You are confusing the speed of light in a vaccuum (space), which is a constant (C=3x10^8), with the speed of light in some other medium (not a vaccuum), which is variable and can be quite slow.
This is a very important point that he didn't mention at all. The result of all these databases being joined together has been, at least topically, a great convenience to consumers. Credit reports can be had almost instantaneously, etc.
Whether we (personally) feel that this is an invasion of privacy doesn't matter. The consumer (as a whole) has accepted the tradeoff of convenience versus privacy.
I'd like to see some hard statistics (not anecdotal evidence from emails that Katz gets) about how often there are mistakes in credit files like this. I know about five years ago there was a big push to make it easier for consumers to get access and change their personal information.
It's a simple fact that when you have a system that supports several hundred million consumers, there are going to be errors. Should we throw the whole thing out and go back to doing everything with paper and pencil? I don't think anyone would want that.
First off, the reason cell phones aren't allowed in hospitals is because they use RF (radio frequency) signals, which can interfere with all kinds of things, from pacemakers to MRI machines.
AFAIK, pagers are allowed without restrictions in a hospital. Every doctor I've ever met has been wearing one, regardless of where they are. Maybe someone with more knowledge of how pager signals work can explain why they are better than cell phones (maybe much less signal power??).
Also, palm pilots are allowed just about anywhere as well. They don't give off any (or much) RF power, and there is little chance of a palm pilot causing "equipment malfunctions while performing operations."
Yeah - I cant see any reason to have a train connecting North/Central/South America with Asia/Europe/Russia... not much value there eh. You could take a train from any where on the planet to anywhere else. Sounds like it has a small amount of value if you ask me..
I want to know how many people are going to get on a train anywhere in the lower 48 states for several days to go anywhere, when a plane takes only several hours. Give me a break... Americans don't use trains - they are slow, and there is no supporting infrastructure around the train stops like there is around airports (rental cars, hotels, taxis, etc.).
>So why is it strange that when Microsoft try to ship their own browser with their OS everybody jumps 50 feet high?
You're missing the whole point of the lawsuit, which is that Microsoft unfairly used its monopoly position in the OS market to advance their own browser while limiting the distribution of other browsers like NS through forceful and illegal agreements with hardware manufacturers.
Remember, it's not illegal to be a monopoly, but it is illegal to be a monopoly and use that power to stop competition.
I agree, that would be cool, but I think the reentry is violent enough and the space station is fragile enough that a) communications wouldn't work (isn't there a radio blackout during reentry?), b) the antenae will break very quickly, or c) both.
>This was the most insightful and best researched bit of social commentary I've ever read on Slashdot.
Repeat after me: CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.
His argument has great numbers, but he doesn't establish a single link between the two. He might as well have put up the number of bananas shipped each year and tried to correlate that with teen violence.
Wake up people, his method of argument is just as bad as the people who claim that video games DO cause violence in teens. You all just happen to like his conclusion better, so you are ignoring that it is pseudoscience.
I'm sorry, but I have to take exception to this. His article wasn't well presented at all.
He gives great quotes and statistics and backs them up with links to reputable places. But correlation does not imply causation.
There is no attempt to make a direct link between teen violence and video games anywhere in his argument.
Who knows, maybe there was a similar increase in the sales of bananas since 1993; does that mean that bananas are responsible for the decrease in teen violence? Of course not! Likewise, video game usage may or may not have have been a cause (or effect) of teen violence, but no good evidence for that is found in his argument.
This method of saying "look at this graph! this is going up and this is also going up so this must be the cause of that" is really bad science.
Correlation does NOT imply causation. You are guilty of exactly the same crime you are accusing GW of.
Just because computer games were on the rise in the 90's and violence among teens was on the decline DOES NOT mean that one caused the other, or vice versa.
Please go read some Richard Fenyman - he had the right idea - what you are doing is pseudoscience, and in the end it will only cloud things up and push us away from the real causes and solutions.
but the beginning of a global war between corporate interests and the forces of democracy...
