Vegans might really like fake eggs because their star Vega, Alpha Lyrae, is egg shaped. The spectral class A, White star is about 30 times brighter than the sun, 35 LY away, and spins so fast that its body is distorted into an ellipsoid. and because of that its equator might shine less bright than its poles, so beings from that star system would recognize eggs even though an egg is not strictly shaped like an ellipsoid. There probably aren't Vegans, however, unless they came from somewhere else, as the star may be too young for life to evolve. A star which has been demonstrated to have polar brightening due to spin is the B-class main-sequence star Regulus, Alpha Leonis, 78 LY off. There are several news notes in Sky and Telescope from the past 20 years that document there findings.
The Internet is being killed by its own successes, and it deserves to die by fragmentation, and it will because of spying and how easy spying is on it. It has several single points of access by intelligence agencies and they can be made to work much harder to achieve their goals. At the same time this response will kill the business and spam schemes, and they deserve to die too. Death to Google and Facebook and lots of other organizations that have had to much power to intrude and manipulate. There are ways to make life hard on the bad guys, but you and I have to get used to different behavior in our networks to achieve this. We have to put up with delay in order to be safer, and we have to deal with less connectivity in order to be more private. This is the future.
You might think that fragmentation favors state censorship, and it will as long as the topology is as static as it is now at the large scale, but it doesn't have to be. What is needed is a way to have much more dynamic routing, so it is hard to determine, meshes and store and forward technology with acceptance of latency is one way to allow for that. Privacy and security for individuals may require the end of the always-on Internet and it may need delayed gratification for more precious content to reach its target securely and privately.
It is pretty hard to spy on the sneaker net. What if even our wired communications become more like sneaker nets?
Imperialist Pig! But, seriously, if people don't trust "our" invention they don't have to lump it because we got there first, they can go and make it better, and people are as we rest on our laurels, smug in the fact that we are the smartest and most resourceful people in the world!:-)
So, fair is fair, you dare someone else to come up with something better, something that deals with the problems you created in your design, and which you are committed to maintain. There are lots of different ways to imagine a communications network and fixed global domains with a fixed network topology is but one way. Just because it was the only game in town 20 years ago and had no cost effective alternatives them doesn't mean that such new choices don't exist now, or that alternative ways to deal with connectivity don't exist, even ones that mitigate the disadvantages of the current system. It is not wise to be smug.
I went to the abstract. It refers to four low-mass stars with some "metals" but almost no Iron. So the reasoning is that these stars were seeded by metals from low-mass novas that didn't make the iron one sees in current supernovae. This is intrepeted as a situation of first generation stars in the earliest galaxies, hence the inference of great age. The line of reasoning might not stand up if it is revealed that these stars to not reveal all their metals in their atmospheric absorption spectra, they don't convect the way familiar stars do. The reference to low mass stars about 6,000 LY away implies that in order to be old, these are very slow evolving stars, such as M-class red drawfs.
There are still problems understanding SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud because the stars in that galaxy are more metal poor than the ones near us. The precursor star was bluer than expected, which may have been due to it being more transparent to radiation than a more metal-rick star such as near us.
I haven't read the abstract, I'm sure the journal article is behind a paywall. The Idea here is that the star is old because it is "Metal" poor. In Stellar Evolution parlance "Metal" refers to anything heavier, any atom heavier, than helium. Most of the stars fuse hydrogen to heavier elements as they evolve. Evolution stops when the binding energy per nucleon reaches a maximun at around Fe or Ni. Most of the element abundances are greater up to mass = 56 and although heavier elements do exist, they are far less abundant on earth and in many places in the Univese because these heavy elements are not produced in ordinary nucleosynthesis. They are produced in supernovae explosions. Also, the star is nearby in cosmic terms. We are not discussing a star in a very distant galaxy whose light-travel time places it close to the formation of the first galaxies, rather this is a star in our own vicinity which has for some reason remained metal poor. I do not know where it is ploted in stellar evolution, spectral class.
The idea here is that the Big Bang produces the two most common elements, H and He in about 3:1 ratio and that when the primordial gas forms a star its evolution accounts for all of the rest or ordinary matter we see. The star being described here appears to be so metal poor that its composition must be close to the primordial ordinary matter in the Universe, the original H and He from the Big Bang and that little of the elements heavier than these were around when the star was formed, so the inference is that it is a vey old star.
One must be a little careful with this inference because it has been known for some time that stars in the Halo's of evolved galaxies like our own are lower in metals than the Sun and most so-called population III stars. This star could have had a complex history, maybe being one captured from another galaxy, and there are some uncertainties about stellar evolution rates for metal poor stars. Metal poor stars are less opaque to radiation and so may not evolve at the same rate as nearby stars or convect material fron their core regions to reveal what metals they were formed from or are able to make. There could be other factors than age that determine the life history of a metal poor star.
Just admit it, that if you work for a social media company, or do advertising and marketing, or even if you are in financial services, YOU are the source of the problem WRT ignorance about what is true or not, weather astrology or Creationism, or for that matter market economics is true. You can't be spreading the white lies that are normal for business and marketing, along with some black lies too, and expect people to have enough critical thinking skills and skepticism to see the truth in general terms, when your goal in life is distraction and propaganda. There is no material difference between public relations, propaganda and advertising, and what may be OK in an impression-driven trip to the supermarket has far more dire results in citizenship and debating public policy.
Especially if your game is social media, you have a particular fault because all the flaws in human behavior become heightened in the frenzy created by ephemeral off-the-cuff buzz-driven knee-jerk response demanded by that medium. It is a sorry substitute for thinking, sound judgement and deliberation, all of which tske silence and time. So, in pursuit of a fast buck, not only is the generation that grew up with the influience of your wares perhaps less well-equipped to think rationally and to be informed, but through your marketing you are contributing to their disadvantage.
The rules, the complexity, of any economic system is a way for businesses to export their risk onto their customers. It is the primary means by which people you pay for a service parasitize their hosts. Cell Phone service plans are a prime example. Not only does this lock in the prices set by the vendors but it also gets consumers to pay for their risk of doing business.
