The spelling and grammar in the paper is very poor. I can't take any of the fact finding seriously when the spelling and grammar is that bad.
What exactly do you expect us to think of you by saying that?
I certainly will grant one thing: TFA is very short, short on citations, and written in a very informal style, more so than what I expect out of academic work, and depending on the author's purpose and audience (which I don't know, I'll admit), I would suggest rewriting it/editing. But you, dear Coward, you're out of your mind.
As TFA itself alludes to it, though in a way that's not helpful to non-specialists. From TFA:
In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around "class" is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like "working class" and "middle class" and "upper class" get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus "class."
The treatment of class in American sociology isn't a matter of just income, even in the older, less "critical" work that TFA is probably critical of. Sociologists doing quantitative research routinely use things other than income when they classify people by social class. For example, they often also use education and profession. A construction contractor with no education beyond high school may routinely get classified as "working class," even if he makes more than a Ph.D. in literature who teaches at a community college, who gets classified as middle class. The theory is that their social networks are quite different, and that this will be no less predictive of whatever variables the study is researching than income will be.
(Not a sociologist, but I've hung around plenty of social scientists.)
IQ may not be the *only* thing that corresponds to intelligence, but it definitely is an objective measure of some factors that we consider to be the hallmarks of an intelligent person.
Who is "we," and why should I believe "us"? And more importantly, why do "we" act and talk as if there is a definite thing called "intelligence" at all, that can be measured?
Just because we call some people "smart" in some vague set of circumstances (which may differ from one person to the next) doesn't mean that we can coherently claim there is a thing called "intelligence" that we can measure.
Technology is the end result of our problem solving which is a subset of our brain's survival routines. Just think if the sun was say (for convenience of making my point) going to explode in 200 years, you'd definitely see vigorous redirection of resources in finding a way to make it to outer space at any cost or *else*.
Why are you so sure of that?
Here's an alternative scenario: when every person and group realizes that their coping with each other's conflicting interests has ceased to be for the indefinite future, and instead has a definite endpoint, all such cooperation will stop immediately, and massive all-out conflict will ensue.
Please note that I do not actually claim to know that that would happen. I just propose it because it is a different, no less plausible brand of sociobiological bullshit that the one you're so certain about ("the brain's survival routines"? who made you a neuroscientist?).
Or, in short: stop thinking that you know so much.
This goes against every biological imperative ever experienced by any life form on earth.
Science is descriptive, not normative. However convenient it may be to picture whatever biological facts as an "imperative," you still can't derive an ought from an is.
The way species improve themselves is to expand until they fill their available space to the limit, and beyond, of sustainability. Once that is reached, a die-off culls the weak and strengthens the remaining gene pool for further adaptation and expansion.
Oh my god. Where do I start?
Natural selection does not "improve" species in any evaluative sense, only in a trivial, tautological sense that the types that reproduced more successfully will tend to be more frequent in the succeeding generation. If you think these organisms are "better," you are guilty of overlaying a value judgement on a valueless matter.
The "weak" can only be identified in retrospect; they turned out not to be adapted for those circumstances, but they could in principle have been adapted to others. But by the same token, natural selection does not "strenghten the remaining gene pool," because there is no guarantee that yesterday's adaptations will actually help in tomorrow's environment.
In fact, too much of a purging of genetic diversity, by excessive disappearance of "weak" genes, may weaken the species' chances of survival in the case of a change of environment.
Once we fill this planet to the breaking point (which we will), we'll either die off, improving the "herd", or we'll send parts of us away to seed nearby star systems. Death, life, freedom, poverty, and exploration are all the reasons we need, just like our forefathers who struck out across oceans to find new land for colonization. I'm afraid this notion of "fewer humans on earth" is fundamentally nonsense. Biology demands that we expand and multiply, or die trying.
No, biology does not demand anything, you silly. Stop wishfully thinking that science justifies your sick cosmological fantasies, and engage biology seriously if you do so. (And for that matter, engage seriously the actual history of European colonialism, that you're glorifying there.)
To pick some particular "this is what will be the new scientific principle" would be wishfull thinking. To say that there is likely to be one is reasoned prediction. (Not guaranteed, but plausible.)
As they say in the investment business: "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns."
OTOH, there's nothing wrong with wishful thinking, as long as you don't mistake it for reality.
I don't think you understand the term wishful thinking as well as you think.
Gee, I thought the whole point of a free market was to let businesses succeed/fail based on their ability to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for.