We all know that corporations are driven by one goal and one goal only: to make money. But for whom? The shareholders, of course. And I'd bet that most Americans have stock in Sony (either directly or through some mutual fund), and that the very corporations that are threatening society as we know it are also the ones in which they are part owner.
>The ironic thing, of course, is that the Simpsons paved the way for all the "prime-time" cartoons on TV now.
I hate to be a stickler but I think that The Flintstones did that a longgg time ago. From what my parents have told me they were an even bigger sensation than The Simpson's was.
Personally, I avoid all of this by using the C indentation mode in Emacs, where "tab" means correctly indent the line, not insert five spaces, so I can quickly check for errors like those by hitting tab on each line.
(Right now I am teaching myself Visual C++, and the hardest thing about it for me is getting used to MS's editor, not the syntax!)
Also, writers are typically paid for the number of words that they write, so I don't see how you can consider it "silly and arbitrary".
What I was trying to say was that I don't think that the length of a book (and we'll limit ourselves to fiction) has any kind of correlation to the quality of the book. I've read some great short stories and novellas and novels, and I've read some really crappy 1000 page monsters.
Great link! I had no idea that Project Gutenberg existed, but I am certainly interested now.
That said, in my defense I linked to the book at fatbrain , and it is the Dover Thrift classic edition for $1. So if you like having a paper copy to bring with you when you are *gasp* away from a computer, and you don't want to wear out your printer, then this just might be worth it;)
You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. This case certainly proves that point.
You might want to read Civil Disobedience by a Mr. Thoreau as to why there are many many people who disagree with you.
Okay, my sister recently bought a top-o-the-line Powerbook G3, and I was really impressed (and jealous). I played with OSX for a while, and it is really cool, although it seemed a little slow. I think the new graphics system is a lot, even for a G3.
I also got to see Virtual PC. From my last experience with it (several years ago) it was a dinosaur and hardly worth using. But now it is fast as heck, and I think you can even install other OS's (Linux, BSD's, etc) under it as well.
Question: with OSX, will Virtual PC still be around? I would think that the challenges of getting a Windows system running when the entire underlying MacOS has changed would be formidible. Will OSX use something like WINE instead?
In my experience the people who are happiest are the ones who are comfortable in either paradigm and have enough mental discipline to avoid contaminating one style of thought with arguments from the other when they encounter areas of overlap.
Wonderfully said. That is the point I was trying to make.
I wrote "religion/spirituality" because I meant the wider realm of a spiritual experience or spiritual knowledge and I didn't want to get bogged down in the specifics that relgion requires.
I certainly agree with you that (organized) religion has many, many flaws, and that it has historically been used by the powers that be to control the masses.
But just because most people's need for some sort of spiritual experience can be used and abused doesn't mean that the need itself is useless.
>Also, please explain the "point" of religion/spirituality.
This is an unanswerable question for several reasons, first of which is that if you have to ask then I can't explain to you at all.
And like one poster said, you can certainly have a spiritual experience within the realm of science. Read the account of how Heisenburg "discovered" the uncertainty principle while listening to a violin solo.
>And while you're at it, explain in which realm it has proven itself useful.
Ask anyone who considers themselves spiritual if they think that it is useless. Just because you haven't experienced it yourself doesn't mean that other people don't all the time, and find it incredibly useful.
This is an incredibly broad topic, and to really discuss it fully would take more than this simple/. thread.
This reminds me of Thomas Aquinas' (eeks, i think) "proof" that god exists. Someone with some knowledge of philosophy please come and rescue me before i end up screwing up one of the greatest thought experiements of all time.
Imagine the chair you are sitting in right now. Now look at the chair in which you are sitting. These are two separate things; one is an idea and one is a physical object. Aquinas claimed that the physical chair is "greater" than the idea chair because it actually exists.
Now use your definition of God. God is the greatest thing that ever existed. But if God is the greatest thing that ever existed, and I can imagine God, then surely the God that truely exists is greater than the God in my mind, and therefore God exists!
