Indeed, laptops on campus often seem to end up used for that more than anything else
And the problem with that is?
communications
That is assuming that wherever they are on campus, they have some way to connect to the campus network and/or the internet. Not always applicable for every corner of every campus.
You make the false assumption that "communication" means "online". Emails can be edited offline, family photos viewed offline, etc... etc...
a bargain at twice the price
Not sure if you'd still be saying that after paying for licenses for the software that they "just have to have".
Yeah, I would. But then I don't obsess over costs while handwaving away benefits.
You may end up buying the laptop for $1,000; but you'll probably end up spending another $1,000 on the software that your child has to have, and the hardware upgrades to make it work properly.
And the problem with that is? Other than you seemingly not have seen how cheap student editions of software are (I have, when my wife was in college two years ago), and your inexplicable belief that a reasonably current laptop will require some kind of hardware upgrade.
And meanwhile, you're now $2,000 futher in debt than you would have been had you told that child to just use the lab like you did back when you were in school.
Yeah, when I was in school we had to walk uphill (both ways!) through six feet of snow to get to the computer - and we liked it! (Additionally - see comment above about obsessing over cost and handwaving away benefits.)
Spend $1,000 on that new laptop, or instead use the same $1,000 to take out less in student loans? That should be a pretty easy choice.
Indeed it is easy - a laptop is available to my (hypothetical) child 24/7 wherever on campus they need or want to use it. It's entertainment, communications, education, etc... etc... in one compact package.
the Zealots are always willing to burn a heretic. Dyson is one of the greats
Dyson worked as an analyst for RAF Bomber Command at RAF Wyton during World War II, where he would come to create what would be later known as operational research..... his major awards and accomplishments run for pages....
Dyson Sphere, Project Orion - on and on.,.
And some people are willing to take a celebrities opinion on anything. It doesn't matter is it's soap or global warming - going 'celebrity x must be right because they are famous' is bad.
And God knows there are a sh*tload of mediocre minds involved with gerbil wormening Not to mention with Lefties, politicians, movie stars.. If movie stars are in favour of it, it pretty much guarantees it's a bad idea.
Fifth grade name calling - check. Blind stereotyping - check.
You are your own worst argument as to why we should believe Dyson.
Thanks largely to digital search mechanisms, it's way easier to grab this information from the pages of a reputable townie news service website than to sift through a printed paper.
Assuming your town has such a service. Mine doesn't. We don't have a TV or a radio station either. Heck, if we didn't have a pair of local newspapers (a daily and a weekly) and a couple of independents that come and go - it would be impossible to get any local news. Our local (non commuter) population is less than half the total population and is mostly older. The commuter portion of our population tends to think of themselves as citizens of the metropolis they commute to - and only emerge when it comes time to vote against school levies.
My question is... what's to stop the small newspapers from firing the majority of their staff and operating like Internet newspapers with self-moderated volunteer staffs?
If all the old line, stale, MSM news outlets that people love to bitch about closed up shop, the blogosphere would have precious little to do.
Heck, half the blogosphere doesn't link to MSM anyhow. They link to other blogs that talk about other blogs who link to other blogs opinions about other blogs links. One article (MSM or otherwise) generates hundreds or thousands of incestous links.
I.E. it wouldn't take much of a MSM to keep the blogosphere buzzing.
they're providing a reward for news papers that wish to return to reporting news instead of making it.
Of course the belief that papers can return to what they never were in the first place is based on being largely ignorant of the actual history of mass media.
The RFID could be done properly. The handles pop out as you are within a meter of your door. Then the car starts while you are sitting.
That's still not done properly. Maybe I'm within a meter of the car because I'm getting in the trunk. Or fetching the coffee cup I left on the roof. Maybe I'm sitting in the seat, but not actually ready to leave because I'm still talking to someone. Or reading the magazine I just picked up. Or fetching something I left on the passenger seat. Or in the glove box.
The grandparent has it right - this is a usability nightmare.
Also, exactly how much does it really cost to publish this stuff online? The authors aren't paid. What are the costs associated?
More than you might think. While the costs of storage and bandwidth can be modest if you already have a significant IT infrastructure to co-opt a portion of... You still need to pay someone to design and operate the site. An institution the size of MIT will be producing a great deal of material, and that means you'll need a paid professional running the site. It's not an amateur hour job.
Then there are the costs that most people who invoke 'publishing online' rarely realize even exist.*
Working backwards from content ready to deliver to the webmaster - you have editorial costs, someone has to ensure the papers are ready for publication. Again, with the size and prestige of MIT that means paid professionals to ensure and maintain quality results and timely completion. This isn't somebodies blog or live journal where it's no biggie if that essay you promised your readers in the spring would be ready by the 4th of July - but doesn't actually appear until Labor Day, and they forgive minor spelling, grammatical, and design errors and flaws.
