I'm not talking about the space program as a whole, merely the Moon landings. For what they accomplished they cost America far too much, and the money would have been far better spent on other things. Obviously the space program as a whole has come up with some great innovations and new technologies.
They're obviously demonstrating the amount of redundancy in our alphabet and numeric system by showing just how few characters you can use whilst still remaining intelligible (just!). Rather than being "childish" they are in fact demonstrating a deep and intuitive understanding of information theory and entropy, one which we, as foward thinking people, should admire and indeed emulate!
Why are we still on Earth? Because nobody really cares about space any more. Back at the time of the Moon landings people cared, it was a matter of national pride to Americans to get there before the Russians did, and because of that the Americans were able to spend a rediculuous amount of their national budget on a trophy project with no real value.
But now you can't even get funding for NASA to buy extra pencils without Congress screaming bloody murder, and the public are so jaded by "yet another shuttle launch" that they'd rather watch "Armageddon" than anything happening in the real world. The current generation of Americans seem to have lost their fire; without the Red threat there is no real motivational force in the American psyche.
Of course American is now just one of several players in the space market. Whilst its vast body of experiance languishes, becoming more and more obsolete, other nations are still expanding their space programs.
Who'll be the next on the Moon? The Chinese is my guess. And they'll be doing a lot more than putting a Red flag there, because their space program is still on the up.
Much of the content of the web relates to the growth of communications technology. You are limiting yourself severely if you are only thinking of the raw bandwidth connections. The growth of use of non-textual content, multimedia, and scripting languages and applets are all advances in communications technology.
"Much of the content of the web relates to the growth of communications technology. You are limiting yourself severely if you are only thinking of the raw bandwidth connections. The growth of use of non-textual content, multimedia, and scripting languages and applets are all advances in communications technology".
So since they are currently only archiving ASCII text your point is irrelevent isn't it? They aren't demonstrating the development of communications technology at all, mereley the content on web pages.
Instead, you assumed he did, or were attempting to sidetrack the issue to make yourself look like the oppressed religious minority. This kind of behavior is what disgusts others. When people look at me, they see someone like you -- an arrogant, bigoted ass who sees the entire world as filled with evil sinners out to get them. It makes me sick.
Thanks to the efforts of liberals and atheists everywhere people, like myself, who hold with decent Christian ethics are oppressed and considered to be backward and out of touch with the modern world. Your post seems to indicate that you also believe in the Lord and follow the Bible, so I don't see how you can disagree with what I'm saying. The temptations of Evil are many in today's world, and if I choose to try and spread the Word, why is that considered to be such a bad thing?
Um.. Let me think. YES!! That's how historians have had to do it for ages. Should we ignore early American politics because it too was primarly run by white, middle-aged landowners?
That's what American history textbooks do, and they are hardly the most unbiased texts in the world are they? I can't remember where, but there's a book about how bad American history teaching and books are.
This kind of PC "1984" style of thought would have us ignore all of our history for the goals of delluding ourselves into thinking we're perfect. Well, we're not. Get over it, and start trying to figure out why.
Yes, I know you're not perfect, I never said you were.
Finally, the prima facie evidence of a troll. Someone you picks at the formatting rather than the content of the person they disagree with.
I think I'd already "picked" at the content of his post before I mentioned that. Sorry, but incorrect formatting makes a post harder to read and bugs me. Is that a crime? It might make me anal, but not a troll.
Besides, you should really preview and check your spelling before being so harsh. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
*Sigh* And so should you - "delluding", "condenscending" - we all make mistakes. After all, nobody, apart from our Lord, is perfect.
I wish I hadn't just used my last moderator point.
Why? Because you, like so many/. moderators, moderate anything you disagree with down? IMHO that is the biggest simgle problem with/. at the moment, with troll metamoderation the second.
I don't think it is getting a snapshot of how society is today. But is that really the point? Or, rather, is that really what these archives will be used for in the future?
Well, what else is it going to be used for? Your suggestion that it be used as a reference on "the growth of communications techology" is rediculous - the growth of hate material and pornography on the web has no correlation with the growth of communications technology at all. This project is not getting a snapshot of web technology, it is getting a snapshot of web content, something entirely different.
If a million people say something that is factually wrong, it's still wrong. Got that?
Please demonstrate how believing in God and decent Christian morality is "factually wrong". I doubt you can.
Yeah, so what? Does that mean they should stop? It's still their time and money. And this archive WILL provide an amazing picture of the Internet when it was still relatively young(teething, as it were).
My point is, if you read my post, that this is not a good thing given the exlusive access to the net by a certain portion of society. Would you consider how a society lived through records of its nobility?
The "teething problems" are what makes it historically interesting! I think historians of the future will be much more interested in looking at the development of the web through trial and error than at the finished product.
Well I suppose that the sheer amount of perversion and degredation available on the net at this point in history will provide a lot of interest to future historians, so in that context sure it'll be "historically interesting"!
But, pornography aside, what is there of real historical value on the net? Sure there are any number of mindless geocities homepages full of drivel about people's pets, but sifitng through this would drive anyone mad and there are a lot more "insightful" sources already available about today's culture.
Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
It's not a study, it's an archive. The purpose of this project is to collect data, not to analyze it or place any sort of value judgement on it.
