MATLAB is the main program I use in Windows at my office everyday and since Feb. when I've upgraded my system to Vista I never had a problem with MATLAB..
What I should have said is that the following programs are not supported under Vista, rather than stating that they don't run. The program I spend the most time with is ArcGIS. Mostly, I simply *hate* performing upgrades. I have been using the two terms interchangeably to help justify my decision to wait until ArcGIS is no longer supported under Windows XP before I changing over to Vista. If all goes well, I won't have anything to do for a couple of years.
It looks like many quantitative applications are currently not going to work on Vista, at least for now. Major statistical analysis, data mining and Geographic Information Systems tools that don't run on Vista include:
As a semi-libertarian (I'm a distributist), I admire the sentiment behind preserving our right to enter contracts freely. However, since we are talking about the Supreme Court, who may collectively do whatever the hell they choose, what difference would "coming out of the woodwork" make?
Although I TFA interesting, I'm not sure I would assign RIAA or the MPAA the dignity of association (even by analogy) of craftsmens guilds or trade unions. This whole issue of DRM is not just about the trends and traditions within certain professions, but is really instead about the much larger problem of unchecked monopolies with seemingly unlimited government access. To that end, I think a quote by G.K. Chesterton might be even more appropriate than the excellent Heinlein quote posted elsewhere:
From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy." - "A Case In Point," G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity
I have been working in the scientific community my whole professional life, and I have never heard of a "certified scientist" before.
In applied science fields where there are a large number of practitioners in the private sector, some professional organizations find it useful to develop a set of base-line standards for professional practice and certify that members of their community meet those standards. When people who claim to meet those standards (meaning "certified scientists") don't adhere to standard practices, the professional community can use exclusion from the list as a form of sanction. The purpose all of this serves is to give people in the lay community who need to hire applied scientists, but have neither the time nor expertise to evaluate their publication list, a standard way of determining whether or not they are hiring a lunatic. These registers don't do much more than that, but they do at least help weed out the crackpots.
An example of this is the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA) If you represent yourself as a professional archaeologist and an RPA, then there are certain things you will or won't do. For instance, if an RPA member goes out and churns up a 12,000 year old bison kill site with a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer and then sells all the artifacts, you can be pretty sure that, whether the dig was legal or not, that archaeologist will be kicked off the RPA (and rightly so).
Now you can debate the idea of whether or not the American Meteorological Society ought to be using non-belief in anthropogenic global warming as a criterion for revoking their "seal of approval," but the idea that there is no such thing as a "certified scientist" is no longer valid outside the narrow world of academia. Whether you like it or not, certifications are here to stay. Moreover, they serve a purpose in applied science settings.
Am I the only one amused by the fact that/.ers posted an article about the FTC investigating viral marketing on the same day we posted an apparently bogusstory that turned out to probably be a viral marketing ploy?
Ok, well I think our fundamental disagreement then is that the disparity is all that bad.
You hit the nail on the head, but perhaps not in the way you intended. This "new poverty" you speak of is something that has already emerged in Europe and may be on its way in the United States. But in many parts of the world, basic necessities are not being met and the "good level of comfort" is decades, if not more than a century, away. Moreover, it is also an open question as to whether or not these areas can even achieve a state of, as you put it, comparative poverty, without considerable wealth moving out of the industrialized world.
Global markets have already started doing some of this for us. But another concern is that many of the newly rich in other countries currently exhibit a level of concern for meeting the basic needs of those in poverty that is comparable with the robber barons who ran monopolies in this country and Europe 100 to 150 years ago. That being so, it might be harder to support the argument that fighting the economic disparities will do more harm that good. There are no easy answers here. On that we might also agree. If we can agree on this, I wonder if we might also agree that there is, in fact, some sort of problem here.
You and I agree about living comfortably (and about hard work, luck and success). Now, the subject of the article was about the 2% of people who control 50% of the world's wealth. That's 120 million people. The majority of these people live in the U.S. and Canada, Europe, Japan, China, India, Australia, and southeast Asia. In America, this proportion of folks might be around 5% of the total population. In Japan, Europe and Australia, the number will be slightly less and everywhere else it will be much, much less. Given this demographic distribution, my argument is that one doesn't have to resort to hair splitting distinctions of net worth to realize that the majority of folks addressed by the article do not fit into the category of just "living comfortably" and never have done. Those people are called the "upper middle class," and are small business owners, family farmers, engineers, doctors, etc.
My main problem with your argument the idea of lumping the very very rich into the same category as those who have done well through hard work and creativity. It may be cynical to believe that one can only get so far with hard work and brains (and then after that you start hurting people), but it is a cynicism born out by lot of historical data and I stand by it. I also stand by my critique of affirming socio-economic distinctions. While there is a certain degree of natural variation to be seen, the chances bumping into good fortune (opportunities for opportunity, if you will) are biased against the poor. This situation will always be true to some degree, but massive disparities in wealth make it worse than it has to be.