Even before it gets to that stage - you need somebody to organize peer reviews. And again, with an institution the size of MIT that will be a non trivial task and likely one or more full time professional positions.
Etc... etc... Content doesn't magically appear on the website, complete and finished. There's quite a bit of work and more than a few people 'behind the scenes'.
Now being MIT, they can probably pawn some of this off onto undergrads, reducing the cost. Some of it will be work added to already existing positions, and thus while the cost may end up being obscured they are still there.
* My impression that a majority of netizens spend the majority of their time where the background work is performed by volunteers, and the content is provided, prepared, and maintained by users and volunteers. They really have no idea just how fast the costs mount when you actually have to pay people to do the work. Just as an example - for a lark, while I was editing Wikipedia actively, I kept track of the time I spent editing in one month... And found I'd spent nearly 35 hours over the course of that month editing or doing research for the articles I was editing. At current local minimum wage ($8.55), Wikipedia would owe me (one very low volume casual editor) $300 - and that's just the direct costs and does not account for overhead or the costs of the related research materials!
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Having (largely) exhausted the superheroes already reasonably known in popular culture, they're trying to stretch into riskier territory.
So I guess you mean children raised in the Western world and only compared to the last couple of generations. Perhaps since the last World War/Depression. So that would be the 50's onward. But wait, that was right around the Vietnam erra. An erra where news was not sanitized for the masses to protect us from being directly exposed to the gore, death, and destruction that war causes.
Actually, the situation is the reverse from you mistakenly assume. Prior to 60's and 70's the news, and media in general *was* sanitized to remove gore, etc... etc... That was the whole point of the Hays Code and the fuss over comics in the 50's that lead to the Comics Code Authority.
Unless you locked your 9 year olds in the basement, they were plenty exposed to real violence.
Only if you and your hypothetical 9 year old lived in an location where street violence was common, no they weren't 'plenty exposed' to real violence. It was strictly controlled in the media, and not all that common in real life.
So yeah, definitely not something I'd willingly expose a young child to, however this "We're all going to hell in a handbasket" routine is tired and completely unfounded.
It's only 'tired and unfounded' if you are completely unaware of what actually happened in the past.
Slashdot response is invariant of the particulars of the case. They are also ignorant of the fact that the right of free speech does not protect you from the consequences of exercising it, never has and (hopefully) never will.
Saying one thing - yet doing another.
on
Google Apps Deciphered
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And yet, to dampen our somewhat overly enthusiastic spirits, along comes none other than RMS himself in the role of the cowboy philosopher, with words of warning regarding the collective wisdom of committing all our eggs to the Google/Cloud basket: "Hold on there, pilgrim." The present book review is not the place to engage in this particular debate
Except - that's exactly what you do throughout your entire 'review'. Instead of actually review the book, you use continually use the contents of the books as springboard for expressing your point of view in that debate. Disingenuous at best. Dishonest at worst.
Nice handwaving, as precisely none of those examples have anything to do with what you quoted. Even so, if (when) new discoveries relating to stellar formation are discovered, we rerun the equations and simulations again - and compare them to the abundant evidence that fills the sky. Day and night.
We don't need to form a star to validate the theory.
I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles.
They aren't as viable as you might think because flyback stages are expensive to build, expensive to operate and are maintenance intensive.
The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack.
Not entirely true actually... While they are the heaviest, the generally aren't the most expensive. When it comes to spacecraft, cost varies strongly with complexity and only weakly (if at all) with mass. Generally speaking, the higher you go in a vehicle the more complex the engineering and manufacturing gets because it endures more extreme environments and because the impact of any excess weight grows disproportionately. A pound in the Nth stage is a problem because it is carried all the way to orbit - while a pound in the 1st stage can end up being lost in the noise.
maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?
Less than you might think, and frequently it can cost money rather than saving it because of the need to provide landing and refurbishment facilities which a throwaway first stage does not require. This means higher up front costs in engineering the flyback booster and building those facilities, as well as higher ongoing costs.
They key to problem, as always, is flight rate - the more you fly a vehicle, the less it costs. But to make a vehicle that flies often, you need to make it bigger and attractive to a wider variety of customers... Which is one of the key compromises lead to many of the Shuttle's problems.
Fair use is an affirmative defense, you can't just claim it as a right but have to prove your use was "fair" in court.
