One more for the list: 4) Carbon dioxide doesn't work like that.
Robinson's Mars books cheated on their terraforming. Terraforming Mars is a catch-22. To make it warm enough for humans to survive you need to add a lot of CO2, but adding all that CO2 makes the atmosphere toxic to humans. When I first read the Mars books I was looking forward to see how Robinson dealt with that paradox: I was disappointed to see that he didn't. He just let the plants suck up most of the CO2 to make oxygen while ignoring the cooling that would result, and then, realizing that getting rid of *all* the CO2 would be a problem, he waved a magic wand and genetically engineered all the humans to be CO2-tolerant. "Genetic engineering!" and "Nanobots!" are the science fiction equivalents of "Abracadabra!"
Anyway, CO2-tolerance would be such a massive evolutionary advantage to both predators and prey on Earth, if it were that easy to engineer, don't you think life would have figured out a way to do it by now?
There are ways to terraform Mars for realsies -- very large solar mirrors, or synthetic super-greenhouse gases like CFS -- but those have their own problems, and Robinson wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
I reject the submission's premise: neither the submission, nor any of the articles it links to, actually demonstrates that science is getting things "increasingly" wrong. No comparison of values over time, no controlled experiments... it'd be fun and ironic to complain about the statistical significance of the submission's data, but I can't because there isn't any data. The warning some of the articles make about using p=.05 as an acid test when doing broad surveys is useful, but the fact that people are thinking about that now shows how science is *improving*.
So why is scientific error in the news so often? The submission skimmed right past it: public relations sabotage by political and commercial interests who stand to gain by casting doubt on science. Global warming deniers, anti-vaccine nuts, anti-evolution zealots, nontraditional medicine snake-oil salesmen... there's money to be made, and votes to be won, by making scientists sound like they don't know what they're talking about.
And no, I don't have any rigorous data to support my claim. But according to the submission, I should treat all data as baloney and make my arguments based on truthiness alone.
The problem is that a business's profits aren't in proportion to the amount of public property (in this case radio spectrum) they use, so a tax on profits isn't an effective way to allocate that property.
Also, your "set barrier to entry, allow monopoly, tax on profits" model is really easy to abuse. Just look at cable/phone utilities as an example.
Everyone who uses that spectrum has to pay the tax since the company who bought the spectrum has to make back the $2 billion somehow. Plus interest. Plus a profit.
Exactly: the people who use the resource have to pay everyone else for it. What's the problem?
I suppose there's a problem if you believe that money paid to the government goes into a black hole, but I don't. Government spending isn't a perfectly fair way to distribute profits to the people, but neither is "give it all to Elon Musk".
Derailing my own post to throw in a quote by a guy who really understood what intangible public assets are worth: "I’ve got this thing and it’s f***ing golden, and... I’m just not giving it up for f***in' nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And I can always use it."
Of course, Rod Blagojevich wasn't selling radio spectrum, he was selling a US Senate seat, and he went to prison for it. But still.
Sorry, SpaceX, you know I love you but you're trying to cook the rules to get yourself a sweetheart deal. There's a big difference between speculating on radio spectrum and speculating on, say, silver: if you buy some silver and don't use it, a few years later you've still got some silver. If you buy spectrum and don't use it, a few years later the FCC takes it back and you've got nothing. Spectrum is a perishable resource, so nobody's going to bid on spectrum unless they really are going to make a communications network, or they plan to "flip" it and resell it to a viable user like SpaceX.
And short-term speculative bidding is *good* for the American public. Remember, this radio spectrum is our public property, and it's worth serious money. If SpaceX convinces the FCC not to allow "paper satellites", and demonstrates that it's the only bidder that's for real, then it can bid $0.01, win the auction, deploy its constellation, and keep all the profit. Allowing speculative competitive bids forces SpaceX to raise its bid, meaning the FCC, and thus the American public, gets to take a share of SpaceX's profits.