But unless it will be used as the basis for future studies then this project is a waste of time, so I don't think you have a valid point here.
Sure, this'll be a useful reference for future generations, won't it? I'm sorry, but as much of a fan of the web as I am, I really wouldn't consider it to be something worthy of archival in the state that it is at the moment. Why? Well, because currently the web is still in the transitional period between the days of ARPAnet and purely academic use and acceptance as a medium through which the general public can communicate. And as such, it's still in a state where teething problems overwhelm content.
The trouble with the web is that although it is supposedly accessable to anyone with a phone line and a PC, the harsh reality is that cost and communications infrastructure have meant that only those of a certain socioeconomic group are currently able to use the web, and this group is mainly comprised of the priviliged, a group which most/.ers fall into by dint of their jobs or backgrounds. Research carried out my both my consultancy group and others all indicate that the majority of people able to use the web are white, middle-class and certainly in higher than average tax brackets.
So given this, how does taking a snapshot of the web give a view of how society is at the moment? It doesn't, any more than looking at the Royal family of England gives a picture of what England is like (despite what some Americans seem to think). The views that are expressed on the web are those of a priviliged class who do not have to suffer the effects of current liberal free-market policies and the increasing divide between the rich and the poor.
No, this exercise will be a "Who's Who" of society, showing only those who are rich enough to be able to afford net access. The majority of people, unable to benefit from the web, will be left by this study as an underclass, something which I view as incredibly wrong and an example of the undeniable arrogance that most people on the net display towards those that are perceived as their inferiors. Indeed, I have suffered the same myself here on this forum for expressing views that people consider "outdated" or "primitive", even they are held by many others.
Anyway, any study that attempts to categorise how we live at the moment using the web is doomed to be prejudiced and incomplete. Until everyone is online and has equal access, this is just another arrogant study attempting to categorise who is worth enough to be able to use the net.
What I meant was it was designed with mobile phones rather than for wireless devices in general and hence has certain parts of it which specifically apply to mobile phones and don't make sense in the context of other wireless devices.
Actually, it's the "university" portion that he was talking about - I definitely think QM should be taught as first-year undergrad material. High school... might be a bit too early.
I'm not saying start going into QM before university, that would be a bit much, but the concepts can be introduced. The only reason I did a physics degree was because of the books I was reading at the time - I couldn't stand A-level physics at school. There's only so much enthusiasm you can generate for tickertape and ripple tanks:)
Science in high school is intended to teach a method of thought and investigation, and to whet the appetite for knowledge.
Yeah, but it doesn't does it? Everyone I know just got rote learning rather than *gasp* an explanaition of the principles of say, acceleration or circular motion.
University teaching, though, is backwards. There's no reason for people to unlearn things, and since in a university, order of class taking is for the most part, free, it would make sense to have physics majors take quantum mechanics first, and anyone who just wants to take physics as an elective could take classical mechanics first. The order we currently have just leads to confusion.
Hmm, it's different over here in the UK, I had a generally set curriculum with some options, and we did quantum mechanics from the first year on, although we only started the real meat in the third year. But the thing is that because of things like Dirac notation, some of the more "advanced" stuff is actually easier than the stuff that you have to unlearn - go figure.
(Action principles get taught? That's surprising. I had to figure it out on my own.)
We got about six hours on them for a maths course, with no explanaition why or examples. Which is really stupid, because they're one of the most central concepts you'd need if you actually wanted to do real physics, and apart from that they make it really easy to do all kinds of problems.
--- Jon E. Erikson
WAP not as popular as expected
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WAP Under Fire
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The trouble with the WAP protocol is that it is designed primarily with the mobile phone market in mind, and has a lot of excess baggage that both complicates it and makes it harder to implement on any other platform.
Unfortunately for people producing and selling WAP phones, the uptake has been a lot less than expected, at least here in the UK anyway, and from my experiances it's not suprising - you can't really do very much with the current phones since the technology isn't there yet to allow a device that small to be suited for web browsing.
So the whole WAP hype has turned out to be pretty much that, hype, and hopefully this will allow an alternative to take over. Despite it's current failure to appeal, the market is sure to be enormous once the right technology is there.
P.S. CmdrTaco, surely it'd be better to spend some time fixing/. than trying to get it shown on obscure devices? Just a thought.
A professor of mine told me once that he thought that quantum mechanics should be taught before classical mechanics, because then we'd never even think about these dumb ideas like absolute locality, etc. I'm inclined to believe him. People who don't complete physics the entire way through get more misinformation that information, quite often.
Agreed. The hardest part about quantum mechanics is that in order to grasp the ideas behind it you need to unlearn a lot of classical ideas that you get taught beforehand. This is fine if you never do any advanced physics but when you're going on to higher study it just makes it harder.
Just look at the model of the atom and the conceptual revisions it goes through at different stages of education - solar system model, Bohr model and then finally the full quantum model. And the same applies to a lot of other concepts too.
Quite frankly physics teaching sucks before you get to university. It's dull and waaay too focused on things like mechanics.
And don't even get me started on action principles and when they get taught:)
Why on Earth would I want to reply to someone who is trying to "out" me as a troll for some reason known only to themselves. OTOH, your posts do serve to keep me amused at work, so I hope you continue.