Americans are really dumb about economics and politics. You will see these obvious arguments blaming government regulation for these problems, when these same people are loath to admit that business operators went to the government to write regulations to minimize risk, to pass the cost of it onto the consumer, and to create closed markets for businesses like ISPs, phone companies, and insurance companies. Even with all the heat and little light on The Affordable Care Act, most people argue as if it is anything but what it really is, a taxpayer subsidy for the insurance companies and indirectly the whole health care system. One hears these simplistic arguments about government vs. private enterprise as if the two are at war. Nothing can be further from the truth. Both major political parties are in bed with business; the political rhetoric parroted by most American partisans rings hallow. They just don't know what they are talking about, and that included science. American is an anti-intellectual and antisocial country. Most people came here to avoid some obligation they felt in their place of origin, to them freedom means selfishness and that ignorance is bliss, and it shows in the prevelance of pseudoscience.
I am predicting that ACA is a failure and that the nightmare for conservatives of a single-payer nationalized health care system will result, the reason is that our system is too expensive and that in order to meet the needs of people here, the government will have to do something like expand Medicare and force doctors and clinics into some socialized plan. ACA is probably not going to meet the economics goal of minimizing risk for insurers. That will result in more and more pressure on them until the system of private insurance is basically dead. The government will have to step in as doctors and clinics go out of business and more and more people are unable to find health care.
Teams should be built on trust and relationship. trust that the people you have can do what tasks have been assigned and relationship to them to win their support.
In my experience stack ranking has been used in place of stable relationships and in a situation where the management has decided that people have to be laid off. It is not necessary unless relationships in the company are unstable or the management does not know the people who work with them.
I think that the dangers of Facebook have to do with its users barely understanding what technology is and what it does to them. Many Facebook users think they are posting private messages and are largely totally unaware of how thier presence is being manipulated by Facebook and its partners. I have seen friendships and relationships be threatened because of that, because people who think they are intimate don't realize that there is always a third party there. Think of a couple who are in a relationship and the man gets ads for singles sites. His partner doesn't know that he didn't request them but they came because of his profile status and data mining of his page.
It means that scientists have to deal with idiots who don't know the first thing about science. Everybody has an equal voice on a blog whether they deserve to or not. That is the nature of a blog, and people hate that because they have to deal with everybody on a pretty equal basis. People do not deserve such built-in equality and communication tools evolve to prioritize dealing with the different levels of statements people make, and should, and did once long before their were blogs. That is OK.
People want and deserve some privacy and when they are in a public forum they also deserve some tools to choose what they want to read and reply to. Blogging has reduced that ability and it makes blogging hard on people to the extant that people try to protect themselves. If some of the older features of forums were restored or brought back, then people would do better.
The future of social media and the web may hinge on awareness of these issues. The move to blogs is driven by their simplicity, yes, but also the data mining need in social media, but the simplicity could backfire if people get turned off by the limitations of blogs. These limitations were addressed long ago, and it is rime for website owners and framework authors to rediscover them. Social media may not be useful for discussions that need to be had, even ones as involved which happen on Slashdot and Reddit.
My advice to any scientist is to not run blogs. Move communication to a mailing list or a USENET-style newsgroup. Ask your system admin to run a private NNTP server and run a local newsgroup. Even if it is accessible to the public, disruptions can be moved onto subthreads and dealt with specficaly if you desire. I am not saying that science should not educate or confront differences of opinion, only that blogging is not the correct tool.
My concern is the reason I do not like the Slash.Dot Beta Interface. It is a regression to a blog and social media style and it shows the influience of business intelligence types at Dice.com. It is a step backwards. It should not be used. If Dice adopts it, I will leave slashdot and take my views over to reddit and I will advocate people start running text-only USENET newsgroups get off of Google and other social media and use a newreader and advocate a newsreader-like web interface. In fact, Drupal and WordPress should aggressively abandon the blog as a communication model. Move to features of USENET newsgroups along with general availability of Markdown or Rich Text Editing with context quoting.
The blog is a terrible invention. It needs to be undone. The reason I say such as surprising thing is that blogs do not allow for nuance and flexibility is normal human discourse. Here on Slashdot we have the added tools to remedy much of the failings of blogs, even as dice.com wants to take them away in the interface now under beta. Many people don't realize why they hate the beta interface so much. I think it is because it is an intentional regression to the lack of features in most blogs for directing conversation at distractions and disruptions in conversations. The beta would move us toward the social media model at Facebook and Google which has the effect of crippling discussion.
The reason denialists have more power on blogs is the same reason trolls have more power on blogs and why marketers love blogs, because one person can disrupt a conversation on a blog much more easily than if it had more structure, such as threading, topic changes, contextual quoting and reply, all features that Slashdot is closer to and Reddit is even closer to. There are features that were available long ago to e-mail and listservs, and USENET newsgroups, and have been systematically abandoned by the current social media corporations, Facebook and Google, and others because the lack of structure makes it easier for business intelligence, for the Big Data application of being able to mine (spy) the data of billions of users, but this priority is making it hard for people to have useful discussions. It means that tiny minorities or committed partisans can ruin civil discourse. It also means that blog owners are thrust into a moderation role they never wanted.
So the changes scientists are facing due to running public blogs is that people whose agenda is obvious have to be dealt with. The problem is that running a blog gives such intrusions too much power to disrupt and usurp discussions. Even on social media sites, like Facebook, the people who read a presumably private thread have to self-censor and police themselves because the medium does not handle disruptions well. Disruptions would be better handled by contextual reply and change of topic.
The most glaring and unforgivable example of this degradation of communication and the capacity to support a discussion is Google. Google bought an archive of USENET postings that ran from its origins in 1985 untill past 1990. Those postings were created by newsreader programs that supported all of the features for discussion now lacking in most blogs, and yet Google went on to remove all of those features, consciously, in Google Groups and Google+ which have deteriorated into self-promotions, especially the latter, and all for the profit motive and to the loss of debate and discussion that we need to support democratic institutions in the world. True human conversation is far messier than any blog allows for, and the means to deal with it have existed long before the Web, long before social media, and we need to return to these tools.
My advice to any scientist is to not run a blog. They would be better off running a mailing list or a USENET-like newsgroup.
This article points to a slide show of images Linux is supposed to be installed on, without no demonstration that it is. What a waste of time. Some dumb-ass marketer in the social media game, people who cannot read have to be shown pictures. To install Linux you have to be able to read, because one of the ways it gets from place to place is to have to bootstrap through a text-only interface, not a stupid slide show.
