I tried the BETA. I think that I know why it SUCKS!
I SUCKS for the same reason Facebook SUCKS, or Google+ SUCKS, or most blog pages and web-sites SUCK. It simplifies the interface to the same low common demoninator and removes the VERY things that need to be in discussions on the Internet. Good topic setting hooks, good contextual reply. Even the Classic Slashdot does't have enough of the right kind of stuff. There is a misconception promigated by those Silicon Valley Socal Media companies, by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg that simple is always better and that structure id off putting. In fact, the way discussions are being simplified by Social Media and the changes in the Beta for Slashdot is killing discussion, useful, messy, contentious discussion, complexity essential for the continuation of democratic institutions being destroyed for a simplicity that actually weakens the ability of people to hold useful discussion.
If you want to get this right, actually go and read blogs out there, most blogs, and see how little interaction there is between the people who reply, and then fire anyone on your staff who has a social media background. The weakest thing about Slashdot is the editorial staff and the headline bottle neck. You can author any article but there is a social media filter to what gets seen. Slashdot would be much better if it had a topic hierarchy like USENET and one more complicated than Reddit. If the beta become the new standard I will not use Slashdot. It will become too much like Social Media and I think Social Media is killing communication on the Internet.
I want to see the end of Facebook and Google, and to see you guys taking your UI design cues from the likes of them is tragic, worse, it is evil. And one other thing, I am an old fart who actually remembers ARPANET and USENET, and I think that much of value has been lost so that a few companies can control the discussion and make a fast buck. FUCK them and you if you are thinking that way! I am opposed to blogs and social media and I would really regret it if Slashdot ends up looking more like them.
I think that proof of the woeful deficiencies of schooling in the U.S. is cultural and extends back to the antisocial aspects of Americans who are used to running off to form isolated communities in the wilderness when they disagree with everybody else. The value of an education is to be able to reason and persuade as well as to be able to discover and apply. All of these skills are depcricated by the factory school system we have today and by the micromanaging of education by government. If you think that this is a statism vs. free enterprise issue, it is not, for the owners of business really want a passive consumer population, not people who are able to see beyond their scams.
In other worlds the problem with American schools is a problem with American thinking, not with individual teachers and students. There are many examples of teachers and students who do fine, creative work despite the excessive structure and outside controls. It is that the adults who should be in control don't demand enough from one another and that the nation does not have a vibrant national discussion about issues in general. I think the fault goes back to the excesses of Pragmatism and the lack of respect for long traditions going back to Classical times. Also this is caused by the foisting of social issues such as Civil Rights into the classroom rather than preparing students to be citizens in a democracy, which is not the same as being successful in a career or business.
University has not done enough to promote intellectual curiosity which filters down into the classroom. Students in University are not taught that they have an obligation to their fellow citizens to serve them and to protect inclusive institutions, If I were to predict the future of the country based on what students do in University, I would say that it is destined for tyranny, and that the intellectual leadership has failed to transmit values to them. This is the single most important reason why American schools fail, not because of curriculum or regulation, Teachers with strong minds, really taught to think for themselves find ways around the excessive controls and will eventually defeat them. It is because of weak critical thinking skills that Americans are easily duped into giving away rights or not fighting for things of value.
After seeing this long-winded debate over Argentina's political and fiscal history, I come back to the article which says that there is an assumption that security measures were in effect, but that they were ineffective or even non-existent. We know for example that the large earthquake that struck Mexico City in the 1980's was made far worse by construction that did not meet their standards, that there were corrupt practices. I think we are seeing that in Sochi in Russia. The story there will be that the Russians spent the equivalent of $51 Billion US, and the Olympics site was not ready and not done well. Politics and economics do provide the backdrop but the result is that somebody didn't do what they were asked to do, and there may be a long tradition of that, like there is elsewhere.
You statement does not account for the grid. It does not acknowledge that the problem with renewables vs.carbon-based, vs nuclear is that the grid is developed to use carbon-based resources and that alternatives are put at an economic and practical disadvantage. The grid was designed by carbon-energy providers and they attempt to create a captive market by persuading utilities to not build very well WRT renewables. There are abundant wind resources in the north Great Plains, but they can't be used very well because the grid doesn't extend out there and that is in the interest of the coal-natural-gas-oil companies.
BTW you Sig needs editing it should be "Rich or Powerful Men exploit Poor and Weak Men" and possibly change "Men" to "People". It doesn't matter the means of setting priorities in society weather market or centralized, we are all capable of abusing power, which I think is what you really mean to say.
I'd say that increasingly everybody is lying to some extant. This has to do with fragmentation of all media and a lack of the means to hold the feet of the writer to the fire. This is why Internet web sites and social media like blogging, because blogging doesn't really allow for pointed dialogue between people who disagree, and it doesn't allow for conversations to split off and become different topics or threads.
Slashdot and Reddit do have these features, but most web sites and social media lack them, Even sites that claim to offer discussion or call themselves forums, and the blogs associated with traditional print media don't have the needed features. The USENET text-only newsgroups have the kind of tools that are needed, if some marketer or propagandist, same thing, makes an outlandish claim in a structured discussion that doesn't rely on textarea widgets alone, you can make a pointed reply, quote him, and hold his feet the the fire much more effectively than you can in any blog.
Google, who owns the USENET archive from 1985 to about 2004, knows the censoring power of blogs and that is why the way they have done Google Groups and Google+ reveals that they are evil. They do not want democratic processes to run on the Internet that entail debate and discussion and that is why the public discourse that involves people in thinking about the priorities in society is so poor. People were never taught how to think and discuss critically and the state of Internet media controlled by special interests is a major reason.
It is fairly easy to begin to undo this with NNTP sites that start off with small local heirarchies that begin small and grow. All that is needed is that they be set up as text only newsgroups and some decent web interface be writtien to do all the features of the old newsreader programs, even just redditt's software, but it is essential that the heirarchy be neutral, a topic heirarchy like the USENET but maybe not the one controlled by the commercial servers who get to charge so that they can allow for binary files. Don't allow binary files, illegal copies and porn; make it text only and for discussion and debate. The setting of topic by article topic and not allowing for topic drift is a big source of editorial control by website owners. Even here on Slashdot, topics don't get seen by anyone unless they are promoted to the headline. The USENET has a better more democratic approach by making the newsgroup hierarchy purely topical. I would like to see a resurrection of USENET style conversations separate from the NNTP commercial servers, like GIGAnews and with a far more powerful interface than Google Groups. Reddit has most of the pieces but lacks the neutral hierarchy; social media promotion doesn't really serve drawing people together who disagree and need to thrash out their differences. It is doing a huge disservice to democratic institutions by perpetuating the fragmentation.
I think that they are beginning to make DDs out of the top boxes.
I think that a confirmation of the duel strategy to 1) Deny the money questions to the competition and 2) Disorient them by constantly changing the topic would be revealed by low wagers on the DDs. Does anyone know if this was used?