It is hard to know where to begin in replying to this post, so I guess we'll just start with the top:
This is to be expected. People work disproportionately as well. High intelligence is distributed in a very similar curve.
So, you are assuming that wealth is distributed along some merit based system based on hard work and brains? So, how do explain the railroad moguls who built their fortunes by exploiting immigrant Chinese labor, and forcing small farmers off their land with hired guns and goon squads? How about the textile families who forced women, immigrants, and children to work 10 - 15 hours a day, six days a week for most of the late 19th and early 20th century? How about the British colonial officials who were carried around on litters to supervise the production of Indian tea?
Looking at the other side of the coin, how do explain Paris Hilton? Are trying to tell me that she sits where she is because she is brilliant and hard-working?
All this boils down to a fundamentally flawed assumption on your part about great wealth is accumulated. It doesn't happen through hard work. It happens when capital is amassed and then reinvested in the generation of yet more capital. In other words, a cycle of accumulation that can work even if the owner of the wealth doesn't do anything but raise himself up off the couch long enough to say "I pay you to make money, so you better go get more, or I will not pay you again." Since the distribution of wealth has been uneven since before the renaissance, hard work need have little to do with it.
Think back to the 1900s, or even late 1800s. People that were just scraping by would often not even survive.
Ok, it is true that in the 18th and 19th century it was even harder to get wealthy (or just get by) then it is today. However, in the 1940s through 1970s, there was a general reduction in the disparity between rich and poor. It was at this time that many fortunes were made in manufacturing, oil exploration, housing, and other war time and post-war activities. But taxes were much higher and the distribution of wealth today is more like it was in the 1900s, when it was very difficult to get rich when, then it is like the mid-20th century, when there was more socio-economic mobility. Uneven wealth distribution and social mobility are inversely proportional, my friend.
Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself. in fact, it makes you all the more likely to be able to get rich.
Here you make the assumption that everyone aspires to be a multi-billionaire. That seems flawed, as well. Many judeo-christian and non-western moral teachings warn of the dangers associated with accumulating great fortunes. There are many wealthy people who are perfectly decent folks, but, to paraphrase comedian Chris Rock, in many cases, it is true that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
Quit being so classist. Just because others have done well doesn't mean you can't, but you surely can't if all you do is gripe about how you deserve more money without doing anything to earn it.
Tell me again who's being classist here? Your argument basically affirms socio-economic distinctions - the differences between the rich and poor (also known as classes) - as part of the natural social and moral order. If any argument is "classist," it would be yours.
And by the way, speaking of people who gripe about deserving more money without doing anything to earn it, may I refer you again to Paris Hilton?
I've never been 100% certain whether tremendous wealth has positive or negative social consequences, but at least I have some kind of notion of reality.
Richard Feynman had something to say about this debate, though somewhat obliquely. The parentheticals below are my own.
"You can know the name of a bird (or a planet) in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird (or planet)... So let's look at the bird ( or planet) and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
The point here is that scientific knowledge (whether it be social, biological, or physical) is about explaining how things work (understanding processes) or why they are the way they are (understanding variation). Debate over essentialist categories like "planet," "species," "nation-state," etc. are, as one other person in this discussion has already mentioned, problems of language.
Interestingly, Wittgenstein might have a thing or two regarding this topic as well, especially in later work.
I'm still waiting for the first company logo visible from earth (in space).
If there is anything that would lead me to seriously consider engaging in open rebellion against capitalist western culture, a la Camus, this would be it. The last thing some New Guinea Fore or Enga tribesperson or some Australian aborigine needs to see is a damned red and blue sphere with a wavy white stripe down the middle floating across the night sky (personally, I think Pepsi would do it first). I mean c'mon people, have some fscking perspective! Are marketing gurus really so stupid and vain that this would seem like a good idea?
Hmm, lack of perspective, marketing gurus, stupidity and vanity....
from the TFA.....
Google Earth will not replace high tech programs like AutoCAD or ESRI's ArcGIS
The topic missing from this discussion is a simple question: Where does all this data come from?.
You can't plan bike routes, model road trips, view cityscapes, etc. unless you have good data to start with. Neither Google Earth nor KML function to build geographic data. The tools for doing that are as follows:
v
Without these basic development tools, client-side web apps like Google Earth don't exist. These data have a long history and complex standards for verification and use.
In a community normally so concerned with standards, metadata, etc., I am surprised by the Gee whiz view comparing Google Earth and similar client side apps.