Analogy: Suppose your town decides to auction off some public park land to local developers. The biggest developer says, "only developers that can actually build a condo at least 20 stories tall should be allowed to bid." They are the only such developer, they bid $0.01, build a gigantic condo, make a fortune, and you and your town is left with no cash and no park.
A lot of people would be very self conscious doing ordinary dressing and sex with a camera in the room, even if they've taken measures to keep the data from getting out until a crime occurs
My cameras cover the downstairs living/dining/kitchen area and the upstairs hallway, and only activate during weekday work hours when I'm not at home. So unless my wife and I decide to skip work for a little Tuesday afternoon delight on the dining room table, it's not a problem. And even if we did, we could just throw a blouse over the camera, problem solved.
That's how it works in movies, yes. In real life, not so much, because most burglars aren't willing to murder, and even the desperate ones know that it's going to be obvious who dunnit.
So here's my story. My next-door neighbor is in prison, and is renting his house out to ex-con buddies so he can pay the property tax. This is not good for the neighborhood. Anyway, last year our house got robbed. Lost a Macbook and a bunch of other pawnable electronics. In response, I bought a couple of wireless webcams, and set them up to detect motion and stream images to a fileserver which was hidden way in the back of the TV cabinet. Behind the old Gamecube, I figured nobody's gonna dig that deep.
Six months later, my house got broken into again. TV was stolen, an iPad, and the downstairs security camera. The thief stole the camera, but he didn't find the fileserver, which had some entertaining shots of him poking around the living room, spotting the camera, and rushing to unplug it. I printed off the frame that showed his face most clearly and gave it to the cops. The next day, the "Find My iPad" feature activated, pinpointing the iPad in my neighbor's house. I called the cops, they didn't really understand the tech and showed up three hours later and didn't find anything. But they did pass the security cam picture around the station, one of them recognized the guy (low-tech facial recognition), they hauled him in, and he had the iPad on him. He confessed to robbing our house twice, plus a half-dozen other houses around town. And he told the cops about the upstairs window high above the back stairs that we didn't notice was unlocked.
So to those of you who say that in-home surveillance won't work because criminals are too stupid to show their faces, you're underestimating just how stupid criminals can be when heroin withdrawal is making their decisions for them. And to those of you who say that this is one step from Big Brother, the big difference is that it's *my* security camera, I can choose what to show the cops. And yes, I erase the images periodically just in case someone seizes or steals the file server.
Give them citizenship for now. Once your kids are independent adults, they can make their own decision about whether the tax and draft issues are worth the hassle; promise to help them pay the renunciation fee if they choose that option.
Multiple citizenship is one of those things that's a daily hassle, but could save your kids' lives. Imagine if you were making this decision in 1925! Of course the odds of Belgium falling under totalitarian rule are pretty damn slim (slimmer than the US, probably), but if it ever happens, you don't want to be the one to deny your kids a way to get out.
The difference between nukes and fossil fuels is, nobody realistically gains anything by setting off a nuke. Fossil fuels trade short-term gains against long-term losses; with nukes, everybody loses: the only hope is that your enemy might lose more than you.
Upvote the parent. If you were trying to do this in the early 90s, you'd have either physically moved the disk into a new computer -- and oldschool IDE has a bunch of surprises that will bite the unwary -- or used Kermit.
Just be aware that your average '90s serial port probably won't work above 57 kilobit/sec, which means transferring 160 megabytes will take the better part of a day.
This should either be the biggest news story on the planet, or the biggest lie of the year, but the public response seems to be "meh". The problem is, Snowden stole too much. Or claims to have stolen too much. There have been so *many* earthshattering Snowden revelations that both the outrage and the fact-checking seems to have evaporated.
Maybe you didn't hear, but companies do try to make a profit. Throwing your customers to the wolves may not be the simplest way for a company to commit suicide, but it'll do.
But it demonstrates that the government can and will take steps to protect citizens' identity.
I should have added, protect citizens' identity *from other citizens*. The premise here is that protecting your identity from the government is a lost cause, but protecting it from other citizens and corporations is possible, with the government's help.