Of course if you think that you know the category, you are free to bet as much as you can on it, but the risk of the DDs has to do with what you opponents have, which can be controlled by denying them the ability to click-in. I wonder if a delay on the clicker is ever used to bias the game, that is the $64K question;-} A biased game could deal with the above strategy and it would be hard to detect. Someone would have to rat them out for doing it.
It wouldn't surprise me if bias has already happened and maybe with consent as there are tax incentives to NOT maximize one's winnings all at once, especially if one has already made a five times winner. The show looks like it is taped one week at a time in one day, or even as long as the winner lasts through multiple games. Most people don't last beyond five games and maybe most of them cannot arrange to play the game for longer than one day of real time, so they conspire to lose. There are lots of ways the game can get biased, even with consent of the players.
The other thing is to bet everything on Final if you are trailing. If you do not lead after answering correctly on Final, you will get none of what you hold, if you win you might be able to defeat the leader. There have been many games recently where the leader cannot be caught on Final, however. Pride seems to compell people to not bet it all, ending up with $0 is worse than not beating the leader for most of them, but the fact is you don't get to keep the dollar amount if you do not lead after Final.
And of course the producers of the entertainment can change the rules if they want to discourage this kind of strategy. Since the game is an entertainment, if the play pisses off viewers and they start to complain or switch off, the rules will be changed. I am not saying how I would change the rules, but some means could be found including taking the fairness out of the game.
I had often thought about two features of the game 1) A delay on the button click could be used to manipulate who gets to answer, 2) There seem to be incentives, tax incentives, for winners to actually try to lose games once they have reached an amount of winnings or become eligible for the Tournament of Champions, by winning five games. It is very possible that the game isn't perfectly fair, even now.
We should pay students to learn Science and Math, first. They will learn engineering anyway if they want to apply its foundational skills, but it is far more important to teach these than to emphasize their application during their education.
The one thing about Engineers is that they tend to have narrow backgrounds in only a couple of problems, and because they are successful they tend to think that they are competent in more ways than they really are, which shows when they think outside their focus. I have heard or met engineers whose lack of general knowledge results in their advocacy of crackpot ideas, of pseudoscience, or bizarre political or social ideas. This is all related to the narrowness of their disciplines. They often have no business talking about social or biological science unless the education covers enough problems in these fields, and they are not exposed to enough criticism for holding false opinions. Requiring a broader education would solve some of these issues.
William F. Shockley won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949 for inventing the transistor. He went on to engineer applications in Silicon Valley and was an emeritis professor at Stanford when he got caught in a controversey about race and intelligence. Someone asked him to look at statistics of intelligence scores from the Stanford Binet test and once doing so he came to the conclusion that Black People were less able to score well as a group. He might have gone so far as to suggest the hypothesis that this difference was due to genetics differences, for which he was roundly criticized. The problem with this was the correlation in statistics is not the same as causality, that inference needs more information, a hypothesis to test. What explained the differences were cultural differences that put Black People at a disadvantage for scoring on that test, not race, not genetics, but more likely educational opportunity and vocabulary. This is one of the best stories about people, even someone famous, acting beyond his area of competency. Not only was Shockley out of his realm as to discipline, but he probably misused statistical inference and hypothesis formation as well. So a good background in math and science is important to round out the intellectual tools of people who are going to design our future.
Like many people, I left the Superb Owl at the beginning of the third quarter. I didn't even see the Budwisser Ad, although I saw it later. That was a cat video like you's see on You Tube only staring puppies and horses.
I kept saying "Huh?" to most of the ads I saw. Many of them just didn't make sense to me, and of course they seemed full of nonsequitors. Maybe they were too ambitious and most of their message was lost on the editing floor. I know my metaphor is now anachronistic, so maybe the content was catted to/dev/null instead. But it seemed to me that they were trying to cram 10 lbs of shit into 5 lib bags.
I would say that they wasted their money on two accounts, one is trying to do too much with too little and the other is that the Super Bowl is often a mismatch that reults in a boring football game that many viewers leave before it is done, so the advertisers lose. I'm not too sad for them since I dislike the marketed and propagandised media we now have, anyway. Death to Marketing!
But of course the catch is here that you are "free" only if you get the jump on the next guy. "Freedom" consists of taking opportunity from competitors in this unregulated economic and political model. The thing about "freedom" as an institutionalized idea, as a rule of law, is not lack of restraint on you, but it is an acceptance of the idea that your citizenship depends on a balance of your power and the power everyone else has. Now, given that people tend universally to abuse power, the practical implementation of a "free" society requires that you feel somehow responsible for the welfare of your fellows, at least with the knowledge that if you are doing something unfair, even following the rules of business success, that your actions could be viewed negatively by different people at a different time, for which you could be held to account.
German citizens held to account by the Allies at the end of WWII pleaded that they were only doing what was expected of them, when a higher standard of human rights and dignity could be applied to them. The same is true of your argument.
That is because if you are conservative, "Freedom" is for your elite, not everybody. Greed can and does often lead to exclusive institutions especially if you start off assuming that scarcity rules the world. It is hard to see the universal rights of man when you are trying every day to put yourself above the rest, an overlord. elitist view of mankind. That is what drive Nazism in Germany 80 years ago. It had roots in American Capitalists who believed in Social Darwinism, or competative advantage of a social elite, which is a misreading of Darwin.
Object Oriented Programming was meant to provide recipes. Some factory turned out the code to do that task. The problen is that you sill have to learn where the method fits in your universe. It is like asking where to recipes come from in the first place? So we are past the urge to start from scratch every time we solve a problem and now get to use templates or other abstractions to help us, but we still have to understand them and that can be as hard as gong back and using the language primatives.
I say that you still have to know where recipes come from from and to extend the analogy with cooking you have to know what the ingredients are and what they do and if methods are like ingredients, that can be almost as hard as starting fresh. First because OOP often fails on poor documentation and if your only fix from that is to read the source, the logic for you is turned entirely on its head. You see the objects first and the bewildering set of methods the dev has chosen to define, which are often not complete or orthogonal, so practically it can be next to impossible to use a package effectively. Real life is not as simple as you suggest because people are lazy and stupid, the Universal Human Condition, by "stupid" I mean unaware, so some very intelligent people can be stupid, in fact very intelligent people are often more stupid than people of average intelligence. That shows up when you look at their code and it doen't really help that they have used OOP unless they have mastered orthagonally, which many have not. I know that code patterns are supposed to address this lack, but there is no way to enforce it except by proving programs have symmetry.
The primary use of Public Education is to create compliant workers for business and to teach them that they are not smart enough to think for themselves. I know that lots of people, even lots of educators, think otherwise, but if the factory school system as mandated by law from our state legislators and Congress were not really about empowering rather than repressing people, the way things are done would be very different. Oh, I know it is sometimes amazing what some teachers can do with limited resources, and that our schools and culture definitely do turn out creative and achieving people, maybe more so than other societies, but they are not intended to promote critical or independent thinking and indeed given the culture driven by business and politics, I'd say that the people in power fear such a result to the extant that most people are repressed by the classroom.