I've looked through the Constitution, but I don't see where Congress gets the power to ban telephone calls on planes.
Umm, Cell Phones didn't exist in 1789. So why do we have a legislative branch? It isn't to treat the Constitution as literal and inerrant, as some people wont to treat the Bible. It is to use it to interpret novel situations under general principles, such as the Congress has the power to regulate Commerce, generally, and includes what businesses and technologies that framers couldn't have imagined. So the Constitution says nothing about cell phones. It also says nothing about modern corporations, the Stock Market, the Cabinet Departments, the number of political parties (directly). So does that mean these are all invalid or that law doesn't apply to them? Of course not. So your statement is absurd.
Everyone has experienced two cases of this. 1) People tend to talk louder on a cell phone than they would if they were talking to the person next to them. This is because of the economics of the cost to the phone manufacturer to build a proper speaker system that compensates for the fact that most people cannot hear the signal from the speaker very well and unconsciously compensate by raising their voice, which has no useful effect except to annoy everyone around them. 2) Everyone had experienced someone who "abuses" the cell phone by heaving one call after another and some of the conversations getting heated, there are people who feel they have to do that. They may be business people in the middle of a tense negotioation or people with a family crisis, whatever.
Since airplanes are a place where you cram hundreds of people together under stressful conditions, that Congress wisely is considering not adding to the problem by allowing in-flight cell-phone conversations. The minute it were allowed, that will be one more cause for a flight disruption. So I support the ban. I don't think that economic incentives are enough to address this problem, and in fact my objection to that can be generalized to all such arguments that charging high fees is a sufficient regulatory action. Image the 1%er business exec who doesn't care about a high fee being charged to use his cell phone in a flight. Because he is a High Flyer he feels justified to be making call after call and talking in a loud voice and he may even be so arrogent that he doen't care that the flight crew or passengers are complaining about his activity. After all he is willing to pay a high price to be able to make the calls and to cause a disruption. So, maybe with the threat of a riot, the Congress is wise to outlaw all cell phone conversations on planes.
Oh Yeah, Fuck Beta, Fuck Dice.com, and Fuck business intelligence and social media, too.
Umm, I think Para Bellum, as "For War", refers not so much to racism against Obama, after all he cannot run again, as it refers to class war, economic war of haves against have-nots. You can hear the fear the 1%'ers have, especially the conservative ones. The thing that motivates conservatives is scarcity, the fear of having to share, and more so facing the hostility caused by selfishness, so the name of the group is a Freudian Slip. Pay attention to names, even informal ones. They often reveal what the mindset is, and even before the PR people get to neutralize the meaning.
The Beta interface for Slashdot is a ditry trick as bad as what the GOP might be doing. It has the effect of changing a discussion into a blog wit all the opinion suppression attributes of a blog and of social media generally. Compare it to Google Groups and Google+ and Facebook and you will get that the change is for the benefit of the marketers and business spys and not for our conversation and debate.
The canned PR statement from Dice.com appeared at the top of this thread before the article on Distributed Storage for Families. It does not include a means for reply and it contains all of the corporate newsspeak that you expect from a group of people who have already made up their minds and will change the interface in spite of us. I have used Slashdot for under a year, as a refugee from social media and blogging, and I will drop Slashdot if the beta interface is adoped and I urge everyone to do so and to continue to bad mouth Dice and social media and blogging generally.
So, why is the Beta so bad? If you have been a user of blogs all your compute tile, or if all you know is social media, you will not be able to understand this. Blogging, the social media model, Facebook, Google (Google Groups, Google+) thwart the kind of discussions we are able to have on Slashdot and Reddit and few other Internet venues. There is good reason for this. it is so the business intelligence types can have a simple means to generate the Big Data information gathering job marketers want. A vibrant public dialogue possible on the Internet is being sacrificed for profit. Dice is expected to be no different in that they are probably trying to find professional and career information about the users of Slashdot. The Beta represents just the sort of change that this priority would represent. it is the same "Simplify" imparitive the Mark Zuckerburg defined for Facebook and is why Facebook and Goggle suck and why if the Beta is adoped here, it will sucj, and Dice is this big corporation located in New Yoirk City that does not care. It is listening to the marketers and the propagandists in corporate and politiclal America who are out to undermine democratic institutions by first using blogs and social media as ways to disrupt public discussion and debate. Capitalists are not usiversally pro-democracy, and the trends in social media reveak that. Resist the migration to Beta and leave Slashdot if it is adoped, or create an alternative.
The minute we let Congress or the local church minister tell us what is and is not science, we have given up our advantage in being a leading nation in innovation and new solutions to problems.
Science has already adequate means to self-correct errors, including being on the take from economic interests or submitting to political pressure to bias or censor results. Even if Peer Review is weakened by government intervention or payola, our competition will see the advantage in not poisoning the well and out strip us to discover and control new technology that results.
It is our advantage to lose, and like dealing with Creatiionism and other biased pseudoscience, reasoning people eventually come up with a good answer. (I'd bet with the Bible Thumpers who deny Evolution that flu epidemics are an answer to their nonsense and they don't get the flu shot because they don't accept its basis that viruses are rapidly evolving pathogens.)
Sp, let politicians and energy company propagandists speak their minds. If the GOP gets to censor climate research they will be no better than Hitler denying quantum mechanics and missing the opportunity to invent atomic energy. Someone else will get to the truth faster and it will be their advantage and not ours, and maybe they will have a case that blames us, our politicians, our business people, for the damage we are causing and have a moral cause to come after us. I'd say let science prevail, especially at correcting the failings of the human beings who do it.
The GTK GUI illustrates the problem well. You do get this visual interface to writing GUI componants, but at some point, around the edges, you still have to understand what the objects and their methods do, so you have to go read documentation and eventually, the code. This is especially true if the thing you've made needs debugging, then you are quickly thrust back into the world of the programming language.