Radio antennas give off radiation too - radio radiation. No one worries about radio radiation - there are plenty of people right beside a radio tower - hell, some are built in the middle of cities. Somehow I've got a feeling no one will really care, at least, after a few years of no one dying because of it.
The trouble is with this situation is that it isn't as cut and dried as people might think. Sure, you've got a right to privacy, but national security isn't just something made up by government's to impose Big Brother regimes on their citizens.
Even now that the Cold War has finished there are any number of threats to people in every country that are dealt with by intelligence services all the time without people even realising it. And if these agencies cannot access information when it is required then they cannot do their jobs, and the chances of say, a terrorist bomb attack, goes up dramatically.
OTOH corporations should have no rights at all to spy on their employees in the ways that this article suggests. Unfortunately because the growth of net use in the workplace has occured so quickly the law hasn't been able to keep up with all of the various aspects of privacy and rights.
And whilst the corporations have such a pervasive influence on government, especially the case in the US, the issue is likely to be either sidelined or made even worse by pro-corporate legislation.
Radiation from lasers? Which type would that be? You know full well thats a load of rubbish.
Microwave radiation idiot - read the article. You know, like mobile phones give off but a hell of a lot stronger? If there's so much of a scare over using phones, think about how much of a scare there'll be over a fuck off big array of microwave lasers.
The laser would be earth bound, and nothing more than a a large peace of equipment. A laser pointing towards the sky shouldn't scare anyone.
You're shitting me right? If you honestly think that having a very large ground based laser pointed into the sky isn't going to worry people then I suggest you get out more. I'm no technophobe but it'd scare me if they wanted one near me. And I doubt people like Greenpeace would welcome this kind of idea.
Light sails work by using the momentum of photons for to speed up. They reflect the light, essentially inverting it's direction and thus get a speed boost.
Err, no they don't. The light is absorbed, not reflected. If it was reflected then they'd have to slow down to transfer momentum, which is obviously impossible.
Eh? What is the practical use of this? I'm not disagreeing with the concept, which obviously works, but surely this is just another one of NASA's research projects that never go anywhere. They've got ion drives now, so why are they bothering with this?
The idea that they're going to be able to push anything of any use, such as cargo or satellites, using lasers is rediculous - the energy required is more than enough to destroy the object in question, which is hardly a useful end result is it? And as for power consumption, I doubt this will be any more efficient than the Saturn V once all the costs are factored in.
And even if they solve this "little" problem, who is going to want to have a huge laser sited in their territory, beaming out dangerous radiation 24 hours a day? People are worried enough about nuclear power, the idea of huge lasers and microwaves beaming across the sky is sure to provoke hordes of protestors.
NASA have a promising drive technology in the form of their ion drive, why bother with something that isn't practical? They need to stop financing anything with the word "space" in it on the off chance it'll pan out and spend their money on real space projects.
The practice of releasing new chips with negligible differences in clock speeds every few months has really seemed stupid to me. The sort of people who have to have the latest and fastest processor aren't going to be impressed when their brand new expensive X Mhz processor is superseded by the even newer X+25 MHz chip in two months time, and many of them will probably wait.
And it must also be costing Intel money to keep releasing incremental upgrades, simply because they then have to lower the prices of the now slower chips to get them to sell in the face of their latest speed king.
This pissing contest between AMD and Intel hasn't done Intel any favours at all, and it's probably time for them to take stock of where they went wrong.
Errrm, that wasn't a troll BTW. I honestly think that this sort of thing will come about as more and more information moves onto the net and people start to use it as their sole source of information.
Sure, and having information stuffed down your throat by a TV is also convienient. That's what 2000 channels were supposed to be for. Does anybody want the internet to be like that?
Not the same. 2000 channels means that again you have to search for the stuff you want and end up missing half of it. What I'm talking about is the equivalent of a single channel just filled with the stuff that matches your profile - very convenient indeed.
And no, I certainly don't want the net like that, but given the amount of people using services like AOL or FreeServe who never venture out of the service's own "areas", I'd say that many other people would want this sort of thing. And not everyone has the time to track down every little thing they want, especially when they might not even know of its existance.
I suppose there is an ongoing process of increasing information on the net, although I'd hardly call it an explosion. The real "explosion" on the net seems to me to be in Geocities homepages rather than new style journalism, but the amount of information available on the net is going to increase.
Probably the real winners if this ideal ever comes to past are those services which can filter this flood of information and provide users with a summary of it that they can digest. After all, it's useless to have so much information available that you can't find anything you're after. Much like/. allows me to read about stuff I'm interested in that I wouldn't have seen otherwise, these services will allow people to customise profiles of what they want to know about.
Of course there are bad sides to this - if you only see what you're interested in it tends to reinforce the views and ideas that you already hold rather than challenge your beliefs. Whether this will be worse than the lowest common denominator style of mass media that most people get today is something we'll have to see.
And of course there are privacy issues with having such a personal profile available. Still I think this kind of thing is going to come about - most people prefer convenience over issues like privacy, and one thing this kind of service will be, is convenient.
Your "argument" is both closed-minded and simply erroneous - if you will only reply to a "rational, intelligent, fact-based argument" then you have shown that my original post was such by replying. Thank you for the compliment.