Some of this has to do with the average intellectual achievement in people. some of whom teach, and those being taught. It may also be due to the fact that the classroom is now a battle ground between opposing forces, a front line in the Civil Rights movement, and where the most able students have to be ignored to raise the level of everybody, a kind of no win situation. It could be worse for us. People in this culture have enough individuality that it is possible to rise above the external standards and find your own way including both the advantaged and the disadvantaged.
I want to go further than you did and assert that democratic participation requires more practice than just being taught about it in school, and I repeat my contention that the limited resources turn the opportunity to teach democratic ideals to students into quite the opposite. Rigid curriculum goals and a one-size-fits-all, or its opposite applied to noisy subsets of the population, does quite the opposite. But more than that democracy has to be practiced, people have to exercise freedom, they have to actively think and analyse and agitate for justice and fairness, and they have to debate competing and bitterly opposed priorities in society to be effective citizens.
One way to do this is to do it on-line. The problem with that at this time is that the business people who dominate the Internet are not really interested in it. The reasons are many but they boil down to a strongly anti-democracy sub plot in business, and to the idea that many citizens have been frightened to voice their thoughts on the Internet for fear of being attacked personally for voicing what is their right to say in public.
I think that fragmentation of mass media, the emergence of venues like Fox News, which no longer have to be fair or balanced, is one cause. Another, and this may surprise you, is the blog. I think that the blog has done more to repress public opinion and of people learning to express their rights than it has helped. The designers of social media know full well that the linear and unstructured form of a blog does not create useful discussion; people talk past one another or preach to the choir, that disagreement and other distractions are not handled well in a blog and never will be.
The bellwheather for this was the "Political Correctness" idea that came out of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. This is basically an anti-democratic idea. it says that people have to play at being nice and avoiding contentious topic. it is a conspiracy of silence, exactly the divide and conquer stretegy of a minority elite that wants to limit the rights of others, and it is applied to blogs by the thread owners and some of the participants because of their desire to control conversations and because the blog lacks context features that are useful in handling the challenges of people actively discussing and debating with each other.
You have in front of you the missing piece for vibrant democracy, the on-line cafe, the Vienanese Coffehouse, but the Google's and Facebooks have tried to take it away from you. We have some of it here on Slashdot, but there needs to be mor
Amusingly, having been taught too much Logic, I think everyone should be taught Statistics.
What they should be taught is inference and hypothesis testing and that they are different from correlation. The greatest misuse of statistics is to mistake
correlation for causation, that is to supply the hypothesis without critically examining the inference.
A famous case of this is the inference Nobel Prize winner William F. Shockley, then at Stanford, made in the late 1960's about Black people. Based on their scores on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test he claimed that they were intellectual disadvantaged. He was not very careful about his choice of words of defining the inference he made carefully, and invited lots of criticism. In fact the raw statistics may have shown that Blacks at that time (N.B.) did score lower in intelligence tests. The flaw in that statement is the hypothesis it implies and what may be the errors in making any useful inference at all. Now we know that tests can be culturally biased, so that even words whose meaning is understood by most people, or the population from which the test was defined, may not be used by the minority, or that lack of quality in the educational resources of the time available to most Blacks put them at a disadvantage for having higher scores on that test.
Shockley, being in physics and then an engineer may not have been as practiced at deciphering test bias as a social scientist usually is.
I've studied basic mathematical logic. Digital logic design and optimization. Proof of correctness. Automatic theorem proving. Constructive mathematics. (Boyer-Moore theory, which is quite elegant.) Expert systems. Even "Dr. John's Mystery Hour", John McCarthy's AI course at Stanford. And I've used all that stuff.
But not in recent years.
Statistics, though, is a win for everybody. Everybody needs enough statistics to calculate the expectations on a Lotto ticket. Programmers need enough statistics to get into machine learning.
Are you saying that you have never run across lists and lambdas in modern practice, odd?
Everyone needs enough critical thinking skills to diagnose the misuse of statistics in places as notable as the houses of Congress, let alone the flood of poorly controlled and intentionally biased medical trials reported almost nightly where the reputation of science is being damaged by pay outs from Big Pharma. The sample sizes should give you a clue quite apart from the Central Limit Theorem.
The factory school, the ones most of us attended, are somewhat inflexible about the different ways people learn and think.There may be too much emphasis on algebra in the middle-school and high school and not enough in geometry. In the history of math many of the problems presented in pre-algebra were fist solved as geometry problems, and can be solved as Cartesian graphs in today's world. So not only is a poly-modal approach better, e.g. draw me a picture, I am too blind to read the exponents of your algebraic expression easily; I can understand a geometric construction better.
In music, requiring everyone to learn a musical instrument, or maybe to sing, or all the related skills, such as ear-training and sight-reading or singing, is really not the point of teaching music. Some people do not have the neural tools to do any of these tasks, but that doesn't mean that music has no value to them, or that getting them to do musical tasks in a classroom has no value. In fact, doing the simplest task, such as beating in tempo with others has far reaching cognitive value, even more important is counting beats and getting rhythms. The simple task of dividing note values and meters relates directly to mathematical skill. These tasks teach social skills too. The participants have to listen and cooperate. in fact even deafness is not a barrier to this sort of activity which can quickly evolve to very complex patterns used in drumming. Recently I heard a mathematician say that math is really about discovering patterns, period. That is the basic skill involved in any music. Musical form does not exist without remembered patterns weather it is a simple tune or drum beat or the extended structure of a Mahler symphonic movement.
By analogy, learning to type doesn't mean that you can communicate in writing, Even learning correct semantics in natural language doesn't mean that you said anything significant. You may not cause a compile error, "Sorry, I don't understand what you said.", but even this mastery is far from a high standard. So your program compiles but does not have the intended result. You failed to communicate what you wanted. To achieve this does require greater skill than just learning the mechanics of the task. Coders might have been key punch clerks in the days of card decks, but now the extra steps are not needed and the people who are tasked to make meaningful programs are also coding. The two tasks are not the same. I have poor vision and so cause lots of typos when I write natural language and when I code. I will never be a very productive coder, but given the number of bug fixes per line of code, I could be a more productive programmer, possibly. I have to admit that age has taught me that I am neither a productive coder or programmer. I may be more skilled at writing than programming, as it turns out, but the differences between them do matter.
Teaching music in the elementary grades has far more value than just inspiring young kids to play. It is a cognitive exercise that has been shown to enhance concentration and skills general to learning language and math. Students who learn to count for reading and playing music, do better in reasoning tasks, particularly in math.