I'm imagining a smart card that provides an ever-changing one-time code that's displayed on an LCD on the front, and is embossed with your photo. Usually you use a chip-and-pin style process to confirm your identity, but when there's no power or network access, the person who needs to confirm your identity can just look at the photo and write down the one-time code, to be verified later when he's at a computer.
Without network access, it's less secure, but it's still better than any offline system we have today. I mean, last time I ordered takeout, the delivery guy took a rubbing of my credit card using a pen and some carbon paper...
There's no question you could make this system nightmarish, but the way I see it, the American public (not just Slashdot nerds) has successfully opposed national ID for ages; the only way you'll get public support for this is by offering people something better than the current system. Like an end to identity theft and spam.
Also, the social security administration already offers an identity verification service that only verifies "yes or no", and does not return names or other identifying data. Of course, it's pretty much useless because since so many private databases use the same SS#, the data's out in the wild and easy to collate. But it demonstrates that the government can and will take steps to protect citizens' identity.
This is as good a place as any for me to jump on my favorite hobby horse: the US government should be issuing a standardized national ID; there should be a federal administration that handles identity of US persons.
Specifically, the government should issue 2-factor authenticators to all citizens which do absolutely nothing but verify identity to businesses, people, and other government agencies. The service should return no name, address, or other identifying data: just a hash ID code which is unique for every person, and unique for every agency or business which requests your ID. Thus, a bank can verify that you're the same person who set up your bank account, the state police can verify that you're the same person who applied for a driver's license, but that's all they can learn about you. This would makes it very difficult for anyone but the federal government to steal your identity, and tough for anyone but the feds to correlate your credit card data with your medical data with your Facebook profile.
Obviously, this means the federal government would be able to use your identity records to track you. But they can do that anyway, with a quick call to a credit card company and your internet service provider. This at least keeps everyone *else* from being able to do so.
It is a classic mistake to measure the benefit of infrastructure on the basis of "does it pay for itself in ticket sales?". The benefit to society may be much larger than the direct income generated.
Sure, but this is going to benefit a tenth as much society as the Chunnel, at the same cost. And the Chunnel has never been indispensable to start with.
This tunnel would be roughly the same length and complexity as the English Channel Tunnel. The combined metro area of London and Paris is 26 million people; Talinn and Helsinki combined are less than 1/10th the size. If you're thinking more in terms of connecting all of Finland to all of Europe the way the Chunnel connects the whole UK to Europe, the population of Finland is again less than 1/10th the size of the UK.
The Chunnel has been in or on the edge of bankruptcy for most of its existence.
Ever notice how "uncertainty" has come to mean "something we don't want to happen"? Not just net neutrality, it's everywhere. It's like, everything we support will last forever, everything we oppose is uncertain because someday we'll manage rid of it.
Not Google's loss. Just like the bank, Google is holding their users' property for them: it's the users who lose, and the users who demand better security. But only if the users know their property is actually at risk.
Think about it: if you knew that one stolen password would permanently wipe out your life savings, you wouldn't touch online banking with a ten-foot pole. But you know that the bank (and the FDIC) will cover it, so you don't give a shit.
You're arguing from what you expect, rather than from data.
The number of Americans able to hold a conversation in a foreign language is about 25%. Which is nowhere near "Most Americans". http://www.gallup.com/poll/182...
This is especially bad since about 17% of Americans are Hispanic. Not all Hispanics are bilingual, of course.
In the UK the bilingual rate is about 38%; in Ireland it's 34%, both higher than the US, despite your claims. Across the EU, it's 56%. http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
It's understandable that English-speaking countries have lower rates, but even within English-speaking nations, the US is pretty near the bottom. (Australia is right at the bottom.) http://yourlanguage.org/resear...
I'm going to skip over the whole "computer language and spoken language are two different things" argument, and focus on the quote. What's the case for forcing everyone to spend two years learning a foreign language? Is that really a better use of students' time than learning something else?
Yes. International conflict happens when societies misunderstand each other, and when they're able to dehumanize each other. The more we are able to understand the language and culture of our neighbors, the harder it is for misunderstandings to build to hatred to build to war.