Mod parent up -- this quote is key. Popular folklore on the Internets holds that there is a certain percentage of material you can post that qualifies as fair use. That is bogus.
It's much worse than that - popular folklore on the Internet holds that "fair use" is a magic wand. All you have to do is invoke it (believe strongly enough that you are right) and you are magically protected.
Fission bombs and fission reactor both started with something cold fusion notably lacks - physics and a sound theoretical basis.
To be fair, just because, for once in human history, useful technology was theoretically conceived of before it was discovered, doesn't at all mean all future discoveries will follow the same path. Einstein could well have been an exception humanity will never see again.
Had it been 'once in human history', you'd have a point. But Einstein was just the latest in a long line, and reality he was just describing a process already known empirically. Fission bombs and reactors no more need his equations than Watt needed to understand the atomic structure of water to build his steam engines.
There certainly isn't a long history of every useful effect/material/etc. being theorized of, before it was discovered. There are far too many instances which run contrary to that model.
But there is a long history of discovering potentially useful effects and then coming up with a theoretical basis to describe them (which is what Einstein did). Cold fusion has a history of not doing so however.
I don't find the lack of a theoretical basis to be very troubling. As Asimov said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'".
The problem is, the 'hmm... that's funny...' part was twenty years ago - and precisely zero progress has been made in the intervening twenty years. The lack of a theoretical basis, beyond mystical handwaving, after two decades should be deeply troubling. The lack of serious attempts to even develop at theoretical basis should be horrifying.
The question I have is whether or not there's really anything out of the ordinary happening. Every discovery of something genuinely new can lead to great discoveries once it's truly understood.
To answer that question, and to understand the results - we come right back to the same thing... A theoretical basis. You can't understand what it happening and whether it is out of the ordinary or not unless you can produce a theory that explains it. Without a theory, at best its just cargo cult science.
For experiments of this scale, yes - repeatability is everything. If you can't repeat it, you can't study it.
We don't need to repeat the formation of a star, the equations and basic physics that define what happens are unchanging. We don't need to repeat the creation of the universe, as we can (with suitable instruments) measure the unchanging evidence of what happened in the past any time we please.
The question is if its them or the media that's calling it cold fusion...
I can't find their original presentation or press release anywhere online - but one of the authors of this paper previously authored on with Fleischmann and they explicitly link their work to the cold fusion work of Pons & Fleischmann... So it's not hard to make the inference.
I spent the better part of a 17 year Navy career testing and working with atomic weapons and follow on technology. In 1941 the notion of an atomic bomb was science fiction. It took a war to make the thing work.
It may have been science fiction to the general public (which includes all non physicists), but it did in fact have a sound theoretical basis. (Unlike cold fusion.) It didn't take a war to make them work, it took a war to spur their engineering development. They would have worked regardless.
I can't to this day discuss many of the things I know but when I left the service in 1963 I was inspecting little light 1 kiloton tank killers and rumors had an atomic rifle grenade...
You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
Lord only knows how far things have come in 40 plus years.
Not as far as you fantasize they were 45 years ago. (You don't seem to have kept up with the field, at lot has been declassified since 1963.) I invite you to check out Carey Sublette's excellent Nuclear Weapons FAQ and then join us on the Usenet group alt.war.nuclear for further discussion.
My experience has been that is you can envision something it has a basis in fact.
I can envision plaid polka dotted elephants - but their only basis in fact is the consumption of psychoactive chemicals.
Can you even imagine how devastating cold fusion would be to the oil industry? I wouldn't be a bit surprised to discover that cold fusion is already a reality. It - like many other related things - never see the light of day for many reasons.
Yeah, when all else fails - invoke a conspiracy theory. It relieves you of dealing with the really hard questions... Like the lack of a theoretical basis for cold fusion. Like the fact that despite twenty years of trying, the experiments cannot be replicated on a reliable basis. It's all Big Oil and their evil minions.
Unlike nitroglycerine, nuclear fission bombs didn't start with a lab explosion. Simalarly, nuclear fission power plants didn't start with a lab fire or a flask boilover (though there WERE a few such incidents along the way during the manufacturing-engineering phase, once they knew what they were doing but had some issues with knowing how to avoid doing it accidentally).
Fission bombs and fission reactor both started with something cold fusion notably lacks - physics and a sound theoretical basis.
To put it another way - it sounds like you are invoking the "they laughed at Christopher Columbus" defense, to which I reply "they laughed at Bozo the Clown too".
Slashdot Mirror
And the problem with that is?
You make the false assumption that "communication" means "online". Emails can be edited offline, family photos viewed offline, etc... etc...
Yeah, I would. But then I don't obsess over costs while handwaving away benefits.