U.S companies have a history of breaking the law in foreign countries. In most countries, it is against the law to bribe government officials to get a factory built. Moreover, I believe it is also against U.S. law for a U.S. company to bribe an official in a foreign government in order to get a factory built. But is anyone seriously believe it doesn't happen all the time? The difference is that Yahoo! and Google are internet companies. For lots of reasons (U.S. free press traditions, the popularity of literature on Network theory and distributed systems, dissillusionment with mass-media conglomerates, etc. etc.) many people in the U.S. (especially slashdottirs) have attached a code of freedom of speech and free expression to the Internet's use. I like this code and want to see it continue, but it isn't inherent to Internet's (or any other) technology.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, law, schmaw. Let's talk about the ethics. And speaking of which, my problem isn't with Google or Yahoo! in particular, but instead with corporate ethics more broadly.
And yet, the lion's share of Google's revenues come from advertising. I like Google as well, but I am very ambivalent about some of their ethics. This tension between providing information that people trust, warehousing information about everyone and everything involved with their services, and then generating revenue from advertising, which, as you said, is mostly deceptive, is very scary.
This post may seem a little off-topic, but so does its parent, and I feel the insert a few hard facts.
I have worked as an archaeologist in the Desert Southwest and southern Mexico for eight years and I am aware of no firm evidence whatsoever for Aztecs encroaching directly into the traditional lands of the Navajo. There is some evidence that people living at the site of Paquime traded copper and exotic birds with groups from Mesoamerica, but these folks probably lived on or near the Pacific Coast, in what are now the states of Sinaloa and Nayarit. A chronology of Navajo settlement in the Southwest mentions the Aztec, but under a separate timeline. Finally, a curriculum guide from a comparative civilizations class designed to be taught in Navajo schools makes no mention of these alleged Aztec slavers.
From all I have read (and I apologize for not having time to re-create the bibliography here), there were forms of slavery among many Native American groups in North America, including the Aztecs. However, slavery, as conceived by Native Americans, was very different from that imposed by Europeans. Most of the time, war captives were involved. In some cases, as was observed among the 18th century Creek of present-day Georgia, slaves ended up being treated more as outcasts than outright slaves. Some were even adopted into the families of the men who captured them. A similar observation was made regarding indigenous Afreican slavery.
As for celestial observation towers, etc., yes, they were everywhere, among many cultures. But again turning to archaeological evidence, it seems that most were developed indepently by different groups for different purposes.
While there is nothing wrong with being impressed by the accomplishments of Native Americans prior to European colonization for their own sake, don't make the mistake of superimposing models of European civilizational development on these societies. Prehistoric native groups in North America followed very different paths and we owe it to their descendents to appreciate their history on its own terms. We sell everyone short if we have to impose false parallels with European history in order to be impressed.
Between this article and previous articles concerning the locking of Wikipedia pages, I can't help but wonder if what is happening amounts to some kind of evolution. Depending on how Wiki solves this, what we may see is the system evolving to include some form of the old fashioned, but sometimes maligned model of peer review. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is an interesting process to watch -- especially for somebody (like me) who thinks peer review is good thing.
Re:Yes, they charge for it. However...
on
Buy Vista or Else
·
· Score: 1
I think you will have hard time, finding *anyone*, slashdotter or not, who likes the pain of going through a Windows upgrade. Most of my colleagues are stuck with M$ because of our application domains. Our industry standard geographic information system software, ESRI ArcGIS, doesn't run on anything but Windows and Solaris. Given the options to A) upgrade the OS in our labs from one flavor of Windows to the next or B) undergo a root canal,
I think most would take the trip to the dentist. At least that way, you know you are back working in a day or so.
Well, it is a cute play on words, but what the author of TFA is talking about in the last paragraph is a conference, not a meeting. Taken as more than a jest, this would be like calling the macworld expo a meeting. While there are conference presentations that mimic traditionally defined meetings in terms of tedium, attendance is voluntary and most professional conferences are (for me, at least) a stimulating way to recommit to professional goals.
"The spaceport, to be located some 25 miles south of the town of Truth or Consequences, will be constructed 90 percent underground, with just the runway and supporting structures above ground........Virgin Galactic also unveiled its logo _ the pupil of an eye incorporating an eclipse. Branson's iris will be used for the final design......."
Is anyone else wondering why Richard Branson now seems to be channeling an old James Bond villain? Underground spaceports and creepy logos with overtones of world dominion make you wonder, especially coming from the man who said, "I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator".
if our corporations were ran by people with science and engineering backgrounds who cared about long-term research and development rather than ran by MBAs with BAs in Medieval History and Philosophy who can't differentiate a simple function or write a line of code, and who care more about short-term profits and $$$, then perhaps we'll see some more scientific and engineering progress in this country
The above quoted posting is emblematic of problems associated with the National Academies' report discussed in this article, as well as much of the related discourse here on slashdot. The overall problem is not with science and engineering education per se, but with the overall education system as a whole. Whether a person seeking a college education seeks a final degree in science, engineering, or Medieval History and Philosophy, the most important part of a four year education is that it be broad and rigorous. Students should come out of college being able to write well, think critically, and be conversant, or at least familiar, with a broad range of topics beyond their specialization in arts, sciences, social sciences, or the humanities.