Now, this isn't a sure thing, nor should it be. But foreign language learning can prevent wars. How many iPhone apps is that worth?
Slashdot Mirror
One more for the list: 4) Carbon dioxide doesn't work like that.
Robinson's Mars books cheated on their terraforming. Terraforming Mars is a catch-22. To make it warm enough for humans to survive you need to add a lot of CO2, but adding all that CO2 makes the atmosphere toxic to humans. When I first read the Mars books I was looking forward to see how Robinson dealt with that paradox: I was disappointed to see that he didn't. He just let the plants suck up most of the CO2 to make oxygen while ignoring the cooling that would result, and then, realizing that getting rid of *all* the CO2 would be a problem, he waved a magic wand and genetically engineered all the humans to be CO2-tolerant. "Genetic engineering!" and "Nanobots!" are the science fiction equivalents of "Abracadabra!"
Anyway, CO2-tolerance would be such a massive evolutionary advantage to both predators and prey on Earth, if it were that easy to engineer, don't you think life would have figured out a way to do it by now?
There are ways to terraform Mars for realsies -- very large solar mirrors, or synthetic super-greenhouse gases like CFS -- but those have their own problems, and Robinson wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
I reject the submission's premise: neither the submission, nor any of the articles it links to, actually demonstrates that science is getting things "increasingly" wrong. No comparison of values over time, no controlled experiments ... it'd be fun and ironic to complain about the statistical significance of the submission's data, but I can't because there isn't any data. The warning some of the articles make about using p=.05 as an acid test when doing broad surveys is useful, but the fact that people are thinking about that now shows how science is *improving*.
So why is scientific error in the news so often? The submission skimmed right past it: public relations sabotage by political and commercial interests who stand to gain by casting doubt on science. Global warming deniers, anti-vaccine nuts, anti-evolution zealots, nontraditional medicine snake-oil salesmen ... there's money to be made, and votes to be won, by making scientists sound like they don't know what they're talking about.
And no, I don't have any rigorous data to support my claim. But according to the submission, I should treat all data as baloney and make my arguments based on truthiness alone.
The problem is that a business's profits aren't in proportion to the amount of public property (in this case radio spectrum) they use, so a tax on profits isn't an effective way to allocate that property.
Also, your "set barrier to entry, allow monopoly, tax on profits" model is really easy to abuse. Just look at cable/phone utilities as an example.
Exactly: the people who use the resource have to pay everyone else for it. What's the problem?
I suppose there's a problem if you believe that money paid to the government goes into a black hole, but I don't. Government spending isn't a perfectly fair way to distribute profits to the people, but neither is "give it all to Elon Musk".
Derailing my own post to throw in a quote by a guy who really understood what intangible public assets are worth: "I’ve got this thing and it’s f***ing golden, and ... I’m just not giving it up for f***in' nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And I can always use it."
Of course, Rod Blagojevich wasn't selling radio spectrum, he was selling a US Senate seat, and he went to prison for it. But still.
Sorry, SpaceX, you know I love you but you're trying to cook the rules to get yourself a sweetheart deal. There's a big difference between speculating on radio spectrum and speculating on, say, silver: if you buy some silver and don't use it, a few years later you've still got some silver. If you buy spectrum and don't use it, a few years later the FCC takes it back and you've got nothing. Spectrum is a perishable resource, so nobody's going to bid on spectrum unless they really are going to make a communications network, or they plan to "flip" it and resell it to a viable user like SpaceX.
And short-term speculative bidding is *good* for the American public. Remember, this radio spectrum is our public property, and it's worth serious money. If SpaceX convinces the FCC not to allow "paper satellites", and demonstrates that it's the only bidder that's for real, then it can bid $0.01, win the auction, deploy its constellation, and keep all the profit. Allowing speculative competitive bids forces SpaceX to raise its bid, meaning the FCC, and thus the American public, gets to take a share of SpaceX's profits.
