If google had the chance to make the kind of impact on the world and on history that the Wright Brothers did, I'm pretty sure they would trade that kind of impact for the chance for their search business to be successful 105 years later.
That would be like saying, "Man. If scientists Exxon were to invent cold fusion that would TOTALLY UNDERMINE THEIR GAS BUSINESS because someone else might steal the design and make more money off of it!"
Most of this comment isn't even a reply to what I wrote, but here:
"If you want to try to cure yourself of the problem and remove the cultural blinders, you have to do a Nigger Thought Experiment. If you prefer, you can do a Kike Thought Experiment. Instead of the Danish cartoons, image a big-lipped, bug-eyed 'nigger' eating a giant watermelon. Or perhaps you'd prefer a cloaked, hook-nosed 'kike' with a giant bag of gold 'jewing' some gentile out of his money? Would you be defending the right of the papers to publish such cartoons based on the 'enlightenment values' of the West? Would you be so proud of your precious 'free speech'?"
Yeah. This is allowed. Organizations like the KKK? Allowed to spew their hatred. That argument is totally bogus. The civilized world doesn't riot when people publish offensive stuff. Most of the time, it gets an hour or so of press and then ignored.
The cartoons were targetted at a very specific and very vocal muslim population that uses violence as a means to solving their problems. As people who want to be in prominent places, they can be ridiculed. I can see how the way it was done is *highly offensive*, but that doesn't make it okay to burn stuff down. You're just deluding yourself into the most extremeist form of political correctness if you think so.
"Here is a small list of some of the things we do to Muslims, without even a hint that there might be some moral issues involved"
You and I both know that's bullshit. No one imprisons muslim women to take them away from their families just for fun. No one bombs innocent children, calls it a mistake, but really meant to do it on purpose. No one chops down olive tree groves just to laugh at dejected muslim faces.
Lastly, It's clear you've never read the history of the Palestinian refugees and how they got there. Before you reply - and I'm pretty sure there's going to be a reply here - go look up exactly what forced Palestinian people from their lands. [Try "Arab Israelis" as a start"]
It's just like Jon Stewart says. The moderate is quiet primarily because you don't see moderate protestors out on the streets, chanting "USE COMMON SENSE! FOR SHAME, THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE DOING BEFORE YOU DO IT!"
What kind of protest would that be?
/* however, I really do think that a large portion of muslims living in islamic countries do believe in this sort of protest. the funny thing is that most of these people who are protesting have never seen the cartoons. and the real funny thing is that many of the protestors in the most extremist groups can't actually read the papers in arabic, much less the ones printed in european languages. you're really dealing with an ignorant, uneducated minority group in that case, and that population of people isn't going to stop burning shit */
I just wanted to let you know that it's not a foregone conclusion, but that I do research in this area, and nativism has fallen very far out of favor. "Geometry is instinctual" seems like a very high degree of misguided nativism.
Of course, that's like saying that your eye knows geometry, because it's able to bend light in very specific ways and be flexible across a wide variety of situations. Not only that, but it adjusts to geometrically position objects in your visual field to give maximum light exposure. But eyes don't know geometry.
I'm not saying that there aren't some very neat aspects of our visual systems. I study visual systems. But this seems more like an artifact of visual systems than it does "knowledge of geometry".
You can patent atreatment? Like, if you discover that applying orange slices specially cut with a very clever machine in concentric circles around my head cures me of AIDS, while I understand your patenting of this very special device (which is the only device that can produce these very special orange slices), I don't understand your patenting of the CLINICAL USE.
I mean, presumably, once I have one of these devices or I get ahold of some of these orange slices, I ought to be able to use them, right?
"It strikes me as interesting that he's out to "debunk" intelligent design. Isn't the complaint that everyone here on Slashdot makes against it that it's unfalsifiable- unable to be proved false?"
There is a nearly universal skepticism in Academia (and, well, the world at large) for things that have no evidenciary support. Demonstrating that I.D. has no evidenciary support is the same as "debunking" it. A serious claim need not be falsifiable to be wrong, it simply must have no support. It is up to the scientist to demonstrate "the burden of proof".
Intelligent Design as a "theory" has never once offered any proof that has ever stood up to any intellectual rigor. More importantly, as a "scientific" theory (as proponents claim), it has never inspired or guided the production of new, published, empirical data.
I'm not trying to sound like a smartass - and I really think this is a neat discovery, to isolate an associated molecule, perhaps - but did anyone with a serious biology background really believe that a neurally modulated social interaction that had obvious and enduring systemic physiological effects *wasn't* associated with circulating factors or hormones?
I mean, there's a systemic effect that's present for a limited duration. I'm not trying to "ruin love", but why should it have worked any differently?