And I thought that we'd figured out long ago that government intervention is often required to create a free market where one could otherwise not exist, because we'd all be worse off otherwise. I guess we should just get rid of fire departments, police, roads, public education, financial assistance for higher education and research, and copyright.
As far as "sound scientific principles"....remember Newtons laws of motion? They were well accepted as "sound scientific principles" back then, and they held their ground for a couple of centuries. Then we started figuring out that they aren't exactly accurate in some scenarios. Who's to say that in the next century or two we won't start figuring out scenarios in which our current scientific understanding isn't exactly applicable.
That is perfectly true in hindsight, and as much hopeless wishful thinking for you to think it now as it would have been for somebody 150 years ago to do so.
You do realise(sic) that Americans don't have a very good public transportation system at all and a lot of them live in small towns that do not have any kind of public transportation. For most Americans no car = no job.
But, people have lived in small towns for ages before cars or public transportation exists. That just can't be it.
I think you're making the mistake of making a one-sided cause analysis here. You say that Americans have to get cars because the places they need to reach are too far to practically reach otherwise. But what you're missing is that the town can only afford to have workplaces and stores be so far-flung precisely because they can rely on people driving to reach them. In towns where cars are less common and people rely on public transport, this sort of problem doesn't exist that much, because the economics of getting people to workplaces and stores demands that they be located close to public transport, either through putting them where existing lines are, or creating new lines to enable new districts.
well if we take my SE W810i as representative, the battery life will probably be superb.
And if we take mine, the noise floor when you try to actually use the damn thing as the "Walkman" it is marketed as will be so high as to be intolerable. (Not to mention the next-to-unusable UI for playing music.)
It's a shame he stopped listening to his own common sense as SE's phones are lovely, and the combination of a fast operating system and easy to use keyboard & pointer/clicker makes it simple to do many tasks without looking at the screen at all - which is something of which the iPhone will never be capable
Then why is the W810i so fucking useless as the music player phone it is marketed as?
Um, about half a gazillion people? For extreme, loony examples, look at stuff like transhumanism.
Science is just a bunch of fact and data.
No, science is a social institution that involves the discovery of facts about the natural world, the transmission of the knowledge required for carrying out the required activities, ideologies that its members adopt as part of their participation in the institution in a certain role, relations between that institutions and others in society (like, e.g., government, the media, relgious organizations), and so on.
Scientists listen to data, not what politicians/economists etc want.
Not true under any charitable interpretation. Read up some on actual history, philosophy and sociology of science. (And by history of science, I don't mean "history' of science as recorded by textbooks that heavily distort the history to fit the dominant paradigm; I mean actual, uncensored, unsanitized history of science, where the way things happened is a damn mess.)
The threat of science to freedom is a classic theme of Feyerabend's, for example. I don't have anything to say better than what he does, so go read up. (For those of you too lazy to read actualy books, try this or this.)
Note that this does not mean "science is an evil that we must eradicate"; it means "science is not the panacea that its most ardent supporters would like us to believe."
Nope, you would not know that the animal in question was large or carnivorous. Those would be nothing more than a good guess.
I should have mentioned something: the fact that those would be good guesses, given the classification, is a completely contingent fact. Nothing about the classification itself makes it more likely for a panthera to be large or carnivorous than otherwise.
However, good taxonomies and naming conventions will allow someone to tell a lot about the physical attributes of something which has previously been examined and classified by someone else just be hearing it's name.
Examined and classified... for what purpose? Why are you trying to erect a grand classificatory scheme without tying it to some specific task that compels you to do so? Why do you propose such a thing as the "right" or "best" way of classifying celestial objects?
For example, "lion" and "tiger" are two names which refer to very similar objects, but you wouldn't know that just by their names. Panthea leo and Panthera tigris, on the other hand, let you know that these are both subtypes of some object class Panthera, and if you know what that entails, then you'll know a lot about both of those objects.
The only thing that entails is that members of both species share a common ancestor, that this common ancestor is relatively more distant to tigers than the common ancestor to all tigers is (genus is above species), yet closer than the common ancestor for all felines or that of all mammals. It entails absolutely nothing more. Nothing about the phenotypes or the genotypes of the species follows from that, nor anything about how recently they diverged.
[...] however, if I overheard that a Panthera fubaris had escaped, while still not knowing what exactly that was, I'd know it was some sort of large carnivorous feline
Nope, you would not know that the animal in question was large or carnivorous. Those would be nothing more than a good guess.
Individual governments can choose to tax however they want within the self-imposed limits of their own constitution, or possibly international treaty. Just because some governments are looking at taxing only the transfer part right now doesn't mean they can't change the rules later.