Even IDES like Eclipse and Netbeans and others that give you prototype hints don't give you a full enough story. I guess these aid productivity if you already know the libraries, but to do that you have to at least read the list of objects and methods, which is where the real complexity of OOL gets obfiscatted, and Java in particular is very bad in this regrad because of its history. The greater the complexity and the poorer the documentation the faster you are thrust into having the read the code and even the source for the libraries. One thing abstraction does is to invert the logic of inheritance so you are forced to read code in a bottom up fashion, which is much harder to figure out what it does. So, OOD fails if the methods aren't done correctly and even more if the developer hasn't put sufficient effort into documenting in your native language. So poor English can become a major impediment to the whole effort if the developer speaks a language far less used than English, e.g.
Development efforts fail or get unused for the same human factors they always did, going back to the days of COBOL and FORTRAN. The way they fail has just changed and looking for a simple interface does not solve this problem.
By analogy, file managers are supposed to reduce the complexity of finding files and directory structures, and they do, but you still need to know a CLI and a shell to solve practical problems finding files, better that you can write a shell script to automate a task, so the shell isn't going away any time soon, even with file managers, and so text-based programming isn't going away soon because of IDEs. I still code HTML and CSS with emacs because I can't be sure of the garbage most WYSIWYG web page editors put in the code. I can code more concise and cleaner HTML by hand than most of these,
If Stack Ranking encourages selfishness, a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, that that fits right into the way most people do business, especially when they have to reduce their work force. The shift of paradigm can come very quickly. A Company can go from being a Masses of Asses operation, not able to hire fast enough, to just the opposite in a couple of years, thanks to the short investment leash most managements are. Stack Ranking appears quickly just has the back channel to whistle blow on the chain of command vanishes. I know, I saw this happen in 2003. They got to pay me to leave, much more than a meisly lay-off package.
Oh, Beta IS different. The Beta lacks most of the complexity needed to address points made by others that we have in the current UI. It is more like blogging and social media in which no one talks to one another but past one another in a phony nice-nice self censored way. On Social Media you can address other replies but you really have to work at setting the context, to whom and what you are replying to. People self-censor on blogs and Social Media because the chance of being misunderstood get very great. Social Media is a way for site owners to control the agenda and ignore their readers. They have confused not communicating with their moderation role, and even may not care if their users get to communicate. I even think that many business people would easily trade profit for democratic processes and institutions. That is why, at least, they are so unaware of what they are doing, and given their politics, they may be well aware of what this means. They most be stopped or abandoned.
If you are young and all you know is social media, then you won't get it, because the insight comes from another era before marketing corporations got control of the Internet. If you want to see how to break communication go read Google+. It is like LinkedIn for bloggers. It is a bunch of self-promoters talking past and not to each other. I have no problem with commercial uses of the Internet provided that they do not crowd out other uses, provided that they don't quell discussions we need to have.
There are ways to manage on-line communication so that people can thrash out differences and have detailed conversations, most blogs and social media don't suffice and Slashdot is one of the few exception. So, what we are facing here is that dice.com is trying to push the social media business model into Slashdot via the Beta, and probsbly for the same reason as Google and Facebook push it. I am making a case that this is bad, generally.
To make my point, it may be that we will have to find a new way to have discussions on the Internet beyond the influience of social media and marketing. That may be to resurrect the text-only USENET on a free platform, to bring back mailing lists and Listserv, and to begin to replace blogging with structured forums web sites. Demand for the website frameworks, Drupal, WordPress, etc. that they provide an alternative to the blog positing and the text-area, a full featured rich text editor by default, one which provides the features of a good Mail User Agent, contextual reply to posts, and change of topic. Also this shift should allow for threaded discussions. We need to end blogging and replace it with discussion, USENET-style discussion even if we don't use the heirarchy, although I think a heirarchy by topic is better than a topic that is just the subject of some article written by a website owner, a marketer, or an editorial board.
I argue that most of the abuses of blogging can be mitigated by a structured discussion. OT and change of topic posts can get their own subthreads and trolls can be taken to task directly. Much of the pain users experience with blogs is due to their inherit inflexibility. Slashdot is able to handle many of these problems. They are the reasons people self-censor and censor others on Social Media because blogging lacks the tools to manage a normal discussion between people complete with the efforts native to humans to manipulate, change the topic, and try to control others.
Oh yes, FUCK the Beta. If it is adopted I will not use Slashdot.
How about collapsing some of these posts? Commenters should hook us in with a decent title, and that is all we should see until we click it. otherwise, we just CONSUME page space for no good reason, and it makes the conversation harder to follow.
There is so much additional whitespace. This isn't a design/marketing website, and we don't appreciate the ascetic as much as you might have anticipated. a little narrowing of the gaps would go a long way.
Actually, a fully threaded presentation with strong filtering rules would be far better. One can only read a few of the hundreds of posts that get made to a topic, I would like to see a count of the number of replies to a subthreadand define those subthreads by changing the topic line. Then I migh apply rules to filter what I want to see. I might first want to see long posts, ones where the person has attempted to say something involved, and secondarily I might want to skip subthreads with lots of short replies.
I think that we need to bring back some old approaches to communication that existed in the days of glass TTYs so that discussion can be rejuvenated. The simplicty of blog pages is a ruse, it allows the site owner and the article author to control what is said. The Beta heads too far in the direction of being a blog and of social media. Any engineer who works at SlashDot who has a social media or marketing bent should be let go. Social Media is destroying the kind of useful discussion we need to have if we are going to continue to have democratic and inclusive institutions. In fact, I would go so far as to acuse Social Media of being not only a business plot, but to be a Right-Wing repressive plot on the order of Fox News, a conscious effort to fragment discussion and control the agenda for the nation. Any trend of slashdot to go in that direction for any reason, mobil use, etc. would cause me to leave and to get active in trying to destroy social media companies.
The reason SlashDot Beta sucks is that it is more like Social Media, like Facebook, Like Google+ then Classic. In fact we need stronger features like Classic, not fewer. If any engineer working at SlashDot has a social media orientation, he should be fired! There needs to be for structure, not less. Mobile and Social Media and blogging do not have a place in quality discussion on the Internet. They are fine for one-off and shallow excahnges, but they cannot support a conversation with any complexity or nuance, and they are in opposition to democratic institutions that need complex discussions to support them. Social Media and blogging do a disservice to citizenship in a democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Vegans might really like fake eggs because their star Vega, Alpha Lyrae, is egg shaped. The spectral class A, White star is about 30 times brighter than the sun, 35 LY away, and spins so fast that its body is distorted into an ellipsoid. and because of that its equator might shine less bright than its poles, so beings from that star system would recognize eggs even though an egg is not strictly shaped like an ellipsoid. There probably aren't Vegans, however, unless they came from somewhere else, as the star may be too young for life to evolve. A star which has been demonstrated to have polar brightening due to spin is the B-class main-sequence star Regulus, Alpha Leonis, 78 LY off. There are several news notes in Sky and Telescope from the past 20 years that document there findings.