Analogy: Suppose your town decides to auction off some public park land to local developers. The biggest developer says, "only developers that can actually build a condo at least 20 stories tall should be allowed to bid." They are the only such developer, they bid $0.01, build a gigantic condo, make a fortune, and you and your town is left with no cash and no park.
My cameras cover the downstairs living/dining/kitchen area and the upstairs hallway, and only activate during weekday work hours when I'm not at home. So unless my wife and I decide to skip work for a little Tuesday afternoon delight on the dining room table, it's not a problem. And even if we did, we could just throw a blouse over the camera, problem solved.
That's how it works in movies, yes. In real life, not so much, because most burglars aren't willing to murder, and even the desperate ones know that it's going to be obvious who dunnit.
So here's my story. My next-door neighbor is in prison, and is renting his house out to ex-con buddies so he can pay the property tax. This is not good for the neighborhood. Anyway, last year our house got robbed. Lost a Macbook and a bunch of other pawnable electronics. In response, I bought a couple of wireless webcams, and set them up to detect motion and stream images to a fileserver which was hidden way in the back of the TV cabinet. Behind the old Gamecube, I figured nobody's gonna dig that deep.
Six months later, my house got broken into again. TV was stolen, an iPad, and the downstairs security camera. The thief stole the camera, but he didn't find the fileserver, which had some entertaining shots of him poking around the living room, spotting the camera, and rushing to unplug it. I printed off the frame that showed his face most clearly and gave it to the cops. The next day, the "Find My iPad" feature activated, pinpointing the iPad in my neighbor's house. I called the cops, they didn't really understand the tech and showed up three hours later and didn't find anything. But they did pass the security cam picture around the station, one of them recognized the guy (low-tech facial recognition), they hauled him in, and he had the iPad on him. He confessed to robbing our house twice, plus a half-dozen other houses around town. And he told the cops about the upstairs window high above the back stairs that we didn't notice was unlocked.
So to those of you who say that in-home surveillance won't work because criminals are too stupid to show their faces, you're underestimating just how stupid criminals can be when heroin withdrawal is making their decisions for them. And to those of you who say that this is one step from Big Brother, the big difference is that it's *my* security camera, I can choose what to show the cops. And yes, I erase the images periodically just in case someone seizes or steals the file server.
Give them citizenship for now. Once your kids are independent adults, they can make their own decision about whether the tax and draft issues are worth the hassle; promise to help them pay the renunciation fee if they choose that option.
Multiple citizenship is one of those things that's a daily hassle, but could save your kids' lives. Imagine if you were making this decision in 1925! Of course the odds of Belgium falling under totalitarian rule are pretty damn slim (slimmer than the US, probably), but if it ever happens, you don't want to be the one to deny your kids a way to get out.
The difference between nukes and fossil fuels is, nobody realistically gains anything by setting off a nuke. Fossil fuels trade short-term gains against long-term losses; with nukes, everybody loses: the only hope is that your enemy might lose more than you.
Upvote the parent. If you were trying to do this in the early 90s, you'd have either physically moved the disk into a new computer -- and oldschool IDE has a bunch of surprises that will bite the unwary -- or used Kermit.
Just be aware that your average '90s serial port probably won't work above 57 kilobit/sec, which means transferring 160 megabytes will take the better part of a day.
This should either be the biggest news story on the planet, or the biggest lie of the year, but the public response seems to be "meh". The problem is, Snowden stole too much. Or claims to have stolen too much. There have been so *many* earthshattering Snowden revelations that both the outrage and the fact-checking seems to have evaporated.
This is a big problem either way.
Maybe you didn't hear, but companies do try to make a profit. Throwing your customers to the wolves may not be the simplest way for a company to commit suicide, but it'll do.
I should have added, protect citizens' identity *from other citizens*. The premise here is that protecting your identity from the government is a lost cause, but protecting it from other citizens and corporations is possible, with the government's help.
I'm imagining a smart card that provides an ever-changing one-time code that's displayed on an LCD on the front, and is embossed with your photo. Usually you use a chip-and-pin style process to confirm your identity, but when there's no power or network access, the person who needs to confirm your identity can just look at the photo and write down the one-time code, to be verified later when he's at a computer.