That is indeed true. Have fun warning us about the conspiracy.
I think we need to have our system of classifications able to accurately distinguish between: [classification snipped]
Why? The actual physical and astronomical facts about the matter, given our contemporary understanding of astronomy, do not depend on such a classification at all. The classification of the celestial objects is not a matter of convenience, not of fact. No astronomical fact follows independently from the "fact" that body X is classified as a Y in your scheme. That is, the only facts that follow about body X are the very same facts that the classification requires for it to be an X; when you gather all the facts that you need to classify X as a Y, the fact that X is a Y does not allow you to infer further facts about it.
Because, of course, there are no physical or astronomical law hinges on whether an object is a star, planet or moon; they're just big blobs of matter in various states, of various shapes, moving at various velocities relative to each other, and exerting all of the usual forces that they exert in virtue of being the aggregates of the stuff they are made out of.
Learn how taxes actually work. The government isn't looking to tax online game transactions in virtual currency. They are looking to tax the transactions where somebody converts virtual game property into real money, and only the real money side.
This is not very different from the taxation on investments. As a general rule, when you buy an investment and it appreciates, the government doesn't tax you for the appreciation. They tax you when either the investment pays you dividends or interest (in cash), and when you sell it (again, for cash). They don't make you give them 28% of your shares each year.
Just out of curiosity, could we maintain some consistency here on the front page?
Why? What's the real value of it in this vs./versus issue? Do you have a better argument than "The New York Times does it this way," or "the small minority of uninfluential people who have the same pet peeves as I do will use it as the excuse to justify the preconceived bad opinion of you"? Or are you just another random intellectually bankrupt pet peever who's never even taken Linguistics 101, pretending that he knows something about language?
I mean, there are editorial tasks the Slashdot editors don't do today that are actually important, like, well, reading the stories linked from the submissions to determine whether the submitters' descriptions of them are even remotely accurate. If you were
In my experience in the music industry (and granted it was a long time ago), musicians would get typically less than 10 percent of sales, usually 6 percent. If it was a group, that 6 percent was split with the group.
You're making a moralistic assumption here: that it's the musicians who ought to be making at least as much money as everybody else in the industry, if not more.
The facts remain the following:
The music industry brings to the deal a network for promoting music and artists, distribution, and management of things like royalties. The demand for these services enormously exceeds the supply: for every sucker who wants to sign on to a major label, there's another sucker who's willing to undercut them.
The musicians bring to the deal their music. The supply of this good, in the aggregate, greatly exceeds the demand. There's tons and tons of very good musicians out there that most people will never hear.
Music doesn't have to be very good to sell very well. Labels can leverage their economies of scale to make a lot of money on bad music.
Now that is why most of the money in the music business isn't made by musicians. Not because of some insidious and evil plot to deny the musicians of what ought to be theirs.
Uhh, no need. You can do that with glass lenses. Its called depth-of-field, aperture, etc.
Depth of field just means that sharpness decreases more or less gradually for points at planes parallel to the plane of focus, so that if you aperture is small enough, you get acceptable practical sharpness at a range of distances from the lens, and not just at the plane of focus.
The crucial thing is that by using depth of field, you have the following limitations:
Every point that you want to be sharp in the image must lie within the field of focus for the aperture and focal length that you're using. If they're too far apart, you can't do it.
Every point in the field of focus will be sharp.
What the GP proposed could, conceivably, not have those limitations (I don't know for sure). It would be hella harder to use, though.
And for your obstacle, simply open a document and 'print' it to PDF. Simple enough.
Oh, yeah, that's really simple. (Ignore the non-computerfolk people in the crowd asking "What's PDF?")
You're basically suggesting that files be saved twice.
No, I'm not. What I'm suggesting differs in two regards:
In each "save," it wouldn't be "the same file," because the application would be built in such a way that the difference between them is obvious. There's the concept of sharing the raw materials that go into making a document, and there's the concept of the finished product. If you want to collaborate on authorship, you need to share the first; if you just want to give somebody the end result, you give them the latter.
I'm not thinking about it in terms of "saving" "files"; these are the terms of the traditional paradigm, and they are part of the problem:
You shouldn't have to "save" the work area for your documents at all. The computer should make sure that your work is never lost unless you specifcally ask to delete it. The whole concept of having to "save" your work is broken, and we need new tools and paradigms for organizing and deleting work in computers.
In the read-only copies, the operation wouldn't be to "save" to a file. It would be to prepare a finished version of your work for somebody.
As I said: "design the UI to support users' reasoning about this problem."