And the problem with that is? Other than you seemingly not have seen how cheap student editions of software are (I have, when my wife was in college two years ago), and your inexplicable belief that a reasonably current laptop will require some kind of hardware upgrade.
Yeah, when I was in school we had to walk uphill (both ways!) through six feet of snow to get to the computer - and we liked it! (Additionally - see comment above about obsessing over cost and handwaving away benefits.)
Indeed it is easy - a laptop is available to my (hypothetical) child 24/7 wherever on campus they need or want to use it. It's entertainment, communications, education, etc... etc... in one compact package.
It's a bargain at twice the price.
And some people are willing to take a celebrities opinion on anything. It doesn't matter is it's soap or global warming - going 'celebrity x must be right because they are famous' is bad.
Fifth grade name calling - check. Blind stereotyping - check.
You are your own worst argument as to why we should believe Dyson.
History cares little for what you like to think.
Assuming your town has such a service. Mine doesn't. We don't have a TV or a radio station either. Heck, if we didn't have a pair of local newspapers (a daily and a weekly) and a couple of independents that come and go - it would be impossible to get any local news. Our local (non commuter) population is less than half the total population and is mostly older. The commuter portion of our population tends to think of themselves as citizens of the metropolis they commute to - and only emerge when it comes time to vote against school levies.
Because you get what you pay for.
Heck, half the blogosphere doesn't link to MSM anyhow. They link to other blogs that talk about other blogs who link to other blogs opinions about other blogs links. One article (MSM or otherwise) generates hundreds or thousands of incestous links.
I.E. it wouldn't take much of a MSM to keep the blogosphere buzzing.
Of course the belief that papers can return to what they never were in the first place is based on being largely ignorant of the actual history of mass media.
The idiot is the one who handwaves away both the post I quoted and my concerns over how they behavior described could operate.
Well, if you are organized and have a clue, you don't need to dig for your keys. You put your hand in your pocket and there they are.
That's still not done properly. Maybe I'm within a meter of the car because I'm getting in the trunk. Or fetching the coffee cup I left on the roof. Maybe I'm sitting in the seat, but not actually ready to leave because I'm still talking to someone. Or reading the magazine I just picked up. Or fetching something I left on the passenger seat. Or in the glove box.
The grandparent has it right - this is a usability nightmare.
More than you might think. While the costs of storage and bandwidth can be modest if you already have a significant IT infrastructure to co-opt a portion of... You still need to pay someone to design and operate the site. An institution the size of MIT will be producing a great deal of material, and that means you'll need a paid professional running the site. It's not an amateur hour job.
Then there are the costs that most people who invoke 'publishing online' rarely realize even exist.*
Working backwards from content ready to deliver to the webmaster - you have editorial costs, someone has to ensure the papers are ready for publication. Again, with the size and prestige of MIT that means paid professionals to ensure and maintain quality results and timely completion. This isn't somebodies blog or live journal where it's no biggie if that essay you promised your readers in the spring would be ready by the 4th of July - but doesn't actually appear until Labor Day, and they forgive minor spelling, grammatical, and design errors and flaws.
Even before it gets to that stage - you need somebody to organize peer reviews. And again, with an institution the size of MIT that will be a non trivial task and likely one or more full time professional positions.
Etc... etc... Content doesn't magically appear on the website, complete and finished. There's quite a bit of work and more than a few people 'behind the scenes'.
Now being MIT, they can probably pawn some of this off onto undergrads, reducing the cost. Some of it will be work added to already existing positions, and thus while the cost may end up being obscured they are still there.
* My impression that a majority of netizens spend the majority of their time where the background work is performed by volunteers, and the content is provided, prepared, and maintained by users and volunteers. They really have no idea just how fast the costs mount when you actually have to pay people to do the work. Just as an example - for a lark, while I was editing Wikipedia actively, I kept track of the time I spent editing in one month... And found I'd spent nearly 35 hours over the course of that month editing or doing research for the articles I was editing. At current local minimum wage ($8.55), Wikipedia would owe me (one very low volume casual editor) $300 - and that's just the direct costs and does not account for overhead or the costs of the related research materials!
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Having (largely) exhausted the superheroes already reasonably known in popular culture, they're trying to stretch into riskier territory.
What planet did you grow up on?
Actually, the situation is the reverse from you mistakenly assume. Prior to 60's and 70's the news, and media in general *was* sanitized to remove gore, etc... etc... That was the whole point of the Hays Code and the fuss over comics in the 50's that lead to the Comics Code Authority.