And when someone comes up with a cure for AIDS (besides putting homosexuals in concentration camps, I mean)? Does that mean that humans are smarter than God? Or does it mean God decided homos are "OK after all"? Or is it your contention that AIDS cannot and will not be cured? If so, that is a prediction that can be checked, so soon we'll know if God exists and what his feelings on same-sex marriage are.
*Sigh*. Are you really this stupid or all you trying to "troll" me? If so, then it's worked.
Have you ever heard of this concept called free will which God, in his infinite wisdom, gave mankind? We have the ability to act for ourselves, and this is a prime example. God has not sent AIDS to destroy us, merely to guide us to the correct path. By these kinds of challenges our faith in the Lord is upheld - after all since we were created in His image we are supposed to be better than mere animals.
Which Christian ethics are we talking about? The ones from the New Testament like "love thy neighbor" or the ones from the Old Testament like "an eye for an eye"? Didn't you get the word? Jesus made the OT obsolete.
Only to people like you with an anti-Christian agenda. Those of us who know the Truth in their hearts can easily reconcile any of your so-called "contradictions". Only the faithless have this "problem" with the word of God.
All the liberals *I* know are trying to help people--sounds a lot like "love" doesn't it? (before you conclude that I am a liberal, though, consider that "trying" and "succeeding" are two different things).
The facade of kindness that the liberal hardliners project to the world may be clever enough to fool easily-led sheep like you, but for those of us who know what is really going on the real truth of the atheist-liberal agenda is readily apparent. If you spent less time reading the media and more time thinking for yourself you might realise what is going on underneath your nose as well.
Are you under the impression that the US is the only country with nuclear weapons? The USSR had them at the same time as us and they didn't blow up the planet either. Remember the USSR? The "Evil Empire" run by "militant atheists"?
And look at where their lack of faith has got them. When they turned their back upon God, he turned his back upon them.
How is genetic research related to Christianity? The only link you provide is the old "things man was not meant to meddle with". Read a history book; this phrase has been used to decry airplanes, electricity, astronomy and probably the written word.
I do not have a problem with science per se, merely those blasphemous aspects which seek to undermine the Truth of the Creation and God's role in the Universe - the pseudo-science of cosmology and genetic engineering. These are the arenas that the atheists are using to discredit decent Christians in favour of their bleak, deterministic views. Through this paradigm they seek to make us all equal and soulless, all the better to enslave.
Have you stoppped to think of the possible benefits we might gain from this research? Perhaps making people resistant to AIDS? Or perhaps cancer (since bigotted religeous zealots like you would naturally assume that AIDS is a disease of people of low moral quality)?
AIDS is not there no punish those of low moral quality, it is there to punish us all for allowing these people to become part of normal society rather than being reviled for their unGodly perversions. If it were as you say then decent people wouldn't catch it would they?
That'd be "sentence" and "flippant" unless I'm mistaken, but we'll leave the semantics of correct spelling, grammar and punctuation out of this, shall we?
Ooh, a grammer flame, how mature. That obviously lends credence to your arguments.
Have you perchance thought that some people actually find scientific discovery interesting, and perchance fun? Just because you've got a stick up your ass doesn't meant the rest of us do.
Yes, your definition of "fun" is a true product of the secular brainwashing you have received thanks to the liberal "educators" that have an agenda to destroy any trace of Christian ethics from children's education. And the fact that it is obviously working only means we will have to fight harder to turn people back to the love of our Lord.
Give human kind SOME credit, please. You'd be surprised just how moral we can be as a race when necessary.
Because up until recently decent Christian ethics were viewed as important, and people heeded the word of God. In today's climate of militant atheism ethics and morals come in second place to scientific "advancement".
Sure, there COULD be bad things that come of this technology, but other great scientific discoveries, like electricity, can also be used for the powers of darkness. Quick, shut down your PC - it uses the Devil's own power!
I think you are mistaking me for some kind of Luddite, which I am obviously not. I am merely concerned about the dangers which genetics poses, and how Christianity has been slandered and then abanonded by a society that is walking straight into Satan's grasp with open arms. Any right-thinking person should agree with what I'm saying.
Maybe one day scientists will find out why we are so F*CKING evil to each other. Did god ever solve that one? He is the one who gave us these feelings and motivations, right?
We are evil because of Satan's influence in the world turning people away from the love of the Lord through such popular modern myths as the Big Bang theory, "evolution" (as if sheer chance could result in human beings!) and atheism. God gave us free will because that way our love for him will mean something rather than being blind obedience.
Does god kill people or do murders kill people? What about war? Is it OK for me to kill people in war or is that a sin?
Murder is only ethical when it is done in the name of the Lord, to protect His followers or to punish those who oppose his Truth. Sin cannot accrue to one who acts according to the Lord's wishes.
Whoa! That was 10 years of catholic school comming out!
But Catholics are not Christians and are destined for Hell when they die. Their worship of idols such as the "virgin" Mary and their "saints" precludes them from being Christians. Their so-called "religion" is a foul mockery of Christianity.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about the space program as a whole, merely the Moon landings. For what they accomplished they cost America far too much, and the money would have been far better spent on other things. Obviously the space program as a whole has come up with some great innovations and new technologies.
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Jon E. Erikson
They're obviously demonstrating the amount of redundancy in our alphabet and numeric system by showing just how few characters you can use whilst still remaining intelligible (just!). Rather than being "childish" they are in fact demonstrating a deep and intuitive understanding of information theory and entropy, one which we, as foward thinking people, should admire and indeed emulate!