Narrowing the focus of fundraising and effort to the educational domains of science and engineering, rather than pushing for the revitalization and re-funding of all sectors of U.S. education system, is not going to solve the problem. The writer who posted the comment to which I replied is a case in point. Aside from the obvious grammatical issues (noted in bold), the author belies a narrowness of view by suggesting that someone with a degree in Medieval History and Philosophy would be the type of person apt to have a short-term, profit oriented mentality. I suppose this is possible, but it is pretty unlikely. Most people who bother to study medieval history and philosophy care deeply about the past, about long term processes, and usually about ethics and the future of the humanity. An excellent example would be G.K. Chesterston, an early twentieth century journalist who spent most of his life writing about the contemporary human condition using, oddly enough, the lessons of medieval history and philosophy as his ethical starting point.
From his vantage point in the "medieval past," (amon his most famous works are biographies of Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi) Chesterton produced a criticism of Business Education that I think many would find agreeable. I close by quoting it, with the reminder that it is equally applicable to a "science and engineering" education as well.
From All is Grist
"The nuisance of all this notion of Business Education, of a training for certain trades, whether of plumber or plutocrat, is that it will prevent the intelligence being sufficiently active to criticize the trade and business properly."
- G.K. Chesterton (his use of italics in the above quote)
Basically what you are saying is that the whole Scientific Process will collapse because people are too spineless to say what they think in public. That is a very sad commentary on the state of academia.
Here you may have a point. The anecdotal evidence I have from my own experiences and that of friends in my field does suggest that some reviewers use anonymity as a shield behind which they can a) be as nasty as they wish for no truly good reason, or b) torpedo researchers they perceive to be "competing" with them. So that's an argument for doing away with anonymous reviews, or at least encouraging people not invoke their right to anonymity.
However, earlier on, I saw arguments in favor of doing away with edited journals entirely. I can argue against this with one word: Editors. Functions that editors serve that the internet cannot duplicate are
a) selecting reviewers based on an experienced background and long practice in the field
2) convincing those who are most qualified to do the review and
III)Encouraging the grammatical quality and clarity of argument of a submitted work, thus making lighter work for readers.
*Democratically* letting an application (or a group of part-time moderators) filter reviewers cannot provide the same quality of reviews that a good editor (and yes, there are bad ones) with years of experience can. And the last time I checked, neither M$ Word, Latec, VI, or OpenOffice provided tools to check for inelegant, but nevertheless correct, sentence structure. Just see my own writing here for evidence of that.
True, journals take longer to publish, are subject to all the frailties associated with humankind, and produce orders of magnitude less material than media outlets like our beloved/. Nevertheless, my 2 cents is that the final products from the journals, page for page, are better.
"God does not play dice with the universe."
-- Albert Einstein
Whereas, religion (and creationism as a sub-part of religion) is rife with dogma and the need to suppress intellectual curiousity.
"I desire mercy and not sacrifice."
-Jesus of Nazereth (Matthew 9:13 and 12:7)
In the former statement, Albert Einstein rather dogmatically refutes the implications of his own theories on relativity. In the latter, Jesus rails against the dogmatic observances of ritual sacrifice observed by the Pharisees.
As a person of faith who also has more than my share of training in scientific methods and evolutionary theory, I would advise folks who automatically associate science with free thinking and religion with thought supression to take a slightly less, *ahem* dogmatic, view.
Just my two cents here, but folks who equate intelligent design or creationism with scientific approaches and those who simply view creationism as a "sub-part of religion" are equally mistaken in that both parties oversimplify and the traditions they seek to criticize, treating them as monolithic stereotypes, rather than the complex institutions and intellectual edifices they actually are.
"1999 SCO launches numerous Open Source Initiatives: 1) Offers free Open Source applications and tools to SCO customers; 2) Extends Professional Services to include audits and deployment consultation for customers interested in installing Linux and Open Source technologies; 3) Invests in LinuxMall.com, the leading portal for Linux-related products and services; 4) Enters strategic agreement with TurboLinux to develop services for TurboLinux's TurboCluster Server and provide Linux Professional Services for TurboLinux customers."
Sometimes the sellouts pretend to be the most zealous zealots of all. Kinda sad, really.
Slashdot Mirror
5. Slashdot hires Johnnie Cochran
Not to be a wet blanket, but I'm afraid Johnnie Cochran died on March 29, 2005.
MATLAB is the main program I use in Windows at my office everyday and since Feb. when I've upgraded my system to Vista I never had a problem with MATLAB..