Only if you and your hypothetical 9 year old lived in an location where street violence was common, no they weren't 'plenty exposed' to real violence. It was strictly controlled in the media, and not all that common in real life.
It's only 'tired and unfounded' if you are completely unaware of what actually happened in the past.
Ah, you have me there... :)
Slashdot response is invariant of the particulars of the case. They are also ignorant of the fact that the right of free speech does not protect you from the consequences of exercising it, never has and (hopefully) never will.
Except - that's exactly what you do throughout your entire 'review'. Instead of actually review the book, you use continually use the contents of the books as springboard for expressing your point of view in that debate. Disingenuous at best. Dishonest at worst.
Nice handwaving, as precisely none of those examples have anything to do with what you quoted. Even so, if (when) new discoveries relating to stellar formation are discovered, we rerun the equations and simulations again - and compare them to the abundant evidence that fills the sky. Day and night.
We don't need to form a star to validate the theory.
They aren't as viable as you might think because flyback stages are expensive to build, expensive to operate and are maintenance intensive.
Not entirely true actually... While they are the heaviest, the generally aren't the most expensive. When it comes to spacecraft, cost varies strongly with complexity and only weakly (if at all) with mass. Generally speaking, the higher you go in a vehicle the more complex the engineering and manufacturing gets because it endures more extreme environments and because the impact of any excess weight grows disproportionately. A pound in the Nth stage is a problem because it is carried all the way to orbit - while a pound in the 1st stage can end up being lost in the noise.
Less than you might think, and frequently it can cost money rather than saving it because of the need to provide landing and refurbishment facilities which a throwaway first stage does not require. This means higher up front costs in engineering the flyback booster and building those facilities, as well as higher ongoing costs.
They key to problem, as always, is flight rate - the more you fly a vehicle, the less it costs. But to make a vehicle that flies often, you need to make it bigger and attractive to a wider variety of customers... Which is one of the key compromises lead to many of the Shuttle's problems.
It's much worse than that - popular folklore on the Internet holds that "fair use" is a magic wand. All you have to do is invoke it (believe strongly enough that you are right) and you are magically protected.
Had it been 'once in human history', you'd have a point. But Einstein was just the latest in a long line, and reality he was just describing a process already known empirically. Fission bombs and reactors no more need his equations than Watt needed to understand the atomic structure of water to build his steam engines.
But there is a long history of discovering potentially useful effects and then coming up with a theoretical basis to describe them (which is what Einstein did). Cold fusion has a history of not doing so however.
The problem is, the 'hmm... that's funny...' part was twenty years ago - and precisely zero progress has been made in the intervening twenty years. The lack of a theoretical basis, beyond mystical handwaving, after two decades should be deeply troubling. The lack of serious attempts to even develop at theoretical basis should be horrifying.
To answer that question, and to understand the results - we come right back to the same thing... A theoretical basis. You can't understand what it happening and whether it is out of the ordinary or not unless you can produce a theory that explains it. Without a theory, at best its just cargo cult science.
Yeah, I forgot about the Davy Crockett.
For experiments of this scale, yes - repeatability is everything. If you can't repeat it, you can't study it.
We don't need to repeat the formation of a star, the equations and basic physics that define what happens are unchanging. We don't need to repeat the creation of the universe, as we can (with suitable instruments) measure the unchanging evidence of what happened in the past any time we please.
Apples and oranges.
I can't find their original presentation or press release anywhere online - but one of the authors of this paper previously authored on with Fleischmann and they explicitly link their work to the cold fusion work of Pons & Fleischmann... So it's not hard to make the inference.
It may have been science fiction to the general public (which includes all non physicists), but it did in fact have a sound theoretical basis. (Unlike cold fusion.) It didn't take a war to make them work, it took a war to spur their engineering development. They would have worked regardless.
You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
Not as far as you fantasize they were 45 years ago. (You don't seem to have kept up with the field, at lot has been declassified since 1963.) I invite you to check out Carey Sublette's excellent Nuclear Weapons FAQ and then join us on the Usenet group alt.war.nuclear for further discussion.
I can envision plaid polka dotted elephants - but their only basis in fact is the consumption of psychoactive chemicals.
Yeah, when all else fails - invoke a conspiracy theory. It relieves you of dealing with the really hard questions... Like the lack of a theoretical basis for cold fusion. Like the fact that despite twenty years of trying, the experiments cannot be replicated on a reliable basis. It's all Big Oil and their evil minions.
Fission bombs and fission reactor both started with something cold fusion notably lacks - physics and a sound theoretical basis.
To put it another way - it sounds like you are invoking the "they laughed at Christopher Columbus" defense, to which I reply "they laughed at Bozo the Clown too".