Or maybe not :)
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Jon E. Erikson
Why are we still on Earth? Because nobody really cares about space any more. Back at the time of the Moon landings people cared, it was a matter of national pride to Americans to get there before the Russians did, and because of that the Americans were able to spend a rediculuous amount of their national budget on a trophy project with no real value.
But now you can't even get funding for NASA to buy extra pencils without Congress screaming bloody murder, and the public are so jaded by "yet another shuttle launch" that they'd rather watch "Armageddon" than anything happening in the real world. The current generation of Americans seem to have lost their fire; without the Red threat there is no real motivational force in the American psyche.
Of course American is now just one of several players in the space market. Whilst its vast body of experiance languishes, becoming more and more obsolete, other nations are still expanding their space programs.
Who'll be the next on the Moon? The Chinese is my guess. And they'll be doing a lot more than putting a Red flag there, because their space program is still on the up.
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Jon E. Erikson
Much of the content of the web relates to the growth of communications technology. You are limiting yourself severely if you are only thinking of the raw bandwidth connections. The growth of use of non-textual content, multimedia, and scripting languages and applets are all advances in communications technology.
From this page at the web site in question:
"Much of the content of the web relates to the growth of communications technology. You are limiting yourself severely if you are only thinking of the raw bandwidth connections. The growth of use of non-textual content, multimedia, and scripting languages and applets are all advances in communications technology".
So since they are currently only archiving ASCII text your point is irrelevent isn't it? They aren't demonstrating the development of communications technology at all, mereley the content on web pages.
Instead, you assumed he did, or were attempting to sidetrack the issue to make yourself look like the oppressed religious minority. This kind of behavior is what disgusts others. When people look at me, they see someone like you -- an arrogant, bigoted ass who sees the entire world as filled with evil sinners out to get them. It makes me sick.
Thanks to the efforts of liberals and atheists everywhere people, like myself, who hold with decent Christian ethics are oppressed and considered to be backward and out of touch with the modern world. Your post seems to indicate that you also believe in the Lord and follow the Bible, so I don't see how you can disagree with what I'm saying. The temptations of Evil are many in today's world, and if I choose to try and spread the Word, why is that considered to be such a bad thing?
Um.. Let me think. YES!! That's how historians have had to do it for ages. Should we ignore early American politics because it too was primarly run by white, middle-aged landowners?
That's what American history textbooks do, and they are hardly the most unbiased texts in the world are they? I can't remember where, but there's a book about how bad American history teaching and books are.
This kind of PC "1984" style of thought would have us ignore all of our history for the goals of delluding ourselves into thinking we're perfect. Well, we're not. Get over it, and start trying to figure out why.
Yes, I know you're not perfect, I never said you were.
Finally, the prima facie evidence of a troll. Someone you picks at the formatting rather than the content of the person they disagree with.
I think I'd already "picked" at the content of his post before I mentioned that. Sorry, but incorrect formatting makes a post harder to read and bugs me. Is that a crime? It might make me anal, but not a troll.
Besides, you should really preview and check your spelling before being so harsh. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
*Sigh* And so should you - "delluding", "condenscending" - we all make mistakes. After all, nobody, apart from our Lord, is perfect.
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Jon E. Erikson
I wish I hadn't just used my last moderator point.
Why? Because you, like so many /. moderators, moderate anything you disagree with down? IMHO that is the biggest simgle problem with /. at the moment, with troll metamoderation the second.
I don't think it is getting a snapshot of how society is today. But is that really the point? Or, rather, is that really what these archives will be used for in the future?
Well, what else is it going to be used for? Your suggestion that it be used as a reference on "the growth of communications techology" is rediculous - the growth of hate material and pornography on the web has no correlation with the growth of communications technology at all. This project is not getting a snapshot of web technology, it is getting a snapshot of web content, something entirely different.
If a million people say something that is factually wrong, it's still wrong. Got that?
Please demonstrate how believing in God and decent Christian morality is "factually wrong". I doubt you can.
Yeah, so what? Does that mean they should stop? It's still their time and money. And this archive WILL provide an amazing picture of the Internet when it was still relatively young(teething, as it were).
My point is, if you read my post, that this is not a good thing given the exlusive access to the net by a certain portion of society. Would you consider how a society lived through records of its nobility?
P.S. Sort your HTML tags out.
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Jon E. Erikson
The "teething problems" are what makes it historically interesting! I think historians of the future will be much more interested in looking at the development of the web through trial and error than at the finished product.
Well I suppose that the sheer amount of perversion and degredation available on the net at this point in history will provide a lot of interest to future historians, so in that context sure it'll be "historically interesting"!
But, pornography aside, what is there of real historical value on the net? Sure there are any number of mindless geocities homepages full of drivel about people's pets, but sifitng through this would drive anyone mad and there are a lot more "insightful" sources already available about today's culture.
Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
It's not a study, it's an archive. The purpose of this project is to collect data, not to analyze it or place any sort of value judgement on it.
But unless it will be used as the basis for future studies then this project is a waste of time, so I don't think you have a valid point here.
