Oh come on, they shipped Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner into space together, so surely Bruce Willis could still go up. Hell, Robert Duvall managed to get his geriatric ass up there and blow up most of a comet and save Earth!
I think it's pretty clear that the answer to our future space emergency needs is to send up senior citizens.
This whole thing is a big waste of money. We already have the perfect cure for aging, and with the Supreme Court's recent decision that Washington D.C. isn't allowed to ban it, we should be able to keep fighting aging for the foreseeable future.
Maybe, but the article also says we don't need the scientific method or any other "model" to interpret the data once we have it. Instead, we use some sort of ill-defined "Googlish" method to derive meaning from it.
Seems to me that no matter how much data you have, and no matter how efficiently you can search through it, you're still going to need some sort of model, and especially the scientific method, if you want to derive any useful science out of it. The article seems to be suggesting that Googling through the data is good enough to find all the answers you need.
It's simple really: The article seems to be saying that we have access to such a ludicrously large amount of data that trying to draw any real meaning from it is pointless. So, we employ a "shotgun" approach at reading the data, and voila, we get data that at least appears to be interesting.
Of course, since we have no particular purpose in mind when we do this, and no particular method other than "random", we end up with mostly useless data (in the example given, we have a bunch of random gene sequences that must belong to previously unknown species, but we know nothing about those species other than that we found some random DNA that probably belongs to them, and have no particularly good way of finding out more).
The article seems to be saying that since we have so much data, we can now draw correlations between different pieces of data and call it science. No reason is given why this is useful other than that we have so much of it, and Google is somehow involved. Apparently when you have enough data, "correlation does not equal causation" is no longer true. Again, no coherent reason is given for this stance.
I think the article makes the same mistake a lot of ill-informed people that get excited by big numbers make: It seems to believe that data is in and of itself an end goal, when really vast amounts of data are useless unless it can help us as humans answer questions that we want answered. Yes, knowing that there are lots of species of organisms in the air that we didn't know about before is sort of interesting I guess, but it doesn't really tell us anything useful.
Above all, the article proves that you can be almost entirely incoherent and still get your article published in Wired if it says something about how Google is changing the world.
Yes, it's a press release, which is why I said "if it's even partially true", which it may not be.
As for what Google gets out of it, if they want people to use a converter obviously giving it away for free will result in a far higher adoption rate. They may also have wanted to add it as a free feature of their Premium service to make that service more attractive to potential customers.
The whole thing could be frivolous, but if the facts are as stated in the article (press release), then it's a sleazy thing for Google to do.
You really should have read the article. If what's said in the article is even partially true, it sure looks like Google acted in a pretty sleazy fashion. Apparently they were willing to boost this company's product until they realized how much money could be made from it, at which point they decided to build their own clone and give it away for free. It's like Netscape/IE all over again.
Come on, do you really think there's a non-trivial number of people willing to take up arms against the government at this stage? Hell, most of the most strident 2nd amendment boosters are the ones that are most vocally defending these types of bills and defending the President's right to take away our civil liberties in the name of "security".
Saying we have the right to overthrow the government by force is nice and all, but if you think it's actually going to happen any time soon, no matter how many freedoms are taken away, you're delusional. The only way to overthrow governments these days is via military coup, and the military doesn't seem in any hurry to get into politics in this country, and I doubt we'd be in any better shape if they did.
Re:Looks not quite what they say
on
Real Snail Mail
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Well, they tried to get the snails to carry the actual message, but it turns out the snails couldn't reliably copy it because not only do they lack hands, but their penmanship is atrocious.
Attempts to get the snails to carry the emails in their internal memory were likewise unsuccessful because the snails lacked the ability to reliably retrieve the message from memory or communicate it effectively at the other end. Indeed, it was never really possible to determine if the messages were actually maintained in the snail's memory at all, even after repeated attempts to store them there. The snails did, however, form an inexplicable appetite for discount v1AgR@, so further study may be warranted.
Haha, that just goes to show that Americans get an unfairly bad rap for being bad at geography. It turns out you Canadians know far less about American geography than we know about everyone else's geography!
Man, what a bunch of losers. I'm so going to mock you losers when I travel up to the oceanfront property I just bought in Alberta. I'm pretty sure my property is close to your national capital in Toronto too, so maybe I'll just have to go complain to your President about all the jokes. You'll be sorry you ever made fun of us!