What I should have said is that the following programs are not supported under Vista, rather than stating that they don't run. The program I spend the most time with is ArcGIS. Mostly, I simply *hate* performing upgrades. I have been using the two terms interchangeably to help justify my decision to wait until ArcGIS is no longer supported under Windows XP before I changing over to Vista. If all goes well, I won't have anything to do for a couple of years.
It looks like many quantitative applications are currently not going to work on Vista, at least for now. Major statistical analysis, data mining and Geographic Information Systems tools that don't run on Vista include:
SPSS, SAS, MATLAB and SAP and ESRI ArcGIS
Eh, this is no big deal, right? I mean, who really wants to know about facts and numbers? Especially when you are using a *computer*.
HP Dishonors Warranty If You Load Linux
I think what our intrepid article sponsor (and editors?) meant is HP "Refuses to Honor" Warranty if.....
Otherwise, workplaces with HP laptops might start looking a lot like this....
As a semi-libertarian (I'm a distributist), I admire the sentiment behind preserving our right to enter contracts freely. However, since we are talking about the Supreme Court, who may collectively do whatever the hell they choose, what difference would "coming out of the woodwork" make?
Although I TFA interesting, I'm not sure I would assign RIAA or the MPAA the dignity of association (even by analogy) of craftsmens guilds or trade unions. This whole issue of DRM is not just about the trends and traditions within certain professions, but is really instead about the much larger problem of unchecked monopolies with seemingly unlimited government access. To that end, I think a quote by G.K. Chesterton might be even more appropriate than the excellent Heinlein quote posted elsewhere:
From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy." - "A Case In Point," G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity
I have been working in the scientific community my whole professional life, and I have never heard of a "certified scientist" before.
In applied science fields where there are a large number of practitioners in the private sector, some professional organizations find it useful to develop a set of base-line standards for professional practice and certify that members of their community meet those standards. When people who claim to meet those standards (meaning "certified scientists") don't adhere to standard practices, the professional community can use exclusion from the list as a form of sanction. The purpose all of this serves is to give people in the lay community who need to hire applied scientists, but have neither the time nor expertise to evaluate their publication list, a standard way of determining whether or not they are hiring a lunatic. These registers don't do much more than that, but they do at least help weed out the crackpots.
An example of this is the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA) If you represent yourself as a professional archaeologist and an RPA, then there are certain things you will or won't do. For instance, if an RPA member goes out and churns up a 12,000 year old bison kill site with a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer and then sells all the artifacts, you can be pretty sure that, whether the dig was legal or not, that archaeologist will be kicked off the RPA (and rightly so).
Now you can debate the idea of whether or not the American Meteorological Society ought to be using non-belief in anthropogenic global warming as a criterion for revoking their "seal of approval," but the idea that there is no such thing as a "certified scientist" is no longer valid outside the narrow world of academia. Whether you like it or not, certifications are here to stay. Moreover, they serve a purpose in applied science settings.
Am I the only one amused by the fact that /.ers posted an article about the FTC investigating viral marketing on the same day we posted an apparently bogus story that turned out to probably be a viral marketing ploy?
Ok, well I think our fundamental disagreement then is that the disparity is all that bad.
You hit the nail on the head, but perhaps not in the way you intended. This "new poverty" you speak of is something that has already emerged in Europe and may be on its way in the United States. But in many parts of the world, basic necessities are not being met and the "good level of comfort" is decades, if not more than a century, away. Moreover, it is also an open question as to whether or not these areas can even achieve a state of, as you put it, comparative poverty, without considerable wealth moving out of the industrialized world.
Global markets have already started doing some of this for us. But another concern is that many of the newly rich in other countries currently exhibit a level of concern for meeting the basic needs of those in poverty that is comparable with the robber barons who ran monopolies in this country and Europe 100 to 150 years ago. That being so, it might be harder to support the argument that fighting the economic disparities will do more harm that good. There are no easy answers here. On that we might also agree. If we can agree on this, I wonder if we might also agree that there is, in fact, some sort of problem here.
You and I agree about living comfortably (and about hard work, luck and success). Now, the subject of the article was about the 2% of people who control 50% of the world's wealth. That's 120 million people. The majority of these people live in the U.S. and Canada, Europe, Japan, China, India, Australia, and southeast Asia. In America, this proportion of folks might be around 5% of the total population. In Japan, Europe and Australia, the number will be slightly less and everywhere else it will be much, much less. Given this demographic distribution, my argument is that one doesn't have to resort to hair splitting distinctions of net worth to realize that the majority of folks addressed by the article do not fit into the category of just "living comfortably" and never have done. Those people are called the "upper middle class," and are small business owners, family farmers, engineers, doctors, etc.