Especially if you have employees sending documents to someone outside the company. Then it's their JOB to know how to use Office. Pack 'em all in a room, pull up Word on an projector, and get it done with. Send 'em back to their desks with a handout with directions.
I don't disagree with training people to do their job better. What bothers me is the fact that the computer industry systematically fails to own up to its own responsibility to design usable software, and uses a combination of blame-the-user and CYA features like "Delete Hidden Content."
We're building solutions that are way more complex to use than they need to be, and require users to constantly pay attention to all sorts of hard-to-guess little details. For example as whether the way the application stores data into files in a primitive filesystem is appropriate for sending the file to untrusted recipients.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly do you expect us to think of you by saying that?
I certainly will grant one thing: TFA is very short, short on citations, and written in a very informal style, more so than what I expect out of academic work, and depending on the author's purpose and audience (which I don't know, I'll admit), I would suggest rewriting it/editing. But you, dear Coward, you're out of your mind.
As TFA itself alludes to it, though in a way that's not helpful to non-specialists. From TFA:
The treatment of class in American sociology isn't a matter of just income, even in the older, less "critical" work that TFA is probably critical of. Sociologists doing quantitative research routinely use things other than income when they classify people by social class. For example, they often also use education and profession. A construction contractor with no education beyond high school may routinely get classified as "working class," even if he makes more than a Ph.D. in literature who teaches at a community college, who gets classified as middle class. The theory is that their social networks are quite different, and that this will be no less predictive of whatever variables the study is researching than income will be.
(Not a sociologist, but I've hung around plenty of social scientists.)
Who is "we," and why should I believe "us"? And more importantly, why do "we" act and talk as if there is a definite thing called "intelligence" at all, that can be measured?
Just because we call some people "smart" in some vague set of circumstances (which may differ from one person to the next) doesn't mean that we can coherently claim there is a thing called "intelligence" that we can measure.
Why are you so sure of that?
Here's an alternative scenario: when every person and group realizes that their coping with each other's conflicting interests has ceased to be for the indefinite future, and instead has a definite endpoint, all such cooperation will stop immediately, and massive all-out conflict will ensue.
Please note that I do not actually claim to know that that would happen. I just propose it because it is a different, no less plausible brand of sociobiological bullshit that the one you're so certain about ("the brain's survival routines"? who made you a neuroscientist?).
Or, in short: stop thinking that you know so much.
Science is descriptive, not normative. However convenient it may be to picture whatever biological facts as an "imperative," you still can't derive an ought from an is.
Oh my god. Where do I start?
No, biology does not demand anything, you silly. Stop wishfully thinking that science justifies your sick cosmological fantasies, and engage biology seriously if you do so. (And for that matter, engage seriously the actual history of European colonialism, that you're glorifying there.)
As they say in the investment business: "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns."
I don't think you understand the term wishful thinking as well as you think.
And I thought that we'd figured out long ago that government intervention is often required to create a free market where one could otherwise not exist, because we'd all be worse off otherwise. I guess we should just get rid of fire departments, police, roads, public education, financial assistance for higher education and research, and copyright.
That is perfectly true in hindsight, and as much hopeless wishful thinking for you to think it now as it would have been for somebody 150 years ago to do so.
But, people have lived in small towns for ages before cars or public transportation exists. That just can't be it.
I think you're making the mistake of making a one-sided cause analysis here. You say that Americans have to get cars because the places they need to reach are too far to practically reach otherwise. But what you're missing is that the town can only afford to have workplaces and stores be so far-flung precisely because they can rely on people driving to reach them. In towns where cars are less common and people rely on public transport, this sort of problem doesn't exist that much, because the economics of getting people to workplaces and stores demands that they be located close to public transport, either through putting them where existing lines are, or creating new lines to enable new districts.
And if we take mine, the noise floor when you try to actually use the damn thing as the "Walkman" it is marketed as will be so high as to be intolerable. (Not to mention the next-to-unusable UI for playing music.)
Then why is the W810i so fucking useless as the music player phone it is marketed as?
As you could find out easily if you just read some basic work on the history or the sociology of science.
Um, about half a gazillion people? For extreme, loony examples, look at stuff like transhumanism.
No, science is a social institution that involves the discovery of facts about the natural world, the transmission of the knowledge required for carrying out the required activities, ideologies that its members adopt as part of their participation in the institution in a certain role, relations between that institutions and others in society (like, e.g., government, the media, relgious organizations), and so on.