Personally, I think it's a smart move. It's a little known fact that private space exploration has failed to take off because most companies are still trying to come up with sufficiently futuristic-looking methods of moving spacecraft parts around before they can start work on the actual going into space bit.
While few doubt that Virgin will eventually need to come up with some sort of overly-aerodynamic truck design propelled by some sort of weird blue jets that cause it to both hover and move in any direction, the "Grandpa's old Ford" method should be okay for the short term.
First the government wants to monitor citizens, and now it wants to monitor the oceans? Come on people, I know most of you don't care because you're not an ocean, but what happens when they start going after the other bodies of water? What about other liquids? Other states of matter? This is just the tip of the iceberg, people.
Oh sure, maybe you think it's fine because the oceans aren't U.S. citizens, but I say constitutional rights should apply to all of Earth's features, and the government should keep its nose out of aquatic affairs. Just because some oceans border terrorist states (through no fault of their own), that doesn't mean all oceans can just be spied on whenever we feel like it.
Maybe you think this is okay because some oceans have committed terrorist acts like hurricanes and tsunamis, but it would be bigoted of us to condemn all oceans for the actions of a few.
This has gotten out of hand and needs to stop. Get involved, people!
Facebook seems to hire based on Facebook. The women coming out of the building are good looking and the guys are hunks. I think you're confused. The people you're seeing coming out of the building are coming from the yoga studio and the beauty salon. The Facebook employees come and go through the back door under the cover of darkness, like all geeks.
Who cares who posted it, it's a legitimate news story from a fairly reliable source (computer world). This story is of interest to the tech world in general.
And no, I'm not a twitter sock puppet, and I generally think he's kind of over the top, but this article looks like a pretty straightforward summary of the article it links to. This particular piece is not in any way "hysterical FUD." Do you add anyone who responds to twitter's posts or reads his journal to his list of sock puppets?
I was sort of thinking this, but I was also wondering what possible value the information he got from this site could be in what should be a well-referenced work. Writing a thesis and backing it up with quotes from random people on the Internet doesn't seem like the wisest decision.
Perhaps he should spend his time interviewing acknowledged experts in the field or at least studying papers written by them. Hell, even interviewing students in his local CS department would be better than basing an argument on what some random Slashdot user posted.
Mostly, though, I'm appalled at the quality of post-secondary education that this guy has supposedly received (and paid for!) if he believes Ask Slashdot is a good way to conduct academic research for a PhD thesis. If I were him, I'd ask for a refund.
That's what the little black part at the crotch is for in the first image. It's an access panel for when your balls itch. Man, those NASA guys think of everything! Just make sure you take care of the itch BEFORE you exit the airlock!
I, for one, prefer to regard everything on the planet as being covered in a thin fecal veneer. While I, being a more proactive sort, prefer to spend my days covering everything on the planet in a thin fecal veneer. It's nice to know someone has finally noticed my work.
Most people drive SUVs because they like the way they look, and then they rationalize it by coming up with other reasons.
Most smaller cars have a lot more head and foot room, especially for the driver, than you give them credit for. I'm 6'2" and drive a 2001 Toyota Corolla. I have plenty of head room without slouching over or anything, and leg room is not an issue either. Heck, I have two kids and they fit just fine in the back seat of the thing, so the hauling kids excuse is silly too unless you happen to have 5 kids or more. It makes me crazy when people with 2 kids say they need an SUV to "haul the family around".
As for seeing over traffic, I have no problem seeing the traffic ahead of me so long as I keep a safe distance between me and the person in front of me (2 second rule, remember?), and have only even been close to having an accident (which I was able to maneuver to avoid) once in my 15 years of driving.
The hauling stuff excuse may be valid for some people, but you have to ask yourself how often do you really need to haul around so much stuff that you require an SUV. Most people haul stuff like that so rarely it would be far more cost effective to simply rent a pickup truck when they need to do that rather than spend all that money on the SUV full-time. Even small cars like mine can fit a surprisingly large amount of stuff in them.
I wish people would just admit that they really wanted an SUV, so they came up with reasons why they should get one, rather than insisting that no other type of car could possibly work for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on, they shipped Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner into space together, so surely Bruce Willis could still go up. Hell, Robert Duvall managed to get his geriatric ass up there and blow up most of a comet and save Earth!