My main problem with your argument the idea of lumping the very very rich into the same category as those who have done well through hard work and creativity. It may be cynical to believe that one can only get so far with hard work and brains (and then after that you start hurting people), but it is a cynicism born out by lot of historical data and I stand by it. I also stand by my critique of affirming socio-economic distinctions. While there is a certain degree of natural variation to be seen, the chances bumping into good fortune (opportunities for opportunity, if you will) are biased against the poor. This situation will always be true to some degree, but massive disparities in wealth make it worse than it has to be.
It is hard to know where to begin in replying to this post, so I guess we'll just start with the top:
This is to be expected. People work disproportionately as well. High intelligence is distributed in a very similar curve.
So, you are assuming that wealth is distributed along some merit based system based on hard work and brains? So, how do explain the railroad moguls who built their fortunes by exploiting immigrant Chinese labor, and forcing small farmers off their land with hired guns and goon squads? How about the textile families who forced women, immigrants, and children to work 10 - 15 hours a day, six days a week for most of the late 19th and early 20th century? How about the British colonial officials who were carried around on litters to supervise the production of Indian tea?
Looking at the other side of the coin, how do explain Paris Hilton? Are trying to tell me that she sits where she is because she is brilliant and hard-working?
All this boils down to a fundamentally flawed assumption on your part about great wealth is accumulated. It doesn't happen through hard work. It happens when capital is amassed and then reinvested in the generation of yet more capital. In other words, a cycle of accumulation that can work even if the owner of the wealth doesn't do anything but raise himself up off the couch long enough to say "I pay you to make money, so you better go get more, or I will not pay you again." Since the distribution of wealth has been uneven since before the renaissance, hard work need have little to do with it.
Think back to the 1900s, or even late 1800s. People that were just scraping by would often not even survive.
Ok, it is true that in the 18th and 19th century it was even harder to get wealthy (or just get by) then it is today. However, in the 1940s through 1970s, there was a general reduction in the disparity between rich and poor. It was at this time that many fortunes were made in manufacturing, oil exploration, housing, and other war time and post-war activities. But taxes were much higher and the distribution of wealth today is more like it was in the 1900s, when it was very difficult to get rich when, then it is like the mid-20th century, when there was more socio-economic mobility. Uneven wealth distribution and social mobility are inversely proportional, my friend.
Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself. in fact, it makes you all the more likely to be able to get rich.
Here you make the assumption that everyone aspires to be a multi-billionaire. That seems flawed, as well. Many judeo-christian and non-western moral teachings warn of the dangers associated with accumulating great fortunes. There are many wealthy people who are perfectly decent folks, but, to paraphrase comedian Chris Rock, in many cases, it is true that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
Quit being so classist. Just because others have done well doesn't mean you can't, but you surely can't if all you do is gripe about how you deserve more money without doing anything to earn it.
Tell me again who's being classist here? Your argument basically affirms socio-economic distinctions - the differences between the rich and poor (also known as classes) - as part of the natural social and moral order. If any argument is "classist," it would be yours.
And by the way, speaking of people who gripe about deserving more money without doing anything to earn it, may I refer you again to Paris Hilton?
I've never been 100% certain whether tremendous wealth has positive or negative social consequences, but at least I have some kind of notion of reality.
Richard Feynman had something to say about this debate, though somewhat obliquely. The parentheticals below are my own.
"You can know the name of a bird (or a planet) in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird (or planet)... So let's look at the bird ( or planet) and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
The point here is that scientific knowledge (whether it be social, biological, or physical) is about explaining how things work (understanding processes) or why they are the way they are (understanding variation). Debate over essentialist categories like "planet," "species," "nation-state," etc. are, as one other person in this discussion has already mentioned, problems of language.
Interestingly, Wittgenstein might have a thing or two regarding this topic as well, especially in later work.
I'm still waiting for the first company logo visible from earth (in space).
;-)
If there is anything that would lead me to seriously consider engaging in open rebellion against capitalist western culture, a la Camus, this would be it. The last thing some New Guinea Fore or Enga tribesperson or some Australian aborigine needs to see is a damned red and blue sphere with a wavy white stripe down the middle floating across the night sky (personally, I think Pepsi would do it first). I mean c'mon people, have some fscking perspective! Are marketing gurus really so stupid and vain that this would seem like a good idea?
Hmm, lack of perspective, marketing gurus, stupidity and vanity....
I think I just answered my own question.
Crap. I don't like rebellion.
from the TFA.....
Google Earth will not replace high tech programs like AutoCAD or ESRI's ArcGIS
The topic missing from this discussion is a simple question: Where does all this data come from?.
You can't plan bike routes, model road trips, view cityscapes, etc. unless you have good data to start with. Neither Google Earth nor KML function to build geographic data. The tools for doing that are as follows: v
ArcGIS, for vector-based data and some imagery.
ERDAS IMAGINE, for imagery, and
for all you open source kiddies:
GRASS and GRASS for Macs
Without these basic development tools, client-side web apps like Google Earth don't exist. These data have a long history and complex standards for verification and use.