It is more important to teach thinking skills, including those they are useful to programmers, especially some of the mathematical foundations to programming, than to how to code, per se. Critical thinking skills, rhetoric, in the classical meaning of the term, and how to speak and write down you ideas and arguments, should come before coding as a life skill. Coding should never be used as a substitute for these more general skills. Problem solving skills can be taught in the context of much more readily available tasks such as math and reading and writing. That includes scientific reasoning, symbolic logic, analysis ( not calculus) or problem decomposition and synthesis. Decomposition is a real life skill quite separate from coding. Learning how to reason to particulars and ignore the extraneous and how to prioritize your effort, especially emotional effort, is a skill not mastered well by most people. That it can be related to programming is nice, but its use is far more general. Teaching it does not require the particulars of a coding discipline, maybe sets are enough. Anyway, it might be more valuable to teach programming from the point of view of the mathematics it is based on, set theory, number theory, Lambda Calculus, at some point in advanced education, and I am not just talking about Computer Science. Even high school math students should get more number theory than just algebra.
I think that there is little value in teaching students to code as opposed to learning math, or logic, or a foreign language, all of which have been mistakenly substituted for by coding or programming classes at various levels. When I was in College 45 years ago I got away with not have to learn another modern spoken language because I was taking programming courses, learning FORTRAN. Now, that did get me some useful skill, I made a living for a time off that.
Looking back on it, I regret not having to learn some French or German, for example, but I regard High School Geometry, learning Euclid, and a later course on Symbolic Math and Logic to be far more valuable. I am not arguing that some exposure be given to a programming language but as an extra, and I would advocate teaching python as opposed to java. Stay away from strongly typed declarative languages for this.
A course in Critical Thinking and rhetoric or general semantics would be for more valuable. But I am sure that marketers and politicians would oppose that. It is possible that people whose first exposure to programming language was BASIC or Java could transfer those to other languages, but think of the number of people turned off by that.
The web is using javascript more than ever because it gives the site owner the balance of power on the user's browser even though it is on his machine. I would love to disable javascript entirely except of course that so many sites depend on it.
I can imagine a security breach so severe that people have to disable javascript. It is only a matter of time before that happens. I can also imagine a low bandwith network off the Internet, a mesh based store and forward network in which minimalism is valued. This would revert back to static HTML minimal designs like I use because I have poor vision, but an effort to communicate off the Internet for safety and security and against spam would lead back to this.
I suppose the claim to fame here is that the company created an artificial hydrothermal vent. They verified that they drilled into a magma chanber and I presume that they tried to inject fluids, water, into it and get steam back but that something plugged up their well. How is this basically different from any other hydrothermal well?
Not too far north of San Francisco Ca, is the Gyser's Hydrotermal plnat operated by PG&E. It uses an existing hydrothermal system which presumably is based on ground water being heated up to steam by hot rock at depth, whether magma or not, and there are many such resources around the world.
Drilling directly into a magma chamber would entail many risks. First, the system is under high pressure, second, to try to use the heat energy of a melt would probably require introducing steam which would be a high pressure product, third, the steam would react with the magma and leach out minerals that would probably be a problem for the well, if not clogging it with parcipitated minerals, then introducing corrosion problems to any equipment being used with the heat source.
It might be the case that taping a magma chamber directly and treating the melt with steam might be a way to enhance the natural process of hydrothermal deposition of economic ores. One geochemical model I remember reading about claimed that gold deposition may be done very rapidly from some hydrothermal regimes.
Of course Slashdot is already a biased sample of public opinion and its polarities. I am assuming that the techies that post here already have some elitist pretentions, many of them thinking themselves superior in some way to people generally. The extremism of the dialogue reveals that. It is almost diagnostic for a Right Wing Bias since most Conservatives seem to come from that elitist POV.
The debate about the relative power of government vs. private business, is a straw man that like every rhetorical argument protects a much weaker agenda. The idea that government vs. business, regulation vs. non-regulation is a straw man is revealed by the access business people have to legislatures and the idea that most legislators are business men, having some experience running an organization that has a self interest and makes money. Increasingly it take lots of money to run for public office and that fact hasn't much assauged the Right Wingers here. There must be something in reality that most of them miss, or they must be lying about their true motives.
So the usual Conservative and Republican anti-government, or state's rights arguments hide a hidden agenda which is really the advantage they want for their elite to the disadvantage of those in the majority not in their elite. This is basically anti-democracy. But it is not fashionable to admit, so they have to couch it in a way that conceals the elitist ramifications which lead down the road away from inclusion of everybody to exclusion of most, to creation of oligarchies, to class war.
Even were that not true, the antisocial element of their individualism must be then considered, for to think that one does not have to compromise one-s self interest with the interests of everybody else in society, just labeling the need to be socially interconnected as "collectiveist" reveals again an elitism that results ultimately in unfairness and a breakdown of the Social Contract. The idea of fairness is crucial here, and even though competition and merit do apply to human affaird, the perception that unfairness is institutionalized is just as repugnant as forcing everyone to be equal. Ruthless metitocracy, even assuming objective standards, which is a streatch, is just has bad as ruthless equality, both being ruthless.
I am glad I live in California and all the more because if I would want the Red States to be out of my hair, my state could actually do quite well and maybe better without them. One solution to the political impasse and polarization much of it funded by capitalist oligarchs is succession.
Strangely, many deep-red states are also struggling with poverty and high unemployment.
Except that is not true. There are five states with unemployment worse than California, and none are red (they all voted for Obama in 2012).
If "this kind of bureaucratic overreach" was a simple explanation for high unemployment rates...
How to lie with statistics, those states may already have populations that are at a disadvantage, people who are not elitist techies or Republicans, and who voted for Obama, The class war is on. The Conservative motto is "I've got mine, screw you!" I hope you are happy creating dissention and exclusion. It may come back to haunt you, and sooner than you think.
I think this job description of "passionate" is HR department and executive bullshit, meaningless fluff intended to discourage skepticism. How many people would dare to hire someone who is the opposite of a team player, whose attitude is "Prove to me that you are not full of Bullshit"? Damn few, even though many operations, including some of the most famous could use a BS monitor, someone who is skeptical, someone who challenges assumptions and decisions. There aren't enough skeptics. least of all among the VCs and investors. I'd love to kick some asses in tech,
So, go to any large inner city, especially one with ethnic and immigrant minorities, and what you see ifthat the effectiveness of the police rests on the trust they hold, or don't, with the locals. Conversely, eyes and ears are most effective against crime if the authorities have the cooperation of the residents, far more effective than any amount of weapons and other tactical tools.
The Syrian government is armed to the teeth, thanks to the Russians, and now three years on in their civil war, they haven't crushed the rebels who started off with no weapons at all. How well armed you are is not as important as having the trust of your neighbors, and that includes the police. The Terror went on as long as it did because the people trusted the revolutionary councils to meat out justice, and when the tide of opinion was that they were abusing their power, they were deposed. Perception is far more powerful than weaponry. The enslaved or repressed have to agree at some level with their oppressors, or if people trust the police to act fairly, the police have far more power than just what weapons they hold.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried the BETA. I think that I know why it SUCKS!