The Internet is being killed by its own successes, and it deserves to die by fragmentation, and it will because of spying and how easy spying is on it. It has several single points of access by intelligence agencies and they can be made to work much harder to achieve their goals. At the same time this response will kill the business and spam schemes, and they deserve to die too. Death to Google and Facebook and lots of other organizations that have had to much power to intrude and manipulate. There are ways to make life hard on the bad guys, but you and I have to get used to different behavior in our networks to achieve this. We have to put up with delay in order to be safer, and we have to deal with less connectivity in order to be more private. This is the future.
You might think that fragmentation favors state censorship, and it will as long as the topology is as static as it is now at the large scale, but it doesn't have to be. What is needed is a way to have much more dynamic routing, so it is hard to determine, meshes and store and forward technology with acceptance of latency is one way to allow for that. Privacy and security for individuals may require the end of the always-on Internet and it may need delayed gratification for more precious content to reach its target securely and privately.
It is pretty hard to spy on the sneaker net. What if even our wired communications become more like sneaker nets?
Imperialist Pig! But, seriously, if people don't trust "our" invention they don't have to lump it because we got there first, they can go and make it better, and people are as we rest on our laurels, smug in the fact that we are the smartest and most resourceful people in the world! :-)
So, fair is fair, you dare someone else to come up with something better, something that deals with the problems you created in your design, and which you are committed to maintain. There are lots of different ways to imagine a communications network and fixed global domains with a fixed network topology is but one way. Just because it was the only game in town 20 years ago and had no cost effective alternatives them doesn't mean that such new choices don't exist now, or that alternative ways to deal with connectivity don't exist, even ones that mitigate the disadvantages of the current system. It is not wise to be smug.
I went to the abstract. It refers to four low-mass stars with some "metals" but almost no Iron. So the reasoning is that these stars were seeded by metals from low-mass novas that didn't make the iron one sees in current supernovae. This is intrepeted as a situation of first generation stars in the earliest galaxies, hence the inference of great age. The line of reasoning might not stand up if it is revealed that these stars to not reveal all their metals in their atmospheric absorption spectra, they don't convect the way familiar stars do. The reference to low mass stars about 6,000 LY away implies that in order to be old, these are very slow evolving stars, such as M-class red drawfs.
There are still problems understanding SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud because the stars in that galaxy are more metal poor than the ones near us. The precursor star was bluer than expected, which may have been due to it being more transparent to radiation than a more metal-rick star such as near us.
I haven't read the abstract, I'm sure the journal article is behind a paywall. The Idea here is that the star is old because it is "Metal" poor. In Stellar Evolution parlance "Metal" refers to anything heavier, any atom heavier, than helium. Most of the stars fuse hydrogen to heavier elements as they evolve. Evolution stops when the binding energy per nucleon reaches a maximun at around Fe or Ni. Most of the element abundances are greater up to mass = 56 and although heavier elements do exist, they are far less abundant on earth and in many places in the Univese because these heavy elements are not produced in ordinary nucleosynthesis. They are produced in supernovae explosions. Also, the star is nearby in cosmic terms. We are not discussing a star in a very distant galaxy whose light-travel time places it close to the formation of the first galaxies, rather this is a star in our own vicinity which has for some reason remained metal poor. I do not know where it is ploted in stellar evolution, spectral class.
The idea here is that the Big Bang produces the two most common elements, H and He in about 3:1 ratio and that when the primordial gas forms a star its evolution accounts for all of the rest or ordinary matter we see. The star being described here appears to be so metal poor that its composition must be close to the primordial ordinary matter in the Universe, the original H and He from the Big Bang and that little of the elements heavier than these were around when the star was formed, so the inference is that it is a vey old star.
One must be a little careful with this inference because it has been known for some time that stars in the Halo's of evolved galaxies like our own are lower in metals than the Sun and most so-called population III stars. This star could have had a complex history, maybe being one captured from another galaxy, and there are some uncertainties about stellar evolution rates for metal poor stars. Metal poor stars are less opaque to radiation and so may not evolve at the same rate as nearby stars or convect material fron their core regions to reveal what metals they were formed from or are able to make. There could be other factors than age that determine the life history of a metal poor star.
Just admit it, that if you work for a social media company, or do advertising and marketing, or even if you are in financial services, YOU are the source of the problem WRT ignorance about what is true or not, weather astrology or Creationism, or for that matter market economics is true. You can't be spreading the white lies that are normal for business and marketing, along with some black lies too, and expect people to have enough critical thinking skills and skepticism to see the truth in general terms, when your goal in life is distraction and propaganda. There is no material difference between public relations, propaganda and advertising, and what may be OK in an impression-driven trip to the supermarket has far more dire results in citizenship and debating public policy.
Especially if your game is social media, you have a particular fault because all the flaws in human behavior become heightened in the frenzy created by ephemeral off-the-cuff buzz-driven knee-jerk response demanded by that medium. It is a sorry substitute for thinking, sound judgement and deliberation, all of which tske silence and time. So, in pursuit of a fast buck, not only is the generation that grew up with the influience of your wares perhaps less well-equipped to think rationally and to be informed, but through your marketing you are contributing to their disadvantage.
The rules, the complexity, of any economic system is a way for businesses to export their risk onto their customers. It is the primary means by which people you pay for a service parasitize their hosts. Cell Phone service plans are a prime example. Not only does this lock in the prices set by the vendors but it also gets consumers to pay for their risk of doing business.