In a community normally so concerned with standards, metadata, etc., I am surprised by the Gee whiz view comparing Google Earth and similar client side apps.
U.S companies have a history of breaking the law in foreign countries. In most countries, it is against the law to bribe government officials to get a factory built. Moreover, I believe it is also against U.S. law for a U.S. company to bribe an official in a foreign government in order to get a factory built. But is anyone seriously believe it doesn't happen all the time? The difference is that Yahoo! and Google are internet companies. For lots of reasons (U.S. free press traditions, the popularity of literature on Network theory and distributed systems, dissillusionment with mass-media conglomerates, etc. etc.) many people in the U.S. (especially slashdottirs) have attached a code of freedom of speech and free expression to the Internet's use. I like this code and want to see it continue, but it isn't inherent to Internet's (or any other) technology.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, law, schmaw. Let's talk about the ethics. And speaking of which, my problem isn't with Google or Yahoo! in particular, but instead with corporate ethics more broadly.
Much of advertising is deceptive.
And yet, the lion's share of Google's revenues come from advertising. I like Google as well, but I am very ambivalent about some of their ethics. This tension between providing information that people trust, warehousing information about everyone and everything involved with their services, and then generating revenue from advertising, which, as you said, is mostly deceptive, is very scary.
This post may seem a little off-topic, but so does its parent, and I feel the insert a few hard facts.
I have worked as an archaeologist in the Desert Southwest and southern Mexico for eight years and I am aware of no firm evidence whatsoever for Aztecs encroaching directly into the traditional lands of the Navajo. There is some evidence that people living at the site of Paquime traded copper and exotic birds with groups from Mesoamerica, but these folks probably lived on or near the Pacific Coast, in what are now the states of Sinaloa and Nayarit. A chronology of Navajo settlement in the Southwest mentions the Aztec, but under a separate timeline. Finally, a curriculum guide from a comparative civilizations class designed to be taught in Navajo schools makes no mention of these alleged Aztec slavers.
From all I have read (and I apologize for not having time to re-create the bibliography here), there were forms of slavery among many Native American groups in North America, including the Aztecs. However, slavery, as conceived by Native Americans, was very different from that imposed by Europeans. Most of the time, war captives were involved. In some cases, as was observed among the 18th century Creek of present-day Georgia, slaves ended up being treated more as outcasts than outright slaves. Some were even adopted into the families of the men who captured them. A similar observation was made regarding indigenous Afreican slavery.
As for celestial observation towers, etc., yes, they were everywhere, among many cultures. But again turning to archaeological evidence, it seems that most were developed indepently by different groups for different purposes.
While there is nothing wrong with being impressed by the accomplishments of Native Americans prior to European colonization for their own sake, don't make the mistake of superimposing models of European civilizational development on these societies. Prehistoric native groups in North America followed very different paths and we owe it to their descendents to appreciate their history on its own terms. We sell everyone short if we have to impose false parallels with European history in order to be impressed.
Between this article and previous articles concerning the locking of Wikipedia pages, I can't help but wonder if what is happening amounts to some kind of evolution. Depending on how Wiki solves this, what we may see is the system evolving to include some form of the old fashioned, but sometimes maligned model of peer review. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is an interesting process to watch -- especially for somebody (like me) who thinks peer review is good thing.
I think you will have hard time, finding *anyone*, slashdotter or not, who likes the pain of going through a Windows upgrade. Most of my colleagues are stuck with M$ because of our application domains. Our industry standard geographic information system software, ESRI ArcGIS, doesn't run on anything but Windows and Solaris. Given the options to
A) upgrade the OS in our labs from one flavor of Windows to the next
or B) undergo a root canal,
I think most would take the trip to the dentist. At least that way, you know you are back working in a day or so.
Well, it is a cute play on words, but what the author of TFA is talking about in the last paragraph is a conference, not a meeting. Taken as more than a jest, this would be like calling the macworld expo a meeting. While there are conference presentations that mimic traditionally defined meetings in terms of tedium, attendance is voluntary and most professional conferences are (for me, at least) a stimulating way to recommit to professional goals.
From TFA:
"The spaceport, to be located some 25 miles south of the town of Truth or Consequences, will be constructed 90 percent underground, with just the runway and supporting structures above ground........Virgin Galactic also unveiled its logo _ the pupil of an eye incorporating an eclipse. Branson's iris will be used for the final design......."