I SUCKS for the same reason Facebook SUCKS, or Google+ SUCKS, or most blog pages and web-sites SUCK. It simplifies the interface to the same low common demoninator and removes the VERY things that need to be in discussions on the Internet. Good topic setting hooks, good contextual reply. Even the Classic Slashdot does't have enough of the right kind of stuff. There is a misconception promigated by those Silicon Valley Socal Media companies, by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg that simple is always better and that structure id off putting. In fact, the way discussions are being simplified by Social Media and the changes in the Beta for Slashdot is killing discussion, useful, messy, contentious discussion, complexity essential for the continuation of democratic institutions being destroyed for a simplicity that actually weakens the ability of people to hold useful discussion.
If you want to get this right, actually go and read blogs out there, most blogs, and see how little interaction there is between the people who reply, and then fire anyone on your staff who has a social media background. The weakest thing about Slashdot is the editorial staff and the headline bottle neck. You can author any article but there is a social media filter to what gets seen. Slashdot would be much better if it had a topic hierarchy like USENET and one more complicated than Reddit. If the beta become the new standard I will not use Slashdot. It will become too much like Social Media and I think Social Media is killing communication on the Internet.
I want to see the end of Facebook and Google, and to see you guys taking your UI design cues from the likes of them is tragic, worse, it is evil. And one other thing, I am an old fart who actually remembers ARPANET and USENET, and I think that much of value has been lost so that a few companies can control the discussion and make a fast buck. FUCK them and you if you are thinking that way! I am opposed to blogs and social media and I would really regret it if Slashdot ends up looking more like them.
I think that proof of the woeful deficiencies of schooling in the U.S. is cultural and extends back to the antisocial aspects of Americans who are used to running off to form isolated communities in the wilderness when they disagree with everybody else. The value of an education is to be able to reason and persuade as well as to be able to discover and apply. All of these skills are depcricated by the factory school system we have today and by the micromanaging of education by government. If you think that this is a statism vs. free enterprise issue, it is not, for the owners of business really want a passive consumer population, not people who are able to see beyond their scams.
In other worlds the problem with American schools is a problem with American thinking, not with individual teachers and students. There are many examples of teachers and students who do fine, creative work despite the excessive structure and outside controls. It is that the adults who should be in control don't demand enough from one another and that the nation does not have a vibrant national discussion about issues in general. I think the fault goes back to the excesses of Pragmatism and the lack of respect for long traditions going back to Classical times. Also this is caused by the foisting of social issues such as Civil Rights into the classroom rather than preparing students to be citizens in a democracy, which is not the same as being successful in a career or business.
University has not done enough to promote intellectual curiosity which filters down into the classroom. Students in University are not taught that they have an obligation to their fellow citizens to serve them and to protect inclusive institutions, If I were to predict the future of the country based on what students do in University, I would say that it is destined for tyranny, and that the intellectual leadership has failed to transmit values to them. This is the single most important reason why American schools fail, not because of curriculum or regulation, Teachers with strong minds, really taught to think for themselves find ways around the excessive controls and will eventually defeat them. It is because of weak critical thinking skills that Americans are easily duped into giving away rights or not fighting for things of value.
After seeing this long-winded debate over Argentina's political and fiscal history, I come back to the article which says that there is an assumption that security measures were in effect, but that they were ineffective or even non-existent. We know for example that the large earthquake that struck Mexico City in the 1980's was made far worse by construction that did not meet their standards, that there were corrupt practices. I think we are seeing that in Sochi in Russia. The story there will be that the Russians spent the equivalent of $51 Billion US, and the Olympics site was not ready and not done well. Politics and economics do provide the backdrop but the result is that somebody didn't do what they were asked to do, and there may be a long tradition of that, like there is elsewhere.
You statement does not account for the grid. It does not acknowledge that the problem with renewables vs.carbon-based, vs nuclear is that the grid is developed to use carbon-based resources and that alternatives are put at an economic and practical disadvantage. The grid was designed by carbon-energy providers and they attempt to create a captive market by persuading utilities to not build very well WRT renewables. There are abundant wind resources in the north Great Plains, but they can't be used very well because the grid doesn't extend out there and that is in the interest of the coal-natural-gas-oil companies.
BTW you Sig needs editing it should be "Rich or Powerful Men exploit Poor and Weak Men" and possibly change "Men" to "People". It doesn't matter the means of setting priorities in society weather market or centralized, we are all capable of abusing power, which I think is what you really mean to say.
I'd say that increasingly everybody is lying to some extant. This has to do with fragmentation of all media and a lack of the means to hold the feet of the writer to the fire. This is why Internet web sites and social media like blogging, because blogging doesn't really allow for pointed dialogue between people who disagree, and it doesn't allow for conversations to split off and become different topics or threads.
Slashdot and Reddit do have these features, but most web sites and social media lack them, Even sites that claim to offer discussion or call themselves forums, and the blogs associated with traditional print media don't have the needed features. The USENET text-only newsgroups have the kind of tools that are needed, if some marketer or propagandist, same thing, makes an outlandish claim in a structured discussion that doesn't rely on textarea widgets alone, you can make a pointed reply, quote him, and hold his feet the the fire much more effectively than you can in any blog.
Google, who owns the USENET archive from 1985 to about 2004, knows the censoring power of blogs and that is why the way they have done Google Groups and Google+ reveals that they are evil. They do not want democratic processes to run on the Internet that entail debate and discussion and that is why the public discourse that involves people in thinking about the priorities in society is so poor. People were never taught how to think and discuss critically and the state of Internet media controlled by special interests is a major reason.
It is fairly easy to begin to undo this with NNTP sites that start off with small local heirarchies that begin small and grow. All that is needed is that they be set up as text only newsgroups and some decent web interface be writtien to do all the features of the old newsreader programs, even just redditt's software, but it is essential that the heirarchy be neutral, a topic heirarchy like the USENET but maybe not the one controlled by the commercial servers who get to charge so that they can allow for binary files. Don't allow binary files, illegal copies and porn; make it text only and for discussion and debate. The setting of topic by article topic and not allowing for topic drift is a big source of editorial control by website owners. Even here on Slashdot, topics don't get seen by anyone unless they are promoted to the headline. The USENET has a better more democratic approach by making the newsgroup hierarchy purely topical. I would like to see a resurrection of USENET style conversations separate from the NNTP commercial servers, like GIGAnews and with a far more powerful interface than Google Groups. Reddit has most of the pieces but lacks the neutral hierarchy; social media promotion doesn't really serve drawing people together who disagree and need to thrash out their differences. It is doing a huge disservice to democratic institutions by perpetuating the fragmentation.
I think that they are beginning to make DDs out of the top boxes.
I think that a confirmation of the duel strategy to 1) Deny the money questions to the competition and 2) Disorient them by constantly changing the topic would be revealed by low wagers on the DDs. Does anyone know if this was used?