Americans are really dumb about economics and politics. You will see these obvious arguments blaming government regulation for these problems, when these same people are loath to admit that business operators went to the government to write regulations to minimize risk, to pass the cost of it onto the consumer, and to create closed markets for businesses like ISPs, phone companies, and insurance companies. Even with all the heat and little light on The Affordable Care Act, most people argue as if it is anything but what it really is, a taxpayer subsidy for the insurance companies and indirectly the whole health care system. One hears these simplistic arguments about government vs. private enterprise as if the two are at war. Nothing can be further from the truth. Both major political parties are in bed with business; the political rhetoric parroted by most American partisans rings hallow. They just don't know what they are talking about, and that included science. American is an anti-intellectual and antisocial country. Most people came here to avoid some obligation they felt in their place of origin, to them freedom means selfishness and that ignorance is bliss, and it shows in the prevelance of pseudoscience.
I am predicting that ACA is a failure and that the nightmare for conservatives of a single-payer nationalized health care system will result, the reason is that our system is too expensive and that in order to meet the needs of people here, the government will have to do something like expand Medicare and force doctors and clinics into some socialized plan. ACA is probably not going to meet the economics goal of minimizing risk for insurers. That will result in more and more pressure on them until the system of private insurance is basically dead. The government will have to step in as doctors and clinics go out of business and more and more people are unable to find health care.
Teams should be built on trust and relationship. trust that the people you have can do what tasks have been assigned and relationship to them to win their support.
In my experience stack ranking has been used in place of stable relationships and in a situation where the management has decided that people have to be laid off. It is not necessary unless relationships in the company are unstable or the management does not know the people who work with them.
I think that the dangers of Facebook have to do with its users barely understanding what technology is and what it does to them. Many Facebook users think they are posting private messages and are largely totally unaware of how thier presence is being manipulated by Facebook and its partners. I have seen friendships and relationships be threatened because of that, because people who think they are intimate don't realize that there is always a third party there. Think of a couple who are in a relationship and the man gets ads for singles sites. His partner doesn't know that he didn't request them but they came because of his profile status and data mining of his page.
So understanding technology is necessary, yes.
It means that scientists have to deal with idiots who don't know the first thing about science. Everybody has an equal voice on a blog whether they deserve to or not. That is the nature of a blog, and people hate that because they have to deal with everybody on a pretty equal basis. People do not deserve such built-in equality and communication tools evolve to prioritize dealing with the different levels of statements people make, and should, and did once long before their were blogs. That is OK.
People want and deserve some privacy and when they are in a public forum they also deserve some tools to choose what they want to read and reply to. Blogging has reduced that ability and it makes blogging hard on people to the extant that people try to protect themselves. If some of the older features of forums were restored or brought back, then people would do better.
The future of social media and the web may hinge on awareness of these issues. The move to blogs is driven by their simplicity, yes, but also the data mining need in social media, but the simplicity could backfire if people get turned off by the limitations of blogs. These limitations were addressed long ago, and it is rime for website owners and framework authors to rediscover them. Social media may not be useful for discussions that need to be had, even ones as involved which happen on Slashdot and Reddit.
My advice to any scientist is to not run blogs. Move communication to a mailing list or a USENET-style newsgroup. Ask your system admin to run a private NNTP server and run a local newsgroup. Even if it is accessible to the public, disruptions can be moved onto subthreads and dealt with specficaly if you desire. I am not saying that science should not educate or confront differences of opinion, only that blogging is not the correct tool.
My concern is the reason I do not like the Slash.Dot Beta Interface. It is a regression to a blog and social media style and it shows the influience of business intelligence types at Dice.com. It is a step backwards. It should not be used. If Dice adopts it, I will leave slashdot and take my views over to reddit and I will advocate people start running text-only USENET newsgroups get off of Google and other social media and use a newreader and advocate a newsreader-like web interface. In fact, Drupal and WordPress should aggressively abandon the blog as a communication model. Move to features of USENET newsgroups along with general availability of Markdown or Rich Text Editing with context quoting.
The blog is a terrible invention. It needs to be undone. The reason I say such as surprising thing is that blogs do not allow for nuance and flexibility is normal human discourse. Here on Slashdot we have the added tools to remedy much of the failings of blogs, even as dice.com wants to take them away in the interface now under beta. Many people don't realize why they hate the beta interface so much. I think it is because it is an intentional regression to the lack of features in most blogs for directing conversation at distractions and disruptions in conversations. The beta would move us toward the social media model at Facebook and Google which has the effect of crippling discussion.
The reason denialists have more power on blogs is the same reason trolls have more power on blogs and why marketers love blogs, because one person can disrupt a conversation on a blog much more easily than if it had more structure, such as threading, topic changes, contextual quoting and reply, all features that Slashdot is closer to and Reddit is even closer to. There are features that were available long ago to e-mail and listservs, and USENET newsgroups, and have been systematically abandoned by the current social media corporations, Facebook and Google, and others because the lack of structure makes it easier for business intelligence, for the Big Data application of being able to mine (spy) the data of billions of users, but this priority is making it hard for people to have useful discussions. It means that tiny minorities or committed partisans can ruin civil discourse. It also means that blog owners are thrust into a moderation role they never wanted.
So the changes scientists are facing due to running public blogs is that people whose agenda is obvious have to be dealt with. The problem is that running a blog gives such intrusions too much power to disrupt and usurp discussions. Even on social media sites, like Facebook, the people who read a presumably private thread have to self-censor and police themselves because the medium does not handle disruptions well. Disruptions would be better handled by contextual reply and change of topic.
The most glaring and unforgivable example of this degradation of communication and the capacity to support a discussion is Google. Google bought an archive of USENET postings that ran from its origins in 1985 untill past 1990. Those postings were created by newsreader programs that supported all of the features for discussion now lacking in most blogs, and yet Google went on to remove all of those features, consciously, in Google Groups and Google+ which have deteriorated into self-promotions, especially the latter, and all for the profit motive and to the loss of debate and discussion that we need to support democratic institutions in the world. True human conversation is far messier than any blog allows for, and the means to deal with it have existed long before the Web, long before social media, and we need to return to these tools.
My advice to any scientist is to not run a blog. They would be better off running a mailing list or a USENET-like newsgroup.
This article points to a slide show of images Linux is supposed to be installed on, without no demonstration that it is. What a waste of time. Some dumb-ass marketer in the social media game, people who cannot read have to be shown pictures. To install Linux you have to be able to read, because one of the ways it gets from place to place is to have to bootstrap through a text-only interface, not a stupid slide show.