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Jon E. Erikson
Sure, this'll be a useful reference for future generations, won't it? I'm sorry, but as much of a fan of the web as I am, I really wouldn't consider it to be something worthy of archival in the state that it is at the moment. Why? Well, because currently the web is still in the transitional period between the days of ARPAnet and purely academic use and acceptance as a medium through which the general public can communicate. And as such, it's still in a state where teething problems overwhelm content.
The trouble with the web is that although it is supposedly accessable to anyone with a phone line and a PC, the harsh reality is that cost and communications infrastructure have meant that only those of a certain socioeconomic group are currently able to use the web, and this group is mainly comprised of the priviliged, a group which most /.ers fall into by dint of their jobs or backgrounds. Research carried out my both my consultancy group and others all indicate that the majority of people able to use the web are white, middle-class and certainly in higher than average tax brackets.
So given this, how does taking a snapshot of the web give a view of how society is at the moment? It doesn't, any more than looking at the Royal family of England gives a picture of what England is like (despite what some Americans seem to think). The views that are expressed on the web are those of a priviliged class who do not have to suffer the effects of current liberal free-market policies and the increasing divide between the rich and the poor.
No, this exercise will be a "Who's Who" of society, showing only those who are rich enough to be able to afford net access. The majority of people, unable to benefit from the web, will be left by this study as an underclass, something which I view as incredibly wrong and an example of the undeniable arrogance that most people on the net display towards those that are perceived as their inferiors. Indeed, I have suffered the same myself here on this forum for expressing views that people consider "outdated" or "primitive", even they are held by many others.
Anyway, any study that attempts to categorise how we live at the moment using the web is doomed to be prejudiced and incomplete. Until everyone is online and has equal access, this is just another arrogant study attempting to categorise who is worth enough to be able to use the net.
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Jon E. Erikson
What I meant was it was designed with mobile phones rather than for wireless devices in general and hence has certain parts of it which specifically apply to mobile phones and don't make sense in the context of other wireless devices.
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Jon E. Erikson
Actually, it's the "university" portion that he was talking about - I definitely think QM should be taught as first-year undergrad material. High school... might be a bit too early.
I'm not saying start going into QM before university, that would be a bit much, but the concepts can be introduced. The only reason I did a physics degree was because of the books I was reading at the time - I couldn't stand A-level physics at school. There's only so much enthusiasm you can generate for tickertape and ripple tanks :)
Science in high school is intended to teach a method of thought and investigation, and to whet the appetite for knowledge.
Yeah, but it doesn't does it? Everyone I know just got rote learning rather than *gasp* an explanaition of the principles of say, acceleration or circular motion.
University teaching, though, is backwards. There's no reason for people to unlearn things, and since in a university, order of class taking is for the most part, free, it would make sense to have physics majors take quantum mechanics first, and anyone who just wants to take physics as an elective could take classical mechanics first. The order we currently have just leads to confusion.
Hmm, it's different over here in the UK, I had a generally set curriculum with some options, and we did quantum mechanics from the first year on, although we only started the real meat in the third year. But the thing is that because of things like Dirac notation, some of the more "advanced" stuff is actually easier than the stuff that you have to unlearn - go figure.
(Action principles get taught? That's surprising. I had to figure it out on my own.)
We got about six hours on them for a maths course, with no explanaition why or examples. Which is really stupid, because they're one of the most central concepts you'd need if you actually wanted to do real physics, and apart from that they make it really easy to do all kinds of problems.
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Jon E. Erikson
The trouble with the WAP protocol is that it is designed primarily with the mobile phone market in mind, and has a lot of excess baggage that both complicates it and makes it harder to implement on any other platform.
Unfortunately for people producing and selling WAP phones, the uptake has been a lot less than expected, at least here in the UK anyway, and from my experiances it's not suprising - you can't really do very much with the current phones since the technology isn't there yet to allow a device that small to be suited for web browsing.
So the whole WAP hype has turned out to be pretty much that, hype, and hopefully this will allow an alternative to take over. Despite it's current failure to appeal, the market is sure to be enormous once the right technology is there.
P.S. CmdrTaco, surely it'd be better to spend some time fixing /. than trying to get it shown on obscure devices? Just a thought.
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Jon E. Erikson
A professor of mine told me once that he thought that quantum mechanics should be taught before classical mechanics, because then we'd never even think about these dumb ideas like absolute locality, etc. I'm inclined to believe him. People who don't complete physics the entire way through get more misinformation that information, quite often.
Agreed. The hardest part about quantum mechanics is that in order to grasp the ideas behind it you need to unlearn a lot of classical ideas that you get taught beforehand. This is fine if you never do any advanced physics but when you're going on to higher study it just makes it harder.
Just look at the model of the atom and the conceptual revisions it goes through at different stages of education - solar system model, Bohr model and then finally the full quantum model. And the same applies to a lot of other concepts too.
Quite frankly physics teaching sucks before you get to university. It's dull and waaay too focused on things like mechanics.
And don't even get me started on action principles and when they get taught :)
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Jon E. Erikson
Why on Earth would I want to reply to someone who is trying to "out" me as a troll for some reason known only to themselves. OTOH, your posts do serve to keep me amused at work, so I hope you continue.
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Jon E. Erikson
Radio antennas give off radiation too - radio radiation. No one worries about radio radiation - there are plenty of people right beside a radio tower - hell, some are built in the middle of cities. Somehow I've got a feeling no one will really care, at least, after a few years of no one dying because of it.