Of course if you think that you know the category, you are free to bet as much as you can on it, but the risk of the DDs has to do with what you opponents have, which can be controlled by denying them the ability to click-in. I wonder if a delay on the clicker is ever used to bias the game, that is the $64K question ;-} A biased game could deal with the above strategy and it would be hard to detect. Someone would have to rat them out for doing it.
It wouldn't surprise me if bias has already happened and maybe with consent as there are tax incentives to NOT maximize one's winnings all at once, especially if one has already made a five times winner. The show looks like it is taped one week at a time in one day, or even as long as the winner lasts through multiple games. Most people don't last beyond five games and maybe most of them cannot arrange to play the game for longer than one day of real time, so they conspire to lose. There are lots of ways the game can get biased, even with consent of the players.
The other thing is to bet everything on Final if you are trailing. If you do not lead after answering correctly on Final, you will get none of what you hold, if you win you might be able to defeat the leader. There have been many games recently where the leader cannot be caught on Final, however. Pride seems to compell people to not bet it all, ending up with $0 is worse than not beating the leader for most of them, but the fact is you don't get to keep the dollar amount if you do not lead after Final.
And of course the producers of the entertainment can change the rules if they want to discourage this kind of strategy. Since the game is an entertainment, if the play pisses off viewers and they start to complain or switch off, the rules will be changed. I am not saying how I would change the rules, but some means could be found including taking the fairness out of the game.
I had often thought about two features of the game 1) A delay on the button click could be used to manipulate who gets to answer, 2) There seem to be incentives, tax incentives, for winners to actually try to lose games once they have reached an amount of winnings or become eligible for the Tournament of Champions, by winning five games. It is very possible that the game isn't perfectly fair, even now.
We should pay students to learn Science and Math, first. They will learn engineering anyway if they want to apply its foundational skills, but it is far more important to teach these than to emphasize their application during their education.
The one thing about Engineers is that they tend to have narrow backgrounds in only a couple of problems, and because they are successful they tend to think that they are competent in more ways than they really are, which shows when they think outside their focus. I have heard or met engineers whose lack of general knowledge results in their advocacy of crackpot ideas, of pseudoscience, or bizarre political or social ideas. This is all related to the narrowness of their disciplines. They often have no business talking about social or biological science unless the education covers enough problems in these fields, and they are not exposed to enough criticism for holding false opinions. Requiring a broader education would solve some of these issues.
William F. Shockley won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949 for inventing the transistor. He went on to engineer applications in Silicon Valley and was an emeritis professor at Stanford when he got caught in a controversey about race and intelligence. Someone asked him to look at statistics of intelligence scores from the Stanford Binet test and once doing so he came to the conclusion that Black People were less able to score well as a group. He might have gone so far as to suggest the hypothesis that this difference was due to genetics differences, for which he was roundly criticized. The problem with this was the correlation in statistics is not the same as causality, that inference needs more information, a hypothesis to test. What explained the differences were cultural differences that put Black People at a disadvantage for scoring on that test, not race, not genetics, but more likely educational opportunity and vocabulary. This is one of the best stories about people, even someone famous, acting beyond his area of competency. Not only was Shockley out of his realm as to discipline, but he probably misused statistical inference and hypothesis formation as well. So a good background in math and science is important to round out the intellectual tools of people who are going to design our future.
Like many people, I left the Superb Owl at the beginning of the third quarter. I didn't even see the Budwisser Ad, although I saw it later. That was a cat video like you's see on You Tube only staring puppies and horses.
I kept saying "Huh?" to most of the ads I saw. Many of them just didn't make sense to me, and of course they seemed full of nonsequitors. Maybe they were too ambitious and most of their message was lost on the editing floor. I know my metaphor is now anachronistic, so maybe the content was catted to /dev/null instead. But it seemed to me that they were trying to cram 10 lbs of shit into 5 lib bags.
I would say that they wasted their money on two accounts, one is trying to do too much with too little and the other is that the Super Bowl is often a mismatch that reults in a boring football game that many viewers leave before it is done, so the advertisers lose. I'm not too sad for them since I dislike the marketed and propagandised media we now have, anyway. Death to Marketing!
But of course the catch is here that you are "free" only if you get the jump on the next guy. "Freedom" consists of taking opportunity from competitors in this unregulated economic and political model. The thing about "freedom" as an institutionalized idea, as a rule of law, is not lack of restraint on you, but it is an acceptance of the idea that your citizenship depends on a balance of your power and the power everyone else has. Now, given that people tend universally to abuse power, the practical implementation of a "free" society requires that you feel somehow responsible for the welfare of your fellows, at least with the knowledge that if you are doing something unfair, even following the rules of business success, that your actions could be viewed negatively by different people at a different time, for which you could be held to account.
German citizens held to account by the Allies at the end of WWII pleaded that they were only doing what was expected of them, when a higher standard of human rights and dignity could be applied to them. The same is true of your argument.
That is because if you are conservative, "Freedom" is for your elite, not everybody. Greed can and does often lead to exclusive institutions especially if you start off assuming that scarcity rules the world. It is hard to see the universal rights of man when you are trying every day to put yourself above the rest, an overlord. elitist view of mankind. That is what drive Nazism in Germany 80 years ago. It had roots in American Capitalists who believed in Social Darwinism, or competative advantage of a social elite, which is a misreading of Darwin.
Object Oriented Programming was meant to provide recipes. Some factory turned out the code to do that task. The problen is that you sill have to learn where the method fits in your universe. It is like asking where to recipes come from in the first place? So we are past the urge to start from scratch every time we solve a problem and now get to use templates or other abstractions to help us, but we still have to understand them and that can be as hard as gong back and using the language primatives.
I say that you still have to know where recipes come from from and to extend the analogy with cooking you have to know what the ingredients are and what they do and if methods are like ingredients, that can be almost as hard as starting fresh. First because OOP often fails on poor documentation and if your only fix from that is to read the source, the logic for you is turned entirely on its head. You see the objects first and the bewildering set of methods the dev has chosen to define, which are often not complete or orthogonal, so practically it can be next to impossible to use a package effectively. Real life is not as simple as you suggest because people are lazy and stupid, the Universal Human Condition, by "stupid" I mean unaware, so some very intelligent people can be stupid, in fact very intelligent people are often more stupid than people of average intelligence. That shows up when you look at their code and it doen't really help that they have used OOP unless they have mastered orthagonally, which many have not. I know that code patterns are supposed to address this lack, but there is no way to enforce it except by proving programs have symmetry.
The primary use of Public Education is to create compliant workers for business and to teach them that they are not smart enough to think for themselves. I know that lots of people, even lots of educators, think otherwise, but if the factory school system as mandated by law from our state legislators and Congress were not really about empowering rather than repressing people, the way things are done would be very different. Oh, I know it is sometimes amazing what some teachers can do with limited resources, and that our schools and culture definitely do turn out creative and achieving people, maybe more so than other societies, but they are not intended to promote critical or independent thinking and indeed given the culture driven by business and politics, I'd say that the people in power fear such a result to the extant that most people are repressed by the classroom.