If anyone's seen the Enron Movie "The Smartest Guys in the Room", the whole thing sounds a lot like the Enron scandal. Enron essentially posted "earnings" which weren't really earnings yet; they were scamming their stockholders into thinking their company was making money by "projecting" future earnings into their current quarterly earnings reports.
Obviously, this is illegal. It may be hard to imagine why it would be illegal to do the same thing in reverse - i.e., project losses without any actual substantial loss taking place - but the MPAA/RIAA is showing that it can be a valuable force in getting the entertainment industry leverage in legislation.
Just seems like a very strange practice, projecting ghost earnings or ghost losses to manipulate the market. And also an illegal one.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
"It's theorized that groups of Europeans are immune to AIDS due to surviving the black plague"
By who?
"I don't know if it's accurate or not, but there's speculation that generations of people who haven't been exposed to previous flu oubreaks have less of an innate response to new outbreaks."
Sure, but I'd be willing to be that almost every American has had quite a dose of exposure to the flu. An "outbreak" strain or not.
I was just wondering if any biologist/virologist/etc had ever suggested anything to the effect of "Flu outbreaks happen about once-a-generation because the chance of one flu outbreak happening is affected by previously ineffective virus mutations", as you seem to imply. I'm not sure if that's what you were implying, but you did suggest that this had been studied, and I was wondering where, and by whom.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
On the basis of what data?
Flu outbreaks due to virus mutation have no such constraint that I know about. I'd really appreciate a reference on this one.
Like many others who attack ID, you are illegitimately broadening the scope and beating up on a straw man. The only question in scope here is the question of species formation. Creation of the universe, etc., while many ID proponents certainly have strong opinions on it, is not part of the core theory, any more than it's part of the core theory of darwinism.
What? No I'm not. Intelligent Design is an absurd argument which tries to say that species formation (a very complex thing) is less likely than a much more complex thing (God creating species and accounting for their diversity). No matter how unlikely species formation is, God, as an "intelligent designer", is more unlikely.
"The Intelligent Designer doesn't have to be the Christian God, nor does it even need to be a God at all. It could be little green men."
No. This is a philosophical problem called "First Cause". This is what will happen. You will say it was little green men. I will say something like, "And where did they come from?", and you will say something like, "Oh, the little green men before them." And I will say, "And where did THEY come from?" and you will say, "The little green men before THEM". And then at some point, we will reach the end.
Intelligent Design is an absurd argument that rests on assigning the complexity of origins of one thing (say, for instance, very complicated molecules) to the infinately more complex and unlikely appearance of something that could have created these things (say, God). The reason we must have God as the intelligent designer is the simple reason that God gives us the clever property of having always existed and very nice things that solve the issue in the Argument of First Cause. Not nicely, mind you, because there IS no way to solve that issue nicely (Where did GOD come from? etc).
Intelligent Designers are very clever creationists in sheep's clothing. This is not a difficult thing to understand. They don't want to talk about God, because as soon as they do, they give up the game.
There is no science in Intelligent Design. If you can name one paper in a recently published, reputable scientific journal (i.e., peer reviewed) with new empirical data (not simply a review article of previously published hogwash arguments, but NEW EMPIRICAL DATA), that is derived from the viewpoint of intelligent design, I will stand corrected.
ID People don't want to talk about the intelligent designer. They say things like, "You can't look at a watch and tell things about the watchmaker!", and other absurdities.
If they talk about "God" as the Intelligent Designer, they give up the game and lose. So they talk about the Intelligent Designer as some sort of force we don't need to understand anything about to understand Intelligent Design. It's an absurd argument.
This whole thing was taken care of by Socrates quite some time ago (well, Plato, in Apologia). Socrates asks, "Who believes in Equestrian Phenomena, and does not acknowledge horses?" The answer of course, is no one. "Who believes in human phenomena, and does not acknowledge humans?" Again. "And who believes in divine phenomena, but does not acknowledge gods?" Answer: Intelligent Design proponents.
Evolution isn't a theory about the start of life. Evolution is an attempt to explain variability (and patterns of variability) among and within different species, and how that variability is systematically affected by certain factors.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, commence flame war.
this directly relates to a story that was originally posted under the YRO heading. it makes sense to keep posting information about that story there, because people who read yro.slashdot.org might want to know the latest in the Sony DRM rootkit saga.
Infinium Labs Legal Team: "omg you posted teh libelous statements against us and damaged our emotional reputation and possibly our physical reputation!"
Slashdot Legal Team: "..."
Infinium Labs Legal Team: "We cast Jack Thompson lvl 10!"
Slashdot Legal Team: "...he hates you guys, and everything about gaming."
Jack Thompson: "omg you put words in my mouth you infuriating pixelate! Prepare the PR-machine for WAR!"
yes, the imaging you're talking about is called metabolic mapping. radioactive labels are placed on otherwise normal glucose molecules, and as those glucose molecules make their way to placed they're required (i.e., places of high activity), the presence of their radioactive tