Basic science or basic research is science done for no other reason than to learn and obtain knowledge. Like the stuff they're doing at NIF or NASA with the recent Mars rover.
R&D is applied science, or applied research. It's purpose is to solve problems or obtain a tangible goal. Google's glasses project is R&D, so too are fusion start-ups
Cheaper energy lowers how much people have to pay for electricity. This in turn gives people more money to spend on other things. So instead of having to pay $120 on your next electric bill you pay $60, meaning you use that extra $60 however you please. Like buying new clothes or going out to eat more often.
Free energy wouldn't necessarily be free to consumers, since they still have to pay for the upkeep of the system + labor costs, but I'd imagine a normal electric bill to be just a few dollars. But now you basically have an extra $115 in your pocket every month. And could you imagine the sales in electric cars? The market would explode because people would save tens of thousands of dollars by owning an electric vehicle. You need engineers and factory workers to build those.
Oh, and thanks to the unlimited virtually free energy, businesses have lower operating costs, meaning the price of items across the board would drop.
Thorium motherfucking reactors. Goddamn we've had this technology for how long and it isn't used because of some asshole president? Yeah I'm mad as hell. Practically free energy right at our fingertips -- completely free, virtually clean -- AND WERE NOT USING IT.
What did I learn about computers in my entire journey from elementary to high school? Typing.
Yeah that's the only thing was typing on a QWERTY keyboard. There was also a technology class that was just messing around with Word/Excel/Powerpoint. Everything else I learned by experience and by just using it all the time, but I'm a technologically oriented person who can tell you what ATA means or the difference between a byte and a bit, or even where the word bit came from.
Most other people from my generation can't.
Technology education in America is absolutely terrible.
Because that's the price of freedom, and I'm not willing to sacrifice my freedom for any of that temporary safety. Don't get me started on free speech zones and other egregious acts the US government, of all entities, has done to grind the gears of the constitution's spirit of the law. "If we can't remove them, let's just water them down," sort of thing.
Or should we prohibit anyone from speaking a dissenting opinion than the governments, because think of all the people that could be hurt by those words. Never mind that our system of law holds people accountable for their actions and affirms they have the ability to choose: my shouting fire in a crowded movie theater forced those people to trample over that girl.
Oh, and people don't have to shout fire in a crowded movie theater anymore -- that's why we have fire alarms.
It's do not track not cover up track. I think these fellas need a course in remedial grammar.
There are times I do want, say, Google to keep my data, and I don't care if they share it -- like if I search for Minecraft stuffs, I want MC stuff to appear on my search. Or if I search a topic and I'd rather be swayed towards more reliable sources that I would frequent rather than like, "HOMEOPATHY MAGIC QUANTUM JUICE PANACEA MAKE MONEY FROM HOME."
Well I can't speak for others, but caffeine does help "treat" my condition. I grow more comfortable socially and it's easier.
But that's not necessarily fixing anything, just removing a bit social anxiety doesn't mean I small talk with the best of them. I still don't understand people or social nuance with caffeine, it just makes me more willing to passionately rabble on about something that fascinates me. Ask me about the weather and I'll probably start talking about cloud seeding or cosmic rays contributing to more cloud cover.
We are, in a way. But you know what's to be said about judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree. Only we're like monkeys that have difficulty learning how to climb trees, and perhaps more importantly, don't like climbing trees even if we do learn.
Should we learn how to climb trees? Definitely, you don't know when you might need to climb a tree as a monkey. But perhaps not all monkeys have to climb trees to be monkeys. Maybe they're perfectly happy on the ground using sticks to eat bugs. Not liking climbing trees (and being absolutely terrible at it) shouldn't mean there's something wrong that needs to be corrected.
And think of all the things the ground monkey can explore. On the ground there are rivers to play in and lots more space than up in the trees. And maybe that's what the monkey community needs, monkeys that can find nice fresh sources of water on the ground or somewhere to bathe as well as monkeys that enjoy living their whole lives in trees eating fruit and swinging around.
Minecraft is so badly coded why would you want to take credit for its software? o_o
Guy is just a dumb patent troll. 1.5 million? Please, how about we fine him 3 million, 1.5 million for the lawyer fees and 1.5 million to the the US government for wasting its time when it could be spending time and money on more important things than this bullshit.
I do not hear of this majority calling them to stop; saying, "you stop this nonsense right now, this is no way to behave." They are spoiled -- spoiled by the fact that while the minority is responsible for action, the majority sits back and lets them do it. And they do it because there's no moral calling from their religion to make peace with us.