I've looked through the Constitution, but I don't see where Congress gets the power to ban telephone calls on planes.
Umm, Cell Phones didn't exist in 1789. So why do we have a legislative branch? It isn't to treat the Constitution as literal and inerrant, as some people wont to treat the Bible. It is to use it to interpret novel situations under general principles, such as the Congress has the power to regulate Commerce, generally, and includes what businesses and technologies that framers couldn't have imagined. So the Constitution says nothing about cell phones. It also says nothing about modern corporations, the Stock Market, the Cabinet Departments, the number of political parties (directly). So does that mean these are all invalid or that law doesn't apply to them? Of course not. So your statement is absurd.
Everyone has experienced two cases of this. 1) People tend to talk louder on a cell phone than they would if they were talking to the person next to them. This is because of the economics of the cost to the phone manufacturer to build a proper speaker system that compensates for the fact that most people cannot hear the signal from the speaker very well and unconsciously compensate by raising their voice, which has no useful effect except to annoy everyone around them. 2) Everyone had experienced someone who "abuses" the cell phone by heaving one call after another and some of the conversations getting heated, there are people who feel they have to do that. They may be business people in the middle of a tense negotioation or people with a family crisis, whatever.
Since airplanes are a place where you cram hundreds of people together under stressful conditions, that Congress wisely is considering not adding to the problem by allowing in-flight cell-phone conversations. The minute it were allowed, that will be one more cause for a flight disruption. So I support the ban. I don't think that economic incentives are enough to address this problem, and in fact my objection to that can be generalized to all such arguments that charging high fees is a sufficient regulatory action. Image the 1%er business exec who doesn't care about a high fee being charged to use his cell phone in a flight. Because he is a High Flyer he feels justified to be making call after call and talking in a loud voice and he may even be so arrogent that he doen't care that the flight crew or passengers are complaining about his activity. After all he is willing to pay a high price to be able to make the calls and to cause a disruption. So, maybe with the threat of a riot, the Congress is wise to outlaw all cell phone conversations on planes.
Oh Yeah, Fuck Beta, Fuck Dice.com, and Fuck business intelligence and social media, too.
Umm, I think Para Bellum, as "For War", refers not so much to racism against Obama, after all he cannot run again, as it refers to class war, economic war of haves against have-nots. You can hear the fear the 1%'ers have, especially the conservative ones. The thing that motivates conservatives is scarcity, the fear of having to share, and more so facing the hostility caused by selfishness, so the name of the group is a Freudian Slip. Pay attention to names, even informal ones. They often reveal what the mindset is, and even before the PR people get to neutralize the meaning.
The Beta interface for Slashdot is a ditry trick as bad as what the GOP might be doing. It has the effect of changing a discussion into a blog wit all the opinion suppression attributes of a blog and of social media generally. Compare it to Google Groups and Google+ and Facebook and you will get that the change is for the benefit of the marketers and business spys and not for our conversation and debate.
Fuck Beta, Fuck Dice!
The canned PR statement from Dice.com appeared at the top of this thread before the article on Distributed Storage for Families. It does not include a means for reply and it contains all of the corporate newsspeak that you expect from a group of people who have already made up their minds and will change the interface in spite of us. I have used Slashdot for under a year, as a refugee from social media and blogging, and I will drop Slashdot if the beta interface is adoped and I urge everyone to do so and to continue to bad mouth Dice and social media and blogging generally.
So, why is the Beta so bad? If you have been a user of blogs all your compute tile, or if all you know is social media, you will not be able to understand this. Blogging, the social media model, Facebook, Google (Google Groups, Google+) thwart the kind of discussions we are able to have on Slashdot and Reddit and few other Internet venues. There is good reason for this. it is so the business intelligence types can have a simple means to generate the Big Data information gathering job marketers want. A vibrant public dialogue possible on the Internet is being sacrificed for profit. Dice is expected to be no different in that they are probably trying to find professional and career information about the users of Slashdot. The Beta represents just the sort of change that this priority would represent. it is the same "Simplify" imparitive the Mark Zuckerburg defined for Facebook and is why Facebook and Goggle suck and why if the Beta is adoped here, it will sucj, and Dice is this big corporation located in New Yoirk City that does not care. It is listening to the marketers and the propagandists in corporate and politiclal America who are out to undermine democratic institutions by first using blogs and social media as ways to disrupt public discussion and debate. Capitalists are not usiversally pro-democracy, and the trends in social media reveak that. Resist the migration to Beta and leave Slashdot if it is adoped, or create an alternative.
Fuck Beta!
The minute we let Congress or the local church minister tell us what is and is not science, we have given up our advantage in being a leading nation in innovation and new solutions to problems.
Science has already adequate means to self-correct errors, including being on the take from economic interests or submitting to political pressure to bias or censor results. Even if Peer Review is weakened by government intervention or payola, our competition will see the advantage in not poisoning the well and out strip us to discover and control new technology that results.
It is our advantage to lose, and like dealing with Creatiionism and other biased pseudoscience, reasoning people eventually come up with a good answer. (I'd bet with the Bible Thumpers who deny Evolution that flu epidemics are an answer to their nonsense and they don't get the flu shot because they don't accept its basis that viruses are rapidly evolving pathogens.)
Sp, let politicians and energy company propagandists speak their minds. If the GOP gets to censor climate research they will be no better than Hitler denying quantum mechanics and missing the opportunity to invent atomic energy. Someone else will get to the truth faster and it will be their advantage and not ours, and maybe they will have a case that blames us, our politicians, our business people, for the damage we are causing and have a moral cause to come after us. I'd say let science prevail, especially at correcting the failings of the human beings who do it.
The GTK GUI illustrates the problem well. You do get this visual interface to writing GUI componants, but at some point, around the edges, you still have to understand what the objects and their methods do, so you have to go read documentation and eventually, the code. This is especially true if the thing you've made needs debugging, then you are quickly thrust back into the world of the programming language.