Is anyone else wondering why Richard Branson now seems to be channeling an old James Bond villain? Underground spaceports and creepy logos with overtones of world dominion make you wonder, especially coming from the man who said, "I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator".
if our corporations were ran by people with science and engineering backgrounds who cared about long-term research and development rather than ran by MBAs with BAs in Medieval History and Philosophy who can't differentiate a simple function or write a line of code, and who care more about short-term profits and $$$, then perhaps we'll see some more scientific and engineering progress in this country
The above quoted posting is emblematic of problems associated with the National Academies' report discussed in this article, as well as much of the related discourse here on slashdot. The overall problem is not with science and engineering education per se, but with the overall education system as a whole. Whether a person seeking a college education seeks a final degree in science, engineering, or Medieval History and Philosophy, the most important part of a four year education is that it be broad and rigorous. Students should come out of college being able to write well, think critically, and be conversant, or at least familiar, with a broad range of topics beyond their specialization in arts, sciences, social sciences, or the humanities.
Narrowing the focus of fundraising and effort to the educational domains of science and engineering, rather than pushing for the revitalization and re-funding of all sectors of U.S. education system, is not going to solve the problem. The writer who posted the comment to which I replied is a case in point. Aside from the obvious grammatical issues (noted in bold), the author belies a narrowness of view by suggesting that someone with a degree in Medieval History and Philosophy would be the type of person apt to have a short-term, profit oriented mentality. I suppose this is possible, but it is pretty unlikely. Most people who bother to study medieval history and philosophy care deeply about the past, about long term processes, and usually about ethics and the future of the humanity. An excellent example would be G.K. Chesterston, an early twentieth century journalist who spent most of his life writing about the contemporary human condition using, oddly enough, the lessons of medieval history and philosophy as his ethical starting point.
From his vantage point in the "medieval past," (amon his most famous works are biographies of Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi) Chesterton produced a criticism of Business Education that I think many would find agreeable. I close by quoting it, with the reminder that it is equally applicable to a "science and engineering" education as well.
From All is Grist
"The nuisance of all this notion of Business Education, of a training for certain trades, whether of plumber or plutocrat, is that it will prevent the intelligence being sufficiently active to criticize the trade and business properly."
- G.K. Chesterton (his use of italics in the above quote)
Basically what you are saying is that the whole Scientific Process will collapse because people are too spineless to say what they think in public. That is a very sad commentary on the state of academia.
/. Nevertheless, my 2 cents is that the final products from the journals, page for page, are better.
Here you may have a point. The anecdotal evidence I have from my own experiences and that of friends in my field does suggest that some reviewers use anonymity as a shield behind which they can a) be as nasty as they wish for no truly good reason, or b) torpedo researchers they perceive to be "competing" with them. So that's an argument for doing away with anonymous reviews, or at least encouraging people not invoke their right to anonymity.
However, earlier on, I saw arguments in favor of doing away with edited journals entirely. I can argue against this with one word: Editors. Functions that editors serve that the internet cannot duplicate are
a) selecting reviewers based on an experienced background and long practice in the field
2) convincing those who are most qualified to do the review and
III)Encouraging the grammatical quality and clarity of argument of a submitted work, thus making lighter work for readers.
*Democratically* letting an application (or a group of part-time moderators) filter reviewers cannot provide the same quality of reviews that a good editor (and yes, there are bad ones) with years of experience can. And the last time I checked, neither M$ Word, Latec, VI, or OpenOffice provided tools to check for inelegant, but nevertheless correct, sentence structure. Just see my own writing here for evidence of that.
True, journals take longer to publish, are subject to all the frailties associated with humankind, and produce orders of magnitude less material than media outlets like our beloved
"There is no place for dogma in science."
"God does not play dice with the universe." -- Albert Einstein
Whereas, religion (and creationism as a sub-part of religion) is rife with dogma and the need to suppress intellectual curiousity.
"I desire mercy and not sacrifice."
-Jesus of Nazereth (Matthew 9:13 and 12:7)
In the former statement, Albert Einstein rather dogmatically refutes the implications of his own theories on relativity. In the latter, Jesus rails against the dogmatic observances of ritual sacrifice observed by the Pharisees.
As a person of faith who also has more than my share of training in scientific methods and evolutionary theory, I would advise folks who automatically associate science with free thinking and religion with thought supression to take a slightly less, *ahem* dogmatic, view.
Just my two cents here, but folks who equate intelligent design or creationism with scientific approaches and those who simply view creationism as a "sub-part of religion" are equally mistaken in that both parties oversimplify and the traditions they seek to criticize, treating them as monolithic stereotypes, rather than the complex institutions and intellectual edifices they actually are.
Perhaps all the choices should be set aside in favor of
SCO zealots
From their website
"1999 SCO launches numerous Open Source Initiatives: 1) Offers free Open Source applications and tools to SCO customers; 2) Extends Professional Services to include audits and deployment consultation for customers interested in installing Linux and Open Source technologies; 3) Invests in LinuxMall.com, the leading portal for Linux-related products and services; 4) Enters strategic agreement with TurboLinux to develop services for TurboLinux's TurboCluster Server and provide Linux Professional Services for TurboLinux customers."
Sometimes the sellouts pretend to be the most zealous zealots of all. Kinda sad, really.