I think it's pretty clear that the answer to our future space emergency needs is to send up senior citizens.
This whole thing is a big waste of money. We already have the perfect cure for aging, and with the Supreme Court's recent decision that Washington D.C. isn't allowed to ban it, we should be able to keep fighting aging for the foreseeable future.
I don't know about you, but when looking for the remote I find my face, specifically the eye part of the face, to be an invaluable tool.
Maybe, but the article also says we don't need the scientific method or any other "model" to interpret the data once we have it. Instead, we use some sort of ill-defined "Googlish" method to derive meaning from it.
Seems to me that no matter how much data you have, and no matter how efficiently you can search through it, you're still going to need some sort of model, and especially the scientific method, if you want to derive any useful science out of it. The article seems to be suggesting that Googling through the data is good enough to find all the answers you need.
It's simple really: The article seems to be saying that we have access to such a ludicrously large amount of data that trying to draw any real meaning from it is pointless. So, we employ a "shotgun" approach at reading the data, and voila, we get data that at least appears to be interesting.
Of course, since we have no particular purpose in mind when we do this, and no particular method other than "random", we end up with mostly useless data (in the example given, we have a bunch of random gene sequences that must belong to previously unknown species, but we know nothing about those species other than that we found some random DNA that probably belongs to them, and have no particularly good way of finding out more).
The article seems to be saying that since we have so much data, we can now draw correlations between different pieces of data and call it science. No reason is given why this is useful other than that we have so much of it, and Google is somehow involved. Apparently when you have enough data, "correlation does not equal causation" is no longer true. Again, no coherent reason is given for this stance.
I think the article makes the same mistake a lot of ill-informed people that get excited by big numbers make: It seems to believe that data is in and of itself an end goal, when really vast amounts of data are useless unless it can help us as humans answer questions that we want answered. Yes, knowing that there are lots of species of organisms in the air that we didn't know about before is sort of interesting I guess, but it doesn't really tell us anything useful.
Above all, the article proves that you can be almost entirely incoherent and still get your article published in Wired if it says something about how Google is changing the world.
Yes, it's a press release, which is why I said "if it's even partially true", which it may not be.
As for what Google gets out of it, if they want people to use a converter obviously giving it away for free will result in a far higher adoption rate. They may also have wanted to add it as a free feature of their Premium service to make that service more attractive to potential customers.
The whole thing could be frivolous, but if the facts are as stated in the article (press release), then it's a sleazy thing for Google to do.
You really should have read the article. If what's said in the article is even partially true, it sure looks like Google acted in a pretty sleazy fashion. Apparently they were willing to boost this company's product until they realized how much money could be made from it, at which point they decided to build their own clone and give it away for free. It's like Netscape/IE all over again.
Come on, do you really think there's a non-trivial number of people willing to take up arms against the government at this stage? Hell, most of the most strident 2nd amendment boosters are the ones that are most vocally defending these types of bills and defending the President's right to take away our civil liberties in the name of "security".
Saying we have the right to overthrow the government by force is nice and all, but if you think it's actually going to happen any time soon, no matter how many freedoms are taken away, you're delusional. The only way to overthrow governments these days is via military coup, and the military doesn't seem in any hurry to get into politics in this country, and I doubt we'd be in any better shape if they did.
Well, they tried to get the snails to carry the actual message, but it turns out the snails couldn't reliably copy it because not only do they lack hands, but their penmanship is atrocious.
Attempts to get the snails to carry the emails in their internal memory were likewise unsuccessful because the snails lacked the ability to reliably retrieve the message from memory or communicate it effectively at the other end. Indeed, it was never really possible to determine if the messages were actually maintained in the snail's memory at all, even after repeated attempts to store them there. The snails did, however, form an inexplicable appetite for discount v1AgR@, so further study may be warranted.
Haha, that just goes to show that Americans get an unfairly bad rap for being bad at geography. It turns out you Canadians know far less about American geography than we know about everyone else's geography!
Man, what a bunch of losers. I'm so going to mock you losers when I travel up to the oceanfront property I just bought in Alberta. I'm pretty sure my property is close to your national capital in Toronto too, so maybe I'll just have to go complain to your President about all the jokes. You'll be sorry you ever made fun of us!