(If I've explained that clearly enough...)
Unfortuneately the proof rests on the assumption that something that exists in the physical world is "greater" than an idea, which is pretty baseless.
Someone please correct this, but it is an interesting argument.
I, as a person who views religion through the glasses of a scientist evaluating a theory, see no compelling evidence for any of the major religions. This is not the say there is no God; there very we may be. I just have no knowledge of his existence, and therefor do not assume it.
Not to be rude, but aren't you missing the whole point of religion/spirituality? Trying to apply logic to spirituality just isn't going to work. Sprirituality is based on faith, science is based on logic, and they are two separate (but complimentary?) paradigms, and each is certainly useful within its own realm.
While 'digital' might now mean quite the same thing, anyone interested in this kind of thing should go see "Time Code." The entire movie was filmed with four digital cameras, all of them running all the time, without a single cut for two hours; each camera shot occupied 1/4 of the screen. The actors were given a general setup to the plot and ad-libbed the details.
I don't know much about movie making, but I can guess that this would have been hard to do with traditional film. Not only getting two hours of movie-quality film into a camera but also carrying the damn thing around for two hours straight.
I'm sure it would have made editting easier, if they had wanted to do any.
>Mir is testament to the fact that Russians making something on a small budget does not work too well.
The fact that you could make a statement like this just exposes your complete ignorance. Mir was designed to run for only a few years, and it's now been up, what, 12 years? Do you know how much the Russians have learned from something like that?
Personally I think the Russians are the world experts at designing and maintaining space stations, not the US.
Does anyone remember when, while installing, you couldn't touch any keys on the keyboard because it would corrupt the files it was writing to disk? Ah, the good old days!
Slashdot Mirror
You are confusing the speed of light in a vaccuum (space), which is a constant (C=3x10^8), with the speed of light in some other medium (not a vaccuum), which is variable and can be quite slow.
LL
This is a very important point that he didn't mention at all. The result of all these databases being joined together has been, at least topically, a great convenience to consumers. Credit reports can be had almost instantaneously, etc.
Whether we (personally) feel that this is an invasion of privacy doesn't matter. The consumer (as a whole) has accepted the tradeoff of convenience versus privacy.
I'd like to see some hard statistics (not anecdotal evidence from emails that Katz gets) about how often there are mistakes in credit files like this. I know about five years ago there was a big push to make it easier for consumers to get access and change their personal information.
It's a simple fact that when you have a system that supports several hundred million consumers, there are going to be errors. Should we throw the whole thing out and go back to doing everything with paper and pencil? I don't think anyone would want that.
LL
First off, the reason cell phones aren't allowed in hospitals is because they use RF (radio frequency) signals, which can interfere with all kinds of things, from pacemakers to MRI machines.
AFAIK, pagers are allowed without restrictions in a hospital. Every doctor I've ever met has been wearing one, regardless of where they are. Maybe someone with more knowledge of how pager signals work can explain why they are better than cell phones (maybe much less signal power??).
Also, palm pilots are allowed just about anywhere as well. They don't give off any (or much) RF power, and there is little chance of a palm pilot causing "equipment malfunctions while performing operations."
LL
Yeah - I cant see any reason to have a train connecting North/Central/South America with Asia/Europe/Russia... not much value there eh. You could take a train from any where on the planet to anywhere else. Sounds like it has a small amount of value if you ask me..
I want to know how many people are going to get on a train anywhere in the lower 48 states for several days to go anywhere, when a plane takes only several hours. Give me a break... Americans don't use trains - they are slow, and there is no supporting infrastructure around the train stops like there is around airports (rental cars, hotels, taxis, etc.).
This isn't going to happen.
LL
>So why is it strange that when Microsoft try to ship their own browser with their OS everybody jumps 50 feet high?
You're missing the whole point of the lawsuit, which is that Microsoft unfairly used its monopoly position in the OS market to advance their own browser while limiting the distribution of other browsers like NS through forceful and illegal agreements with hardware manufacturers.