Without network access, it's less secure, but it's still better than any offline system we have today. I mean, last time I ordered takeout, the delivery guy took a rubbing of my credit card using a pen and some carbon paper...
There's no question you could make this system nightmarish, but the way I see it, the American public (not just Slashdot nerds) has successfully opposed national ID for ages; the only way you'll get public support for this is by offering people something better than the current system. Like an end to identity theft and spam.
Also, the social security administration already offers an identity verification service that only verifies "yes or no", and does not return names or other identifying data. Of course, it's pretty much useless because since so many private databases use the same SS#, the data's out in the wild and easy to collate. But it demonstrates that the government can and will take steps to protect citizens' identity.
This is as good a place as any for me to jump on my favorite hobby horse: the US government should be issuing a standardized national ID; there should be a federal administration that handles identity of US persons.
Specifically, the government should issue 2-factor authenticators to all citizens which do absolutely nothing but verify identity to businesses, people, and other government agencies. The service should return no name, address, or other identifying data: just a hash ID code which is unique for every person, and unique for every agency or business which requests your ID. Thus, a bank can verify that you're the same person who set up your bank account, the state police can verify that you're the same person who applied for a driver's license, but that's all they can learn about you. This would makes it very difficult for anyone but the federal government to steal your identity, and tough for anyone but the feds to correlate your credit card data with your medical data with your Facebook profile.
Obviously, this means the federal government would be able to use your identity records to track you. But they can do that anyway, with a quick call to a credit card company and your internet service provider. This at least keeps everyone *else* from being able to do so.
Sure, but this is going to benefit a tenth as much society as the Chunnel, at the same cost. And the Chunnel has never been indispensable to start with.
This tunnel would be roughly the same length and complexity as the English Channel Tunnel. The combined metro area of London and Paris is 26 million people; Talinn and Helsinki combined are less than 1/10th the size. If you're thinking more in terms of connecting all of Finland to all of Europe the way the Chunnel connects the whole UK to Europe, the population of Finland is again less than 1/10th the size of the UK.
The Chunnel has been in or on the edge of bankruptcy for most of its existence.
I'm not sure this is gonna work.
Ever notice how "uncertainty" has come to mean "something we don't want to happen"? Not just net neutrality, it's everywhere. It's like, everything we support will last forever, everything we oppose is uncertain because someday we'll manage rid of it.
Not Google's loss. Just like the bank, Google is holding their users' property for them: it's the users who lose, and the users who demand better security. But only if the users know their property is actually at risk.
Think about it: if you knew that one stolen password would permanently wipe out your life savings, you wouldn't touch online banking with a ten-foot pole. But you know that the bank (and the FDIC) will cover it, so you don't give a shit.
Because banks have insurance against these losses, while Google doesn't. Next question.
http://economictimes.indiatime...
You're arguing from what you expect, rather than from data.
The number of Americans able to hold a conversation in a foreign language is about 25%. Which is nowhere near "Most Americans".
http://www.gallup.com/poll/182...
This is especially bad since about 17% of Americans are Hispanic. Not all Hispanics are bilingual, of course.
In the UK the bilingual rate is about 38%; in Ireland it's 34%, both higher than the US, despite your claims. Across the EU, it's 56%.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
It's understandable that English-speaking countries have lower rates, but even within English-speaking nations, the US is pretty near the bottom.
(Australia is right at the bottom.)
http://yourlanguage.org/resear...
I'm going to skip over the whole "computer language and spoken language are two different things" argument, and focus on the quote. What's the case for forcing everyone to spend two years learning a foreign language? Is that really a better use of students' time than learning something else?
Yes. International conflict happens when societies misunderstand each other, and when they're able to dehumanize each other. The more we are able to understand the language and culture of our neighbors, the harder it is for misunderstandings to build to hatred to build to war.
Now, this isn't a sure thing, nor should it be. But foreign language learning can prevent wars. How many iPhone apps is that worth?