Well what do you expect, it's not scheduled to be out of Beta until 2057.
Personally, I think it's a smart move. It's a little known fact that private space exploration has failed to take off because most companies are still trying to come up with sufficiently futuristic-looking methods of moving spacecraft parts around before they can start work on the actual going into space bit.
While few doubt that Virgin will eventually need to come up with some sort of overly-aerodynamic truck design propelled by some sort of weird blue jets that cause it to both hover and move in any direction, the "Grandpa's old Ford" method should be okay for the short term.
First the government wants to monitor citizens, and now it wants to monitor the oceans? Come on people, I know most of you don't care because you're not an ocean, but what happens when they start going after the other bodies of water? What about other liquids? Other states of matter? This is just the tip of the iceberg, people.
Oh sure, maybe you think it's fine because the oceans aren't U.S. citizens, but I say constitutional rights should apply to all of Earth's features, and the government should keep its nose out of aquatic affairs. Just because some oceans border terrorist states (through no fault of their own), that doesn't mean all oceans can just be spied on whenever we feel like it.
Maybe you think this is okay because some oceans have committed terrorist acts like hurricanes and tsunamis, but it would be bigoted of us to condemn all oceans for the actions of a few.
This has gotten out of hand and needs to stop. Get involved, people!
Misquoting Monty Python is a time-honored tradition in geekdom. After all, if they got it right what would Slashdot readers post about?
Who cares who posted it, it's a legitimate news story from a fairly reliable source (computer world). This story is of interest to the tech world in general.
And no, I'm not a twitter sock puppet, and I generally think he's kind of over the top, but this article looks like a pretty straightforward summary of the article it links to. This particular piece is not in any way "hysterical FUD." Do you add anyone who responds to twitter's posts or reads his journal to his list of sock puppets?
I was sort of thinking this, but I was also wondering what possible value the information he got from this site could be in what should be a well-referenced work. Writing a thesis and backing it up with quotes from random people on the Internet doesn't seem like the wisest decision.
Perhaps he should spend his time interviewing acknowledged experts in the field or at least studying papers written by them. Hell, even interviewing students in his local CS department would be better than basing an argument on what some random Slashdot user posted.
Mostly, though, I'm appalled at the quality of post-secondary education that this guy has supposedly received (and paid for!) if he believes Ask Slashdot is a good way to conduct academic research for a PhD thesis. If I were him, I'd ask for a refund.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but I think they have pills you can take for that now.
Well, not before they've spent 6 hours saying "the switch is configured just fine, it must be a server problem" first.
1.) Conduct all illegal activities through email
2.) When I get sued, pay off court clerk to assign case to Judge Kollar-Kotelly.
3.) ???
4.) Profit!
Ah yes, the Daily WTF: the Penthouse Forum of the IT world.
That's what the little black part at the crotch is for in the first image. It's an access panel for when your balls itch. Man, those NASA guys think of everything! Just make sure you take care of the itch BEFORE you exit the airlock!
Apparently a NASA spacecraft soon.
Most people drive SUVs because they like the way they look, and then they rationalize it by coming up with other reasons.
Most smaller cars have a lot more head and foot room, especially for the driver, than you give them credit for. I'm 6'2" and drive a 2001 Toyota Corolla. I have plenty of head room without slouching over or anything, and leg room is not an issue either. Heck, I have two kids and they fit just fine in the back seat of the thing, so the hauling kids excuse is silly too unless you happen to have 5 kids or more. It makes me crazy when people with 2 kids say they need an SUV to "haul the family around".
As for seeing over traffic, I have no problem seeing the traffic ahead of me so long as I keep a safe distance between me and the person in front of me (2 second rule, remember?), and have only even been close to having an accident (which I was able to maneuver to avoid) once in my 15 years of driving.
The hauling stuff excuse may be valid for some people, but you have to ask yourself how often do you really need to haul around so much stuff that you require an SUV. Most people haul stuff like that so rarely it would be far more cost effective to simply rent a pickup truck when they need to do that rather than spend all that money on the SUV full-time. Even small cars like mine can fit a surprisingly large amount of stuff in them.
I wish people would just admit that they really wanted an SUV, so they came up with reasons why they should get one, rather than insisting that no other type of car could possibly work for them.