The Iranian Mir-Hossein Mousavi election protests a while back? The government struck down hard against them.
I don't see the moderate Muslim population turning out en masse and saying, "Make peace not war." But then again maybe they fear their lives if they condemn these violent actions -- which, if true, should go to show you just how much in control your majority is.
Well, Wolfram|Alpha is a computational search engine. Wolfram Mathematica is what you're really looking for to do number crunching.
But there are various AI challenges, like reading comprehension, which is really what it's about. Can you give an AI a word problem and have them solve it? It's more difficult than you may think.
There's a solution for this, just create a law that requires all international DMCA requests to send it through snail mail for processing. An optional online tool should be allowed, but only under an agreement that you're liable under US law for false DMCA requests.
I have come to call this "academic Top Trumps". Appeal to authority would have harmed you for the majority of history, so I wouldn't start appealing to it now. Link to evidence produced by respected authorities, sure, but make sure the argument rests in the evidence.
Perhaps you misunderstand the appeal to authority? It's also not invalid in all circumstances. In any case, if I were to claim that because the APA said it was bad it must be bad, but I didn't make such an assertion, although now I see how it could be interpreted that way. My fault for not making myself more clear, but the intent was that research and science had the authority.
One simply cannot perform a diagnosis based on reading the (edited) writings of some individual and third party accounts of his behaviour. Don't do it. It's not scientific and it makes a mockery of proper autism diagnoses.
Well, it's not my diagnosis. I wouldn't presume to do as much. But some very skilled and qualified researchers who, if anyone, would be entitled to make a diagnosis came to a conclusion on the matter.
There are a lot more people who "always feel uncomfortable around people" and who aren't autistic.
I was hesitant to use the word uncomfortable, but I can't think of another word to describe, since that seemed too benign. It is a definite range. Stressful, perhaps. And there are people who aren't autistic who know what that's like, but I doubt the OP is one of them. Probably bad judgment on my end to insert this bit.
Thoughts cannot be misinterpreted - only the expressions of those thoughts. It is more accurate to say that the autistic person has difficulty communicating effectively. Those who are not autistic can of course try to accommodate for this difficulty, but the problem is not necessarily "misinterpretation".
Or emm yes. That. My mistake. Anyway, what I mean is that it feels like you're being misinterpreted because to you, you're speaking in a way that makes sense to you, and other people just don't think what you're thinking. And even when you become aware of it, it's still a struggle because you don't know exactly what to say. I usually just copy mannerisms I've seen from TV and real life into a sort of script of how to act.
I'm autistic -- yup, a very real high-functioning autist complete with medical diagnosis and jazz. You know, based on science and medicine and modern psychology and not wish-washy nonsense like bloodletting.
Allow me to confront you on this, because I feel like everyone needs to hear this from someone who has it. I find it terribly inhumane and malicious of you to spread this sort of attitude. Because that was the consensus, for a long time. A century ago, I would have been put in a mental hospital. And a lot of good people have fought long and hard to show the world we are people. Living, breathing people.
For one, you advocate corporal punishment, so I must conclude that you are grossly uneducated on the matter about which you speak. The APA (undoubtedly more qualified than you on this subject), abhors it, and you're free to read their research should you disagree. And that's in "normal" children.
Perhaps you weren't aware, Mr. Anon, that Isaac Newton had Asperger's Syndrome, which falls into the category of ASD. And I should not have to mention Temple Grandin, who had to fight against a system hellbent on doing on just what you said to succeed and paved the way for the rest of us.
---
Don't speak so ignorantly. You don't know what it's like to always feel uncomfortable around people. You don't know what it's like being unable to communicate; your thoughts being constantly misinterpreted by those around you. Working as hard as you can and still failing at some of the most basic abilities like writing or reading.
You're the spoiled one; spoiled in the bliss of your own ignorance, unwilling to educate yourself or to understand. Shame on you.
If you were to say, "I bet there's money in one of those boxes over there." I could prove you wrong by checking each and every box that was described, thereby proving a negative, that there is no money in one of the boxes.
But never-mind that nonsense. I wrote a poem for this sort of logic thing:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, also be it fortunate for creatures of intelligence, that which can be asserted in absence of evidence, may be dismissed as undue negligence.
That is to say, sure you can claim whatever you wish, claim homeopathy works; but I may dismiss your statement until it is proven to be true or false. This is the foundation of burden of proof.
So I could not, as limited a human as I am, prove in any conventional method that no god exists. However, I can demonstrate that the Christian god does not exist.