Remember, it's not illegal to be a monopoly, but it is illegal to be a monopoly and use that power to stop competition.
LL
I agree, that would be cool, but I think the reentry is violent enough and the space station is fragile enough that a) communications wouldn't work (isn't there a radio blackout during reentry?), b) the antenae will break very quickly, or c) both.
But it would be cool.
LL
>This was the most insightful and best researched bit of social commentary I've ever read on Slashdot.
Repeat after me: CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.
His argument has great numbers, but he doesn't establish a single link between the two. He might as well have put up the number of bananas shipped each year and tried to correlate that with teen violence.
Wake up people, his method of argument is just as bad as the people who claim that video games DO cause violence in teens. You all just happen to like his conclusion better, so you are ignoring that it is pseudoscience.
LL
I'm sorry, but I have to take exception to this. His article wasn't well presented at all.
He gives great quotes and statistics and backs them up with links to reputable places. But correlation does not imply causation.
There is no attempt to make a direct link between teen violence and video games anywhere in his argument.
Who knows, maybe there was a similar increase in the sales of bananas since 1993; does that mean that bananas are responsible for the decrease in teen violence? Of course not! Likewise, video game usage may or may not have have been a cause (or effect) of teen violence, but no good evidence for that is found in his argument.
This method of saying "look at this graph! this is going up and this is also going up so this must be the cause of that" is really bad science.
LL
Correlation does NOT imply causation. You are guilty of exactly the same crime you are accusing GW of.
Just because computer games were on the rise in the 90's and violence among teens was on the decline DOES NOT mean that one caused the other, or vice versa.
Please go read some Richard Fenyman - he had the right idea - what you are doing is pseudoscience, and in the end it will only cloud things up and push us away from the real causes and solutions.
LL
but the beginning of a global war between corporate interests and the forces of democracy...
We all know that corporations are driven by one goal and one goal only: to make money. But for whom? The shareholders, of course. And I'd bet that most Americans have stock in Sony (either directly or through some mutual fund), and that the very corporations that are threatening society as we know it are also the ones in which they are part owner.
Kinda makes you think...
LL
>The ironic thing, of course, is that the Simpsons paved the way for all the "prime-time" cartoons on TV now.
I hate to be a stickler but I think that The Flintstones did that a longgg time ago. From what my parents have told me they were an even bigger sensation than The Simpson's was.
LL
Personally, I avoid all of this by using the C indentation mode in Emacs, where "tab" means correctly indent the line, not insert five spaces, so I can quickly check for errors like those by hitting tab on each line.
(Right now I am teaching myself Visual C++, and the hardest thing about it for me is getting used to MS's editor, not the syntax!)
LL
Also, writers are typically paid for the number of words that they write, so I don't see how you can consider it "silly and arbitrary".
What I was trying to say was that I don't think that the length of a book (and we'll limit ourselves to fiction) has any kind of correlation to the quality of the book. I've read some great short stories and novellas and novels, and I've read some really crappy 1000 page monsters.
LL
Perhaps Mr. King needs to make his micropayments a little more "micro" so that customers are being offered a better value.
This is assuming you are measuring the 'value' of a book by the number of pages it has. This seems pretty silly and arbitrary to me.
LL
Great link! I had no idea that Project Gutenberg existed, but I am certainly interested now.
;)
That said, in my defense I linked to the book at fatbrain , and it is the Dover Thrift classic edition for $1. So if you like having a paper copy to bring with you when you are *gasp* away from a computer, and you don't want to wear out your printer, then this just might be worth it
LL
You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. This case certainly proves that point.
You might want to read Civil Disobedience by a Mr. Thoreau as to why there are many many people who disagree with you.
LL
Okay, my sister recently bought a top-o-the-line Powerbook G3, and I was really impressed (and jealous). I played with OSX for a while, and it is really cool, although it seemed a little slow. I think the new graphics system is a lot, even for a G3.
I also got to see Virtual PC. From my last experience with it (several years ago) it was a dinosaur and hardly worth using. But now it is fast as heck, and I think you can even install other OS's (Linux, BSD's, etc) under it as well.