Some of this has to do with the average intellectual achievement in people. some of whom teach, and those being taught. It may also be due to the fact that the classroom is now a battle ground between opposing forces, a front line in the Civil Rights movement, and where the most able students have to be ignored to raise the level of everybody, a kind of no win situation. It could be worse for us. People in this culture have enough individuality that it is possible to rise above the external standards and find your own way including both the advantaged and the disadvantaged.
I want to go further than you did and assert that democratic participation requires more practice than just being taught about it in school, and I repeat my contention that the limited resources turn the opportunity to teach democratic ideals to students into quite the opposite. Rigid curriculum goals and a one-size-fits-all, or its opposite applied to noisy subsets of the population, does quite the opposite. But more than that democracy has to be practiced, people have to exercise freedom, they have to actively think and analyse and agitate for justice and fairness, and they have to debate competing and bitterly opposed priorities in society to be effective citizens.
One way to do this is to do it on-line. The problem with that at this time is that the business people who dominate the Internet are not really interested in it. The reasons are many but they boil down to a strongly anti-democracy sub plot in business, and to the idea that many citizens have been frightened to voice their thoughts on the Internet for fear of being attacked personally for voicing what is their right to say in public.
I think that fragmentation of mass media, the emergence of venues like Fox News, which no longer have to be fair or balanced, is one cause. Another, and this may surprise you, is the blog. I think that the blog has done more to repress public opinion and of people learning to express their rights than it has helped. The designers of social media know full well that the linear and unstructured form of a blog does not create useful discussion; people talk past one another or preach to the choir, that disagreement and other distractions are not handled well in a blog and never will be.
The bellwheather for this was the "Political Correctness" idea that came out of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. This is basically an anti-democratic idea. it says that people have to play at being nice and avoiding contentious topic. it is a conspiracy of silence, exactly the divide and conquer stretegy of a minority elite that wants to limit the rights of others, and it is applied to blogs by the thread owners and some of the participants because of their desire to control conversations and because the blog lacks context features that are useful in handling the challenges of people actively discussing and debating with each other.
You have in front of you the missing piece for vibrant democracy, the on-line cafe, the Vienanese Coffehouse, but the Google's and Facebooks have tried to take it away from you. We have some of it here on Slashdot, but there needs to be mor
Everyone should be taught Logic.
Amusingly, having been taught too much Logic, I think everyone should be taught Statistics.
What they should be taught is inference and hypothesis testing and that they are different from correlation. The greatest misuse of statistics is to mistake correlation for causation, that is to supply the hypothesis without critically examining the inference.
A famous case of this is the inference Nobel Prize winner William F. Shockley, then at Stanford, made in the late 1960's about Black people. Based on their scores on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test he claimed that they were intellectual disadvantaged. He was not very careful about his choice of words of defining the inference he made carefully, and invited lots of criticism. In fact the raw statistics may have shown that Blacks at that time (N.B.) did score lower in intelligence tests. The flaw in that statement is the hypothesis it implies and what may be the errors in making any useful inference at all. Now we know that tests can be culturally biased, so that even words whose meaning is understood by most people, or the population from which the test was defined, may not be used by the minority, or that lack of quality in the educational resources of the time available to most Blacks put them at a disadvantage for having higher scores on that test.
Shockley, being in physics and then an engineer may not have been as practiced at deciphering test bias as a social scientist usually is.
I've studied basic mathematical logic. Digital logic design and optimization. Proof of correctness. Automatic theorem proving. Constructive mathematics. (Boyer-Moore theory, which is quite elegant.) Expert systems. Even "Dr. John's Mystery Hour", John McCarthy's AI course at Stanford. And I've used all that stuff. But not in recent years.
Statistics, though, is a win for everybody. Everybody needs enough statistics to calculate the expectations on a Lotto ticket. Programmers need enough statistics to get into machine learning.
Are you saying that you have never run across lists and lambdas in modern practice, odd?
Everyone needs enough critical thinking skills to diagnose the misuse of statistics in places as notable as the houses of Congress, let alone the flood of poorly controlled and intentionally biased medical trials reported almost nightly where the reputation of science is being damaged by pay outs from Big Pharma. The sample sizes should give you a clue quite apart from the Central Limit Theorem.
The factory school, the ones most of us attended, are somewhat inflexible about the different ways people learn and think.There may be too much emphasis on algebra in the middle-school and high school and not enough in geometry. In the history of math many of the problems presented in pre-algebra were fist solved as geometry problems, and can be solved as Cartesian graphs in today's world. So not only is a poly-modal approach better, e.g. draw me a picture, I am too blind to read the exponents of your algebraic expression easily; I can understand a geometric construction better.
In music, requiring everyone to learn a musical instrument, or maybe to sing, or all the related skills, such as ear-training and sight-reading or singing, is really not the point of teaching music. Some people do not have the neural tools to do any of these tasks, but that doesn't mean that music has no value to them, or that getting them to do musical tasks in a classroom has no value. In fact, doing the simplest task, such as beating in tempo with others has far reaching cognitive value, even more important is counting beats and getting rhythms. The simple task of dividing note values and meters relates directly to mathematical skill. These tasks teach social skills too. The participants have to listen and cooperate. in fact even deafness is not a barrier to this sort of activity which can quickly evolve to very complex patterns used in drumming. Recently I heard a mathematician say that math is really about discovering patterns, period. That is the basic skill involved in any music. Musical form does not exist without remembered patterns weather it is a simple tune or drum beat or the extended structure of a Mahler symphonic movement.
By analogy, learning to type doesn't mean that you can communicate in writing, Even learning correct semantics in natural language doesn't mean that you said anything significant. You may not cause a compile error, "Sorry, I don't understand what you said.", but even this mastery is far from a high standard. So your program compiles but does not have the intended result. You failed to communicate what you wanted. To achieve this does require greater skill than just learning the mechanics of the task. Coders might have been key punch clerks in the days of card decks, but now the extra steps are not needed and the people who are tasked to make meaningful programs are also coding. The two tasks are not the same. I have poor vision and so cause lots of typos when I write natural language and when I code. I will never be a very productive coder, but given the number of bug fixes per line of code, I could be a more productive programmer, possibly. I have to admit that age has taught me that I am neither a productive coder or programmer. I may be more skilled at writing than programming, as it turns out, but the differences between them do matter.
Teaching music in the elementary grades has far more value than just inspiring young kids to play. It is a cognitive exercise that has been shown to enhance concentration and skills general to learning language and math. Students who learn to count for reading and playing music, do better in reasoning tasks, particularly in math.