Sure it's that, but you're doing the same five second repetitive job over and over and over for twelve hours straight. While standing.
Sound lame already?
Kay, now envision yourself in that job for 65 - 70 hours a week. You earn $125 per week with all of that overtime. Seem illegal? It is, the maximum amount of overtime per month is 36 hours. But never-mind knowing what your contract says or trying to fight this, you never got a contract. And boy does your boss breath down your neck, and he gets real personal with insults too, calling you a lazy fat slacker and says he hopes you hurt yourself. Want to complain to his boss? Can't, there's no way of putting in complaints.
And what if you do hurt yourself, you have medical insurance that you've been paying like $100 for. Except you don't have your medical insurance card, they never gave you one.
---
Humans really haven't seem to evolved much past slavery, since business owners are trying the best they can to get as close as they can. And sure, everyone and their brother says slavery is wicked and evil, even those crooked business owners. But if you were to allow slavery, you would be surprised at the number of people that would turn back on their words.
I simply must say, capitalism really does bring out the worst in people.
It's hard to say if it will work or not. There's a lot of factors involved, and it at least warrants further study (let's be scientific about this).
For instance, it could be possible to ease up on labor laws, since there is less pressure to keep a job. Bad business practices will put you out of business quicker, leaving better businesses in place. No long is anyone working because it's what they need, they're working because it's what they want.
And it's not like that 10k a year just evaporates. People spend it so it goes back into the market.
So who knows, maybe people will be forever lazy. Or maybe it's just our culture that encourages people to be forever lazy. I think one day our society must evolve into something out of Star Trek, or face extinction.
It's "god" not "God," unless you wish to specifically refer to the Christian deity by name as a proper noun. It is mildly upsetting to see, "Do you believe there is a God?" when the intention is to mean any deity because it can leave the reader confused.
Or, we can keep the rule, and capitalize Spaghetti in every use of the word, even if the intent is not to mean our Great Noodle Overlord the Lord of Pasta.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a uranium rock?
Basic science or basic research is science done for no other reason than to learn and obtain knowledge. Like the stuff they're doing at NIF or NASA with the recent Mars rover.
R&D is applied science, or applied research. It's purpose is to solve problems or obtain a tangible goal. Google's glasses project is R&D, so too are fusion start-ups
It would improve your quality of life.
Cheaper energy lowers how much people have to pay for electricity. This in turn gives people more money to spend on other things. So instead of having to pay $120 on your next electric bill you pay $60, meaning you use that extra $60 however you please. Like buying new clothes or going out to eat more often.
Free energy wouldn't necessarily be free to consumers, since they still have to pay for the upkeep of the system + labor costs, but I'd imagine a normal electric bill to be just a few dollars. But now you basically have an extra $115 in your pocket every month. And could you imagine the sales in electric cars? The market would explode because people would save tens of thousands of dollars by owning an electric vehicle. You need engineers and factory workers to build those.
Oh, and thanks to the unlimited virtually free energy, businesses have lower operating costs, meaning the price of items across the board would drop.
Easy.
Thorium motherfucking reactors. Goddamn we've had this technology for how long and it isn't used because of some asshole president? Yeah I'm mad as hell. Practically free energy right at our fingertips -- completely free, virtually clean -- AND WERE NOT USING IT.
No.
Entropy will do its work >:D
I graduate not more than a few years ago.
What did I learn about computers in my entire journey from elementary to high school? Typing.
Yeah that's the only thing was typing on a QWERTY keyboard. There was also a technology class that was just messing around with Word/Excel/Powerpoint. Everything else I learned by experience and by just using it all the time, but I'm a technologically oriented person who can tell you what ATA means or the difference between a byte and a bit, or even where the word bit came from.
Most other people from my generation can't.
Technology education in America is absolutely terrible.
Yes.
Because that's the price of freedom, and I'm not willing to sacrifice my freedom for any of that temporary safety. Don't get me started on free speech zones and other egregious acts the US government, of all entities, has done to grind the gears of the constitution's spirit of the law. "If we can't remove them, let's just water them down," sort of thing.
Or should we prohibit anyone from speaking a dissenting opinion than the governments, because think of all the people that could be hurt by those words. Never mind that our system of law holds people accountable for their actions and affirms they have the ability to choose: my shouting fire in a crowded movie theater forced those people to trample over that girl.
Oh, and people don't have to shout fire in a crowded movie theater anymore -- that's why we have fire alarms.
It's do not track not cover up track. I think these fellas need a course in remedial grammar.