You'd be suprised - see here and this study here.
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Jon E. Erikson
The trouble is with this situation is that it isn't as cut and dried as people might think. Sure, you've got a right to privacy, but national security isn't just something made up by government's to impose Big Brother regimes on their citizens.
Even now that the Cold War has finished there are any number of threats to people in every country that are dealt with by intelligence services all the time without people even realising it. And if these agencies cannot access information when it is required then they cannot do their jobs, and the chances of say, a terrorist bomb attack, goes up dramatically.
OTOH corporations should have no rights at all to spy on their employees in the ways that this article suggests. Unfortunately because the growth of net use in the workplace has occured so quickly the law hasn't been able to keep up with all of the various aspects of privacy and rights.
And whilst the corporations have such a pervasive influence on government, especially the case in the US, the issue is likely to be either sidelined or made even worse by pro-corporate legislation.
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Jon E. Erikson
What a load of nonsense :)
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Jon E. Erikson
Radiation from lasers? Which type would that be? You know full well thats a load of rubbish.
Microwave radiation idiot - read the article. You know, like mobile phones give off but a hell of a lot stronger? If there's so much of a scare over using phones, think about how much of a scare there'll be over a fuck off big array of microwave lasers.
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Jon E. Erikson
The laser would be earth bound, and nothing more than a a large peace of equipment. A laser pointing towards the sky shouldn't scare anyone.
You're shitting me right? If you honestly think that having a very large ground based laser pointed into the sky isn't going to worry people then I suggest you get out more. I'm no technophobe but it'd scare me if they wanted one near me. And I doubt people like Greenpeace would welcome this kind of idea.
Light sails work by using the momentum of photons for to speed up. They reflect the light, essentially inverting it's direction and thus get a speed boost.
Err, no they don't. The light is absorbed, not reflected. If it was reflected then they'd have to slow down to transfer momentum, which is obviously impossible.
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Jon E. Erikson
Eh? What is the practical use of this? I'm not disagreeing with the concept, which obviously works, but surely this is just another one of NASA's research projects that never go anywhere. They've got ion drives now, so why are they bothering with this?
The idea that they're going to be able to push anything of any use, such as cargo or satellites, using lasers is rediculous - the energy required is more than enough to destroy the object in question, which is hardly a useful end result is it? And as for power consumption, I doubt this will be any more efficient than the Saturn V once all the costs are factored in.
And even if they solve this "little" problem, who is going to want to have a huge laser sited in their territory, beaming out dangerous radiation 24 hours a day? People are worried enough about nuclear power, the idea of huge lasers and microwaves beaming across the sky is sure to provoke hordes of protestors.
NASA have a promising drive technology in the form of their ion drive, why bother with something that isn't practical? They need to stop financing anything with the word "space" in it on the off chance it'll pan out and spend their money on real space projects.
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Jon E. Erikson
The practice of releasing new chips with negligible differences in clock speeds every few months has really seemed stupid to me. The sort of people who have to have the latest and fastest processor aren't going to be impressed when their brand new expensive X Mhz processor is superseded by the even newer X+25 MHz chip in two months time, and many of them will probably wait.
And it must also be costing Intel money to keep releasing incremental upgrades, simply because they then have to lower the prices of the now slower chips to get them to sell in the face of their latest speed king.
This pissing contest between AMD and Intel hasn't done Intel any favours at all, and it's probably time for them to take stock of where they went wrong.
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Jon E. Erikson
Errrm, that wasn't a troll BTW. I honestly think that this sort of thing will come about as more and more information moves onto the net and people start to use it as their sole source of information.
Sure, and having information stuffed down your throat by a TV is also convienient. That's what 2000 channels were supposed to be for. Does anybody want the internet to be like that?
Not the same. 2000 channels means that again you have to search for the stuff you want and end up missing half of it. What I'm talking about is the equivalent of a single channel just filled with the stuff that matches your profile - very convenient indeed.
And no, I certainly don't want the net like that, but given the amount of people using services like AOL or FreeServe who never venture out of the service's own "areas", I'd say that many other people would want this sort of thing. And not everyone has the time to track down every little thing they want, especially when they might not even know of its existance.
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Jon E. Erikson
I suppose there is an ongoing process of increasing information on the net, although I'd hardly call it an explosion. The real "explosion" on the net seems to me to be in Geocities homepages rather than new style journalism, but the amount of information available on the net is going to increase.
Probably the real winners if this ideal ever comes to past are those services which can filter this flood of information and provide users with a summary of it that they can digest. After all, it's useless to have so much information available that you can't find anything you're after. Much like /. allows me to read about stuff I'm interested in that I wouldn't have seen otherwise, these services will allow people to customise profiles of what they want to know about.
Of course there are bad sides to this - if you only see what you're interested in it tends to reinforce the views and ideas that you already hold rather than challenge your beliefs. Whether this will be worse than the lowest common denominator style of mass media that most people get today is something we'll have to see.
And of course there are privacy issues with having such a personal profile available. Still I think this kind of thing is going to come about - most people prefer convenience over issues like privacy, and one thing this kind of service will be, is convenient.