It is more important to teach thinking skills, including those they are useful to programmers, especially some of the mathematical foundations to programming, than to how to code, per se. Critical thinking skills, rhetoric, in the classical meaning of the term, and how to speak and write down you ideas and arguments, should come before coding as a life skill. Coding should never be used as a substitute for these more general skills. Problem solving skills can be taught in the context of much more readily available tasks such as math and reading and writing. That includes scientific reasoning, symbolic logic, analysis ( not calculus) or problem decomposition and synthesis. Decomposition is a real life skill quite separate from coding. Learning how to reason to particulars and ignore the extraneous and how to prioritize your effort, especially emotional effort, is a skill not mastered well by most people. That it can be related to programming is nice, but its use is far more general. Teaching it does not require the particulars of a coding discipline, maybe sets are enough. Anyway, it might be more valuable to teach programming from the point of view of the mathematics it is based on, set theory, number theory, Lambda Calculus, at some point in advanced education, and I am not just talking about Computer Science. Even high school math students should get more number theory than just algebra.
I think that there is little value in teaching students to code as opposed to learning math, or logic, or a foreign language, all of which have been mistakenly substituted for by coding or programming classes at various levels. When I was in College 45 years ago I got away with not have to learn another modern spoken language because I was taking programming courses, learning FORTRAN. Now, that did get me some useful skill, I made a living for a time off that.
Looking back on it, I regret not having to learn some French or German, for example, but I regard High School Geometry, learning Euclid, and a later course on Symbolic Math and Logic to be far more valuable. I am not arguing that some exposure be given to a programming language but as an extra, and I would advocate teaching python as opposed to java. Stay away from strongly typed declarative languages for this.
A course in Critical Thinking and rhetoric or general semantics would be for more valuable. But I am sure that marketers and politicians would oppose that. It is possible that people whose first exposure to programming language was BASIC or Java could transfer those to other languages, but think of the number of people turned off by that.
The web is using javascript more than ever because it gives the site owner the balance of power on the user's browser even though it is on his machine. I would love to disable javascript entirely except of course that so many sites depend on it.
I can imagine a security breach so severe that people have to disable javascript. It is only a matter of time before that happens. I can also imagine a low bandwith network off the Internet, a mesh based store and forward network in which minimalism is valued. This would revert back to static HTML minimal designs like I use because I have poor vision, but an effort to communicate off the Internet for safety and security and against spam would lead back to this.
I suppose the claim to fame here is that the company created an artificial hydrothermal vent. They verified that they drilled into a magma chanber and I presume that they tried to inject fluids, water, into it and get steam back but that something plugged up their well. How is this basically different from any other hydrothermal well?
Not too far north of San Francisco Ca, is the Gyser's Hydrotermal plnat operated by PG&E. It uses an existing hydrothermal system which presumably is based on ground water being heated up to steam by hot rock at depth, whether magma or not, and there are many such resources around the world.
Drilling directly into a magma chamber would entail many risks. First, the system is under high pressure, second, to try to use the heat energy of a melt would probably require introducing steam which would be a high pressure product, third, the steam would react with the magma and leach out minerals that would probably be a problem for the well, if not clogging it with parcipitated minerals, then introducing corrosion problems to any equipment being used with the heat source.
It might be the case that taping a magma chamber directly and treating the melt with steam might be a way to enhance the natural process of hydrothermal deposition of economic ores. One geochemical model I remember reading about claimed that gold deposition may be done very rapidly from some hydrothermal regimes.
Of course Slashdot is already a biased sample of public opinion and its polarities. I am assuming that the techies that post here already have some elitist pretentions, many of them thinking themselves superior in some way to people generally. The extremism of the dialogue reveals that. It is almost diagnostic for a Right Wing Bias since most Conservatives seem to come from that elitist POV.
The debate about the relative power of government vs. private business, is a straw man that like every rhetorical argument protects a much weaker agenda. The idea that government vs. business, regulation vs. non-regulation is a straw man is revealed by the access business people have to legislatures and the idea that most legislators are business men, having some experience running an organization that has a self interest and makes money. Increasingly it take lots of money to run for public office and that fact hasn't much assauged the Right Wingers here. There must be something in reality that most of them miss, or they must be lying about their true motives.
So the usual Conservative and Republican anti-government, or state's rights arguments hide a hidden agenda which is really the advantage they want for their elite to the disadvantage of those in the majority not in their elite. This is basically anti-democracy. But it is not fashionable to admit, so they have to couch it in a way that conceals the elitist ramifications which lead down the road away from inclusion of everybody to exclusion of most, to creation of oligarchies, to class war.
Even were that not true, the antisocial element of their individualism must be then considered, for to think that one does not have to compromise one-s self interest with the interests of everybody else in society, just labeling the need to be socially interconnected as "collectiveist" reveals again an elitism that results ultimately in unfairness and a breakdown of the Social Contract. The idea of fairness is crucial here, and even though competition and merit do apply to human affaird, the perception that unfairness is institutionalized is just as repugnant as forcing everyone to be equal. Ruthless metitocracy, even assuming objective standards, which is a streatch, is just has bad as ruthless equality, both being ruthless.
I am glad I live in California and all the more because if I would want the Red States to be out of my hair, my state could actually do quite well and maybe better without them. One solution to the political impasse and polarization much of it funded by capitalist oligarchs is succession.
Strangely, many deep-red states are also struggling with poverty and high unemployment.
Except that is not true. There are five states with unemployment worse than California, and none are red (they all voted for Obama in 2012).
If "this kind of bureaucratic overreach" was a simple explanation for high unemployment rates ...
How to lie with statistics, those states may already have populations that are at a disadvantage, people who are not elitist techies or Republicans, and who voted for Obama, The class war is on. The Conservative motto is "I've got mine, screw you!" I hope you are happy creating dissention and exclusion. It may come back to haunt you, and sooner than you think.
I think this job description of "passionate" is HR department and executive bullshit, meaningless fluff intended to discourage skepticism. How many people would dare to hire someone who is the opposite of a team player, whose attitude is "Prove to me that you are not full of Bullshit"? Damn few, even though many operations, including some of the most famous could use a BS monitor, someone who is skeptical, someone who challenges assumptions and decisions. There aren't enough skeptics. least of all among the VCs and investors. I'd love to kick some asses in tech,
So, go to any large inner city, especially one with ethnic and immigrant minorities, and what you see ifthat the effectiveness of the police rests on the trust they hold, or don't, with the locals. Conversely, eyes and ears are most effective against crime if the authorities have the cooperation of the residents, far more effective than any amount of weapons and other tactical tools.
The Syrian government is armed to the teeth, thanks to the Russians, and now three years on in their civil war, they haven't crushed the rebels who started off with no weapons at all. How well armed you are is not as important as having the trust of your neighbors, and that includes the police. The Terror went on as long as it did because the people trusted the revolutionary councils to meat out justice, and when the tide of opinion was that they were abusing their power, they were deposed. Perception is far more powerful than weaponry. The enslaved or repressed have to agree at some level with their oppressors, or if people trust the police to act fairly, the police have far more power than just what weapons they hold.