Even IDES like Eclipse and Netbeans and others that give you prototype hints don't give you a full enough story. I guess these aid productivity if you already know the libraries, but to do that you have to at least read the list of objects and methods, which is where the real complexity of OOL gets obfiscatted, and Java in particular is very bad in this regrad because of its history. The greater the complexity and the poorer the documentation the faster you are thrust into having the read the code and even the source for the libraries. One thing abstraction does is to invert the logic of inheritance so you are forced to read code in a bottom up fashion, which is much harder to figure out what it does. So, OOD fails if the methods aren't done correctly and even more if the developer hasn't put sufficient effort into documenting in your native language. So poor English can become a major impediment to the whole effort if the developer speaks a language far less used than English, e.g.
Development efforts fail or get unused for the same human factors they always did, going back to the days of COBOL and FORTRAN. The way they fail has just changed and looking for a simple interface does not solve this problem.
By analogy, file managers are supposed to reduce the complexity of finding files and directory structures, and they do, but you still need to know a CLI and a shell to solve practical problems finding files, better that you can write a shell script to automate a task, so the shell isn't going away any time soon, even with file managers, and so text-based programming isn't going away soon because of IDEs. I still code HTML and CSS with emacs because I can't be sure of the garbage most WYSIWYG web page editors put in the code. I can code more concise and cleaner HTML by hand than most of these,
If Stack Ranking encourages selfishness, a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, that that fits right into the way most people do business, especially when they have to reduce their work force. The shift of paradigm can come very quickly. A Company can go from being a Masses of Asses operation, not able to hire fast enough, to just the opposite in a couple of years, thanks to the short investment leash most managements are. Stack Ranking appears quickly just has the back channel to whistle blow on the chain of command vanishes. I know, I saw this happen in 2003. They got to pay me to leave, much more than a meisly lay-off package.
Damn, I almost forgot: Fuck Beta and Fuck Dice.
Fuck Beta!
Then Dice should sell Slashdot rather than destroy it. Go tell Dice that they need to run Google+ and be done with it.
Oh, Beta IS different. The Beta lacks most of the complexity needed to address points made by others that we have in the current UI. It is more like blogging and social media in which no one talks to one another but past one another in a phony nice-nice self censored way. On Social Media you can address other replies but you really have to work at setting the context, to whom and what you are replying to. People self-censor on blogs and Social Media because the chance of being misunderstood get very great. Social Media is a way for site owners to control the agenda and ignore their readers. They have confused not communicating with their moderation role, and even may not care if their users get to communicate. I even think that many business people would easily trade profit for democratic processes and institutions. That is why, at least, they are so unaware of what they are doing, and given their politics, they may be well aware of what this means. They most be stopped or abandoned.
If you are young and all you know is social media, then you won't get it, because the insight comes from another era before marketing corporations got control of the Internet. If you want to see how to break communication go read Google+. It is like LinkedIn for bloggers. It is a bunch of self-promoters talking past and not to each other. I have no problem with commercial uses of the Internet provided that they do not crowd out other uses, provided that they don't quell discussions we need to have.
There are ways to manage on-line communication so that people can thrash out differences and have detailed conversations, most blogs and social media don't suffice and Slashdot is one of the few exception. So, what we are facing here is that dice.com is trying to push the social media business model into Slashdot via the Beta, and probsbly for the same reason as Google and Facebook push it. I am making a case that this is bad, generally.
To make my point, it may be that we will have to find a new way to have discussions on the Internet beyond the influience of social media and marketing. That may be to resurrect the text-only USENET on a free platform, to bring back mailing lists and Listserv, and to begin to replace blogging with structured forums web sites. Demand for the website frameworks, Drupal, WordPress, etc. that they provide an alternative to the blog positing and the text-area, a full featured rich text editor by default, one which provides the features of a good Mail User Agent, contextual reply to posts, and change of topic. Also this shift should allow for threaded discussions. We need to end blogging and replace it with discussion, USENET-style discussion even if we don't use the heirarchy, although I think a heirarchy by topic is better than a topic that is just the subject of some article written by a website owner, a marketer, or an editorial board. I argue that most of the abuses of blogging can be mitigated by a structured discussion. OT and change of topic posts can get their own subthreads and trolls can be taken to task directly. Much of the pain users experience with blogs is due to their inherit inflexibility. Slashdot is able to handle many of these problems. They are the reasons people self-censor and censor others on Social Media because blogging lacks the tools to manage a normal discussion between people complete with the efforts native to humans to manipulate, change the topic, and try to control others.
Oh yes, FUCK the Beta. If it is adopted I will not use Slashdot.
How about collapsing some of these posts? Commenters should hook us in with a decent title, and that is all we should see until we click it. otherwise, we just CONSUME page space for no good reason, and it makes the conversation harder to follow.
There is so much additional whitespace. This isn't a design/marketing website, and we don't appreciate the ascetic as much as you might have anticipated. a little narrowing of the gaps would go a long way.
Actually, a fully threaded presentation with strong filtering rules would be far better. One can only read a few of the hundreds of posts that get made to a topic, I would like to see a count of the number of replies to a subthreadand define those subthreads by changing the topic line. Then I migh apply rules to filter what I want to see. I might first want to see long posts, ones where the person has attempted to say something involved, and secondarily I might want to skip subthreads with lots of short replies.
I think that we need to bring back some old approaches to communication that existed in the days of glass TTYs so that discussion can be rejuvenated. The simplicty of blog pages is a ruse, it allows the site owner and the article author to control what is said. The Beta heads too far in the direction of being a blog and of social media. Any engineer who works at SlashDot who has a social media or marketing bent should be let go. Social Media is destroying the kind of useful discussion we need to have if we are going to continue to have democratic and inclusive institutions. In fact, I would go so far as to acuse Social Media of being not only a business plot, but to be a Right-Wing repressive plot on the order of Fox News, a conscious effort to fragment discussion and control the agenda for the nation. Any trend of slashdot to go in that direction for any reason, mobil use, etc. would cause me to leave and to get active in trying to destroy social media companies.
The reason SlashDot Beta sucks is that it is more like Social Media, like Facebook, Like Google+ then Classic. In fact we need stronger features like Classic, not fewer. If any engineer working at SlashDot has a social media orientation, he should be fired! There needs to be for structure, not less. Mobile and Social Media and blogging do not have a place in quality discussion on the Internet. They are fine for one-off and shallow excahnges, but they cannot support a conversation with any complexity or nuance, and they are in opposition to democratic institutions that need complex discussions to support them. Social Media and blogging do a disservice to citizenship in a democracy.