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Jon E. Erikson
Your "argument" is both closed-minded and simply erroneous - if you will only reply to a "rational, intelligent, fact-based argument" then you have shown that my original post was such by replying. Thank you for the compliment.
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Jon E. Erikson
And when someone comes up with a cure for AIDS (besides putting homosexuals in concentration camps, I mean)? Does that mean that humans are smarter than God? Or does it mean God decided homos are "OK after all"? Or is it your contention that AIDS cannot and will not be cured? If so, that is a prediction that can be checked, so soon we'll know if God exists and what his feelings on same-sex marriage are.
*Sigh*. Are you really this stupid or all you trying to "troll" me? If so, then it's worked.
Have you ever heard of this concept called free will which God, in his infinite wisdom, gave mankind? We have the ability to act for ourselves, and this is a prime example. God has not sent AIDS to destroy us, merely to guide us to the correct path. By these kinds of challenges our faith in the Lord is upheld - after all since we were created in His image we are supposed to be better than mere animals.
Which Christian ethics are we talking about? The ones from the New Testament like "love thy neighbor" or the ones from the Old Testament like "an eye for an eye"? Didn't you get the word? Jesus made the OT obsolete.
Only to people like you with an anti-Christian agenda. Those of us who know the Truth in their hearts can easily reconcile any of your so-called "contradictions". Only the faithless have this "problem" with the word of God.
All the liberals *I* know are trying to help people--sounds a lot like "love" doesn't it? (before you conclude that I am a liberal, though, consider that "trying" and "succeeding" are two different things).
The facade of kindness that the liberal hardliners project to the world may be clever enough to fool easily-led sheep like you, but for those of us who know what is really going on the real truth of the atheist-liberal agenda is readily apparent. If you spent less time reading the media and more time thinking for yourself you might realise what is going on underneath your nose as well.
Are you under the impression that the US is the only country with nuclear weapons? The USSR had them at the same time as us and they didn't blow up the planet either. Remember the USSR? The "Evil Empire" run by "militant atheists"?
And look at where their lack of faith has got them. When they turned their back upon God, he turned his back upon them.
How is genetic research related to Christianity? The only link you provide is the old "things man was not meant to meddle with". Read a history book; this phrase has been used to decry airplanes, electricity, astronomy and probably the written word.
I do not have a problem with science per se, merely those blasphemous aspects which seek to undermine the Truth of the Creation and God's role in the Universe - the pseudo-science of cosmology and genetic engineering. These are the arenas that the atheists are using to discredit decent Christians in favour of their bleak, deterministic views. Through this paradigm they seek to make us all equal and soulless, all the better to enslave.
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Jon E. Erikson
Have you stoppped to think of the possible benefits we might gain from this research? Perhaps making people resistant to AIDS? Or perhaps cancer (since bigotted religeous zealots like you would naturally assume that AIDS is a disease of people of low moral quality)?
AIDS is not there no punish those of low moral quality, it is there to punish us all for allowing these people to become part of normal society rather than being reviled for their unGodly perversions. If it were as you say then decent people wouldn't catch it would they?
That'd be "sentence" and "flippant" unless I'm mistaken, but we'll leave the semantics of correct spelling, grammar and punctuation out of this, shall we?
Ooh, a grammer flame, how mature. That obviously lends credence to your arguments.
Have you perchance thought that some people actually find scientific discovery interesting, and perchance fun? Just because you've got a stick up your ass doesn't meant the rest of us do.
Yes, your definition of "fun" is a true product of the secular brainwashing you have received thanks to the liberal "educators" that have an agenda to destroy any trace of Christian ethics from children's education. And the fact that it is obviously working only means we will have to fight harder to turn people back to the love of our Lord.
Give human kind SOME credit, please. You'd be surprised just how moral we can be as a race when necessary.
Because up until recently decent Christian ethics were viewed as important, and people heeded the word of God. In today's climate of militant atheism ethics and morals come in second place to scientific "advancement".
Sure, there COULD be bad things that come of this technology, but other great scientific discoveries, like electricity, can also be used for the powers of darkness. Quick, shut down your PC - it uses the Devil's own power!
I think you are mistaking me for some kind of Luddite, which I am obviously not. I am merely concerned about the dangers which genetics poses, and how Christianity has been slandered and then abanonded by a society that is walking straight into Satan's grasp with open arms. Any right-thinking person should agree with what I'm saying.
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Jon E. Erikson
Maybe one day scientists will find out why we are so F*CKING evil to each other. Did god ever solve that one? He is the one who gave us these feelings and motivations, right?
We are evil because of Satan's influence in the world turning people away from the love of the Lord through such popular modern myths as the Big Bang theory, "evolution" (as if sheer chance could result in human beings!) and atheism. God gave us free will because that way our love for him will mean something rather than being blind obedience.
Does god kill people or do murders kill people? What about war? Is it OK for me to kill people in war or is that a sin?
Murder is only ethical when it is done in the name of the Lord, to protect His followers or to punish those who oppose his Truth. Sin cannot accrue to one who acts according to the Lord's wishes.
Whoa! That was 10 years of catholic school comming out!
But Catholics are not Christians and are destined for Hell when they die. Their worship of idols such as the "virgin" Mary and their "saints" precludes them from being Christians. Their so-called "religion" is a foul mockery of Christianity.
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Jon E. Erikson