Not true under any charitable interpretation. Read up some on actual history, philosophy and sociology of science. (And by history of science, I don't mean "history' of science as recorded by textbooks that heavily distort the history to fit the dominant paradigm; I mean actual, uncensored, unsanitized history of science, where the way things happened is a damn mess.)
The threat of science to freedom is a classic theme of Feyerabend's, for example. I don't have anything to say better than what he does, so go read up. (For those of you too lazy to read actualy books, try this or this.)
Note that this does not mean "science is an evil that we must eradicate"; it means "science is not the panacea that its most ardent supporters would like us to believe."
I should have mentioned something: the fact that those would be good guesses, given the classification, is a completely contingent fact. Nothing about the classification itself makes it more likely for a panthera to be large or carnivorous than otherwise.
Examined and classified... for what purpose? Why are you trying to erect a grand classificatory scheme without tying it to some specific task that compels you to do so? Why do you propose such a thing as the "right" or "best" way of classifying celestial objects?
The only thing that entails is that members of both species share a common ancestor, that this common ancestor is relatively more distant to tigers than the common ancestor to all tigers is (genus is above species), yet closer than the common ancestor for all felines or that of all mammals. It entails absolutely nothing more. Nothing about the phenotypes or the genotypes of the species follows from that, nor anything about how recently they diverged.
Nope, you would not know that the animal in question was large or carnivorous. Those would be nothing more than a good guess.
That is indeed true. Have fun warning us about the conspiracy.
Why? The actual physical and astronomical facts about the matter, given our contemporary understanding of astronomy, do not depend on such a classification at all. The classification of the celestial objects is not a matter of convenience, not of fact. No astronomical fact follows independently from the "fact" that body X is classified as a Y in your scheme. That is, the only facts that follow about body X are the very same facts that the classification requires for it to be an X; when you gather all the facts that you need to classify X as a Y, the fact that X is a Y does not allow you to infer further facts about it.
Because, of course, there are no physical or astronomical law hinges on whether an object is a star, planet or moon; they're just big blobs of matter in various states, of various shapes, moving at various velocities relative to each other, and exerting all of the usual forces that they exert in virtue of being the aggregates of the stuff they are made out of.
Learn how taxes actually work. The government isn't looking to tax online game transactions in virtual currency. They are looking to tax the transactions where somebody converts virtual game property into real money, and only the real money side.
This is not very different from the taxation on investments. As a general rule, when you buy an investment and it appreciates, the government doesn't tax you for the appreciation. They tax you when either the investment pays you dividends or interest (in cash), and when you sell it (again, for cash). They don't make you give them 28% of your shares each year.
Under Newtonian mechanics, if we assume the frame of reference of the Google Spy Van, then it follows that everything in the scene is moving.
Why? What's the real value of it in this vs./versus issue? Do you have a better argument than "The New York Times does it this way," or "the small minority of uninfluential people who have the same pet peeves as I do will use it as the excuse to justify the preconceived bad opinion of you"? Or are you just another random intellectually bankrupt pet peever who's never even taken Linguistics 101, pretending that he knows something about language?
I mean, there are editorial tasks the Slashdot editors don't do today that are actually important, like, well, reading the stories linked from the submissions to determine whether the submitters' descriptions of them are even remotely accurate. If you were
You're making a moralistic assumption here: that it's the musicians who ought to be making at least as much money as everybody else in the industry, if not more.
The facts remain the following:
Now that is why most of the money in the music business isn't made by musicians. Not because of some insidious and evil plot to deny the musicians of what ought to be theirs.
Depth of field just means that sharpness decreases more or less gradually for points at planes parallel to the plane of focus, so that if you aperture is small enough, you get acceptable practical sharpness at a range of distances from the lens, and not just at the plane of focus.
The crucial thing is that by using depth of field, you have the following limitations:
What the GP proposed could, conceivably, not have those limitations (I don't know for sure). It would be hella harder to use, though.
"I think like a computer guy, and I don't see anything wrong with the way the computer demands that I interact with it."
Oh, yeah, that's really simple. (Ignore the non-computerfolk people in the crowd asking "What's PDF?")
No, I'm not. What I'm suggesting differs in two regards:
As I said: "design the UI to support users' reasoning about this problem."
I don't disagree with training people to do their job better. What bothers me is the fact that the computer industry systematically fails to own up to its own responsibility to design usable software, and uses a combination of blame-the-user and CYA features like "Delete Hidden Content." We're building solutions that are way more complex to use than they need to be, and require users to constantly pay attention to all sorts of hard-to-guess little details. For example as whether the way the application stores data into files in a primitive filesystem is appropriate for sending the file to untrusted recipients.