meetings ALL day on the phone, and the requirements werent really getting carved into stone. After 3 months of phone deliberations, we had a face to face meeting with everyone involved in requirements gathering, and bam! - in three days we jumped from 30% to 80% of the requirements getting "done".
Then onto the development phase - we noticed that when requirements are communicated to developers who are remote, this works much less efficiently than developers who are local. There are two reasons for this. (1) Developers simply do not read what is documented and prefer to hear the same thing on the phone (2) What is documented is quite often not covering every little aspect of the requirements and when developers ask questions on such unclear portions, the communication loop delays are very significant and drag out things.
Can someone explain that image to me please? What do they mean by noon meridian? I thought that noon at any given meridian is when the sun is at the apex of its daily path when viewed from the meridian in question.
'nuff said
un-normalized databases arent "bad". There is a reason why there are multiple normal forms. It's so that one can pick the normalization level most suited to one's application. Normalization is just a helpful process that usually results in the most efficient table structure, and not a mandatory rule. Sometimes, normalizing can make a design worse because of the additional work required to get hold of data from various tables when the different pieces are commonly used / retrieved together.
Enlighten me please - how does all the paraphernalia of J2EE not provide a solution where CORBA does?
As with some well-concieved but ill-implemented ideas, the trick is to use the Hungarian notation in the right places. When doing database design, for example, if all the columns in a table are given the same prefix, and each table has a distinct prefix, you can avoid using correlation names a lot of times when dealing with joins. Whats more, you can simply look at the column name and figure out which table it is coming from - and this is the intent of the notation.
I confess that I am still dipping my toes into RDF, but I think I know the answer to your specific objection : reification
Think about it : how does one deal with truths, half truths and lies in the real world? One internally assimilates various sources and ascribes trust levels to them. If Joe is known to be a liar, then most statements coming from him are suspect. RDF doesnt make that inference, but it does allow you to record the fact that the source of a particular statement is Joe, and not Mary, who you trust a lot more.
I assume that this is the reason for the reliability of Google. Its database not only records statements (webpages), but it also records who is making those statements and the ranking function probably associates a trust level to the source of the statements.
RDF is not an inference engine. But it does provide the infrastructure to build an inference engine upon.
Damn! You beat me to this. Reading the article, it isnt obvious to me as to what exactly is "new" about this research. Perhaps the "facts" quoted by Mr. Hitchcock in the "Three Investigator" books werent really facts after all, but speculations / common knowledge among film industry technicians, and this is really the first time someone has conducted a scientific study on this matter. I remember reading these books in the 1980 - 84 range, and at that time, the books were a few years old already, so this is quite old knowledge / speculation.
Probably not. More likely, some money-wad holding executive in the administration who loved Macs, disagreed with the Ph.d's 5.2 million times. The probability is that you are a pimply faced teenager who hasnt yet had a chance to learn how the real world works. Hence your statement.
Certainly, if there is a high correlation between one set of problems and another, one should excercise intelligence and consider the risks of having a child. Not too long ago, there was a story on /. about a woman with a family history of early onset Alzheimer's choosing to have a child. That sort of stupidity is not something I'd advocate. However, you are assuming an as yet unknown correlation between a natural inability to bear children and some very serious quality-of-life threatening defects. That is what I am challenging. If there is a correlation, yes, what you advocate makes sense. But without proper science backing this up, your statement is akin to the Catholic church forbidding the use of contraceptives simply because it wasnt what God intended. Get with the times.
You argument doesnt hold true on other counts too. All of the problems that I mentioned in my previous post were serious, quality-of-life or life threatening ailments in the past. I grew up in a land, in a time where inhalers were not available, and the standard advice that doctors gave me to control my asthma was to NOT excercise. I would have been dead by age 5 had I lived a few thousand years ago since I would have neither been able to hunt or farm.