There are times I do want, say, Google to keep my data, and I don't care if they share it -- like if I search for Minecraft stuffs, I want MC stuff to appear on my search. Or if I search a topic and I'd rather be swayed towards more reliable sources that I would frequent rather than like, "HOMEOPATHY MAGIC QUANTUM JUICE PANACEA MAKE MONEY FROM HOME."
For everthing else, there's Duck Duck Go
B-but what about all the job creators! :(
Well I can't speak for others, but caffeine does help "treat" my condition. I grow more comfortable socially and it's easier.
But that's not necessarily fixing anything, just removing a bit social anxiety doesn't mean I small talk with the best of them. I still don't understand people or social nuance with caffeine, it just makes me more willing to passionately rabble on about something that fascinates me. Ask me about the weather and I'll probably start talking about cloud seeding or cosmic rays contributing to more cloud cover.
I'll probably make a great professor someday.
We are, in a way. But you know what's to be said about judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree. Only we're like monkeys that have difficulty learning how to climb trees, and perhaps more importantly, don't like climbing trees even if we do learn.
Should we learn how to climb trees? Definitely, you don't know when you might need to climb a tree as a monkey. But perhaps not all monkeys have to climb trees to be monkeys. Maybe they're perfectly happy on the ground using sticks to eat bugs. Not liking climbing trees (and being absolutely terrible at it) shouldn't mean there's something wrong that needs to be corrected.
And think of all the things the ground monkey can explore. On the ground there are rivers to play in and lots more space than up in the trees. And maybe that's what the monkey community needs, monkeys that can find nice fresh sources of water on the ground or somewhere to bathe as well as monkeys that enjoy living their whole lives in trees eating fruit and swinging around.
Minecraft is so badly coded why would you want to take credit for its software? o_o
Guy is just a dumb patent troll. 1.5 million? Please, how about we fine him 3 million, 1.5 million for the lawyer fees and 1.5 million to the the US government for wasting its time when it could be spending time and money on more important things than this bullshit.
I do not hear of this majority calling them to stop; saying, "you stop this nonsense right now, this is no way to behave." They are spoiled -- spoiled by the fact that while the minority is responsible for action, the majority sits back and lets them do it. And they do it because there's no moral calling from their religion to make peace with us.
The Iranian Mir-Hossein Mousavi election protests a while back? The government struck down hard against them.
I don't see the moderate Muslim population turning out en masse and saying, "Make peace not war." But then again maybe they fear their lives if they condemn these violent actions -- which, if true, should go to show you just how much in control your majority is.
Silly Japan, how are you going to fend off all of those space aliens without giant nuclear powered mecha?
Well, Wolfram|Alpha is a computational search engine. Wolfram Mathematica is what you're really looking for to do number crunching.
But there are various AI challenges, like reading comprehension, which is really what it's about. Can you give an AI a word problem and have them solve it? It's more difficult than you may think.
There's a solution for this, just create a law that requires all international DMCA requests to send it through snail mail for processing. An optional online tool should be allowed, but only under an agreement that you're liable under US law for false DMCA requests.
Well I'd hate to be special, seems like that would cut into my being me time.
I have come to call this "academic Top Trumps". Appeal to authority would have harmed you for the majority of history, so I wouldn't start appealing to it now. Link to evidence produced by respected authorities, sure, but make sure the argument rests in the evidence.
Perhaps you misunderstand the appeal to authority? It's also not invalid in all circumstances. In any case, if I were to claim that because the APA said it was bad it must be bad, but I didn't make such an assertion, although now I see how it could be interpreted that way. My fault for not making myself more clear, but the intent was that research and science had the authority.
One simply cannot perform a diagnosis based on reading the (edited) writings of some individual and third party accounts of his behaviour. Don't do it. It's not scientific and it makes a mockery of proper autism diagnoses.
Well, it's not my diagnosis. I wouldn't presume to do as much. But some very skilled and qualified researchers who, if anyone, would be entitled to make a diagnosis came to a conclusion on the matter.
There are a lot more people who "always feel uncomfortable around people" and who aren't autistic.
I was hesitant to use the word uncomfortable, but I can't think of another word to describe, since that seemed too benign. It is a definite range. Stressful, perhaps. And there are people who aren't autistic who know what that's like, but I doubt the OP is one of them. Probably bad judgment on my end to insert this bit.
Thoughts cannot be misinterpreted - only the expressions of those thoughts. It is more accurate to say that the autistic person has difficulty communicating effectively. Those who are not autistic can of course try to accommodate for this difficulty, but the problem is not necessarily "misinterpretation".