Question: with OSX, will Virtual PC still be around? I would think that the challenges of getting a Windows system running when the entire underlying MacOS has changed would be formidible. Will OSX use something like WINE instead?
LL
Anselm, right, I knew I would get that wrong.
Thanks for the correctin. I think it's time for me to dig out the old philosophy textbook and do some reading...
LL
In my experience the people who are happiest are the ones who are comfortable in either paradigm and have enough mental discipline to avoid contaminating one style of thought with arguments from the other when they encounter areas of overlap.
Wonderfully said. That is the point I was trying to make.
LL
I wrote "religion/spirituality" because I meant the wider realm of a spiritual experience or spiritual knowledge and I didn't want to get bogged down in the specifics that relgion requires.
/. thread.
I certainly agree with you that (organized) religion has many, many flaws, and that it has historically been used by the powers that be to control the masses.
But just because most people's need for some sort of spiritual experience can be used and abused doesn't mean that the need itself is useless.
>Also, please explain the "point" of religion/spirituality.
This is an unanswerable question for several reasons, first of which is that if you have to ask then I can't explain to you at all.
And like one poster said, you can certainly have a spiritual experience within the realm of science. Read the account of how Heisenburg "discovered" the uncertainty principle while listening to a violin solo.
>And while you're at it, explain in which realm it has proven itself useful.
Ask anyone who considers themselves spiritual if they think that it is useless. Just because you haven't experienced it yourself doesn't mean that other people don't all the time, and find it incredibly useful.
This is an incredibly broad topic, and to really discuss it fully would take more than this simple
LL
This reminds me of Thomas Aquinas' (eeks, i think) "proof" that god exists. Someone with some knowledge of philosophy please come and rescue me before i end up screwing up one of the greatest thought experiements of all time.
Imagine the chair you are sitting in right now. Now look at the chair in which you are sitting. These are two separate things; one is an idea and one is a physical object. Aquinas claimed that the physical chair is "greater" than the idea chair because it actually exists.
Now use your definition of God. God is the greatest thing that ever existed. But if God is the greatest thing that ever existed, and I can imagine God, then surely the God that truely exists is greater than the God in my mind, and therefore God exists!
(If I've explained that clearly enough...)
Unfortuneately the proof rests on the assumption that something that exists in the physical world is "greater" than an idea, which is pretty baseless.
Someone please correct this, but it is an interesting argument.
LL
I, as a person who views religion through the glasses of a scientist evaluating a theory, see no compelling evidence for any of the major religions. This is not the say there is no God; there very we may be. I just have no knowledge of his existence, and therefor do not assume it.
Not to be rude, but aren't you missing the whole point of religion/spirituality? Trying to apply logic to spirituality just isn't going to work. Sprirituality is based on faith, science is based on logic, and they are two separate (but complimentary?) paradigms, and each is certainly useful within its own realm.
Just my opinion here.
LL
While 'digital' might now mean quite the same thing, anyone interested in this kind of thing should go see "Time Code." The entire movie was filmed with four digital cameras, all of them running all the time, without a single cut for two hours; each camera shot occupied 1/4 of the screen. The actors were given a general setup to the plot and ad-libbed the details.
I don't know much about movie making, but I can guess that this would have been hard to do with traditional film. Not only getting two hours of movie-quality film into a camera but also carrying the damn thing around for two hours straight.
I'm sure it would have made editting easier, if they had wanted to do any.
LL
>Mir is testament to the fact that Russians making something on a small budget does not work too well.
The fact that you could make a statement like this just exposes your complete ignorance. Mir was designed to run for only a few years, and it's now been up, what, 12 years? Do you know how much the Russians have learned from something like that?
Personally I think the Russians are the world experts at designing and maintaining space stations, not the US.
LL
Does anyone remember when, while installing, you couldn't touch any keys on the keyboard because it would corrupt the files it was writing to disk? Ah, the good old days!
LL