Or emm yes. That. My mistake. Anyway, what I mean is that it feels like you're being misinterpreted because to you, you're speaking in a way that makes sense to you, and other people just don't think what you're thinking. And even when you become aware of it, it's still a struggle because you don't know exactly what to say. I usually just copy mannerisms I've seen from TV and real life into a sort of script of how to act.
Well hello there, nice to meet you.
I'm autistic -- yup, a very real high-functioning autist complete with medical diagnosis and jazz. You know, based on science and medicine and modern psychology and not wish-washy nonsense like bloodletting.
Allow me to confront you on this, because I feel like everyone needs to hear this from someone who has it. I find it terribly inhumane and malicious of you to spread this sort of attitude. Because that was the consensus, for a long time. A century ago, I would have been put in a mental hospital. And a lot of good people have fought long and hard to show the world we are people. Living, breathing people.
For one, you advocate corporal punishment, so I must conclude that you are grossly uneducated on the matter about which you speak. The APA (undoubtedly more qualified than you on this subject), abhors it, and you're free to read their research should you disagree. And that's in "normal" children.
Perhaps you weren't aware, Mr. Anon, that Isaac Newton had Asperger's Syndrome, which falls into the category of ASD. And I should not have to mention Temple Grandin, who had to fight against a system hellbent on doing on just what you said to succeed and paved the way for the rest of us.
---
Don't speak so ignorantly. You don't know what it's like to always feel uncomfortable around people. You don't know what it's like being unable to communicate; your thoughts being constantly misinterpreted by those around you. Working as hard as you can and still failing at some of the most basic abilities like writing or reading.
You're the spoiled one; spoiled in the bliss of your own ignorance, unwilling to educate yourself or to understand. Shame on you.
Au contraire misseur!
If you were to say, "I bet there's money in one of those boxes over there." I could prove you wrong by checking each and every box that was described, thereby proving a negative, that there is no money in one of the boxes.
But never-mind that nonsense. I wrote a poem for this sort of logic thing:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,
also be it fortunate for creatures of intelligence,
that which can be asserted in absence of evidence,
may be dismissed as undue negligence.
That is to say, sure you can claim whatever you wish, claim homeopathy works; but I may dismiss your statement until it is proven to be true or false. This is the foundation of burden of proof.
So I could not, as limited a human as I am, prove in any conventional method that no god exists. However, I can demonstrate that the Christian god does not exist.
Please let this be a joke, please let this be a joke.
*calms down*
It's okay, the homeopathy will fail to work and someone will sue the government for it and all will be right. Right? RIGHT?
Sure it's that, but you're doing the same five second repetitive job over and over and over for twelve hours straight. While standing.
Sound lame already?
Kay, now envision yourself in that job for 65 - 70 hours a week. You earn $125 per week with all of that overtime. Seem illegal? It is, the maximum amount of overtime per month is 36 hours. But never-mind knowing what your contract says or trying to fight this, you never got a contract. And boy does your boss breath down your neck, and he gets real personal with insults too, calling you a lazy fat slacker and says he hopes you hurt yourself. Want to complain to his boss? Can't, there's no way of putting in complaints.
And what if you do hurt yourself, you have medical insurance that you've been paying like $100 for. Except you don't have your medical insurance card, they never gave you one.
---
Humans really haven't seem to evolved much past slavery, since business owners are trying the best they can to get as close as they can. And sure, everyone and their brother says slavery is wicked and evil, even those crooked business owners. But if you were to allow slavery, you would be surprised at the number of people that would turn back on their words.
I simply must say, capitalism really does bring out the worst in people.
It's hard to say if it will work or not. There's a lot of factors involved, and it at least warrants further study (let's be scientific about this).
For instance, it could be possible to ease up on labor laws, since there is less pressure to keep a job. Bad business practices will put you out of business quicker, leaving better businesses in place. No long is anyone working because it's what they need, they're working because it's what they want.
And it's not like that 10k a year just evaporates. People spend it so it goes back into the market.
So who knows, maybe people will be forever lazy. Or maybe it's just our culture that encourages people to be forever lazy. I think one day our society must evolve into something out of Star Trek, or face extinction.
It's "god" not "God," unless you wish to specifically refer to the Christian deity by name as a proper noun. It is mildly upsetting to see, "Do you believe there is a God?" when the intention is to mean any deity because it can leave the reader confused.
Or, we can keep the rule, and capitalize Spaghetti in every use of the word, even if the intent is not to mean our Great Noodle Overlord the Lord of Pasta.
Guy literally has the most stressful job on the planet.
I think we should at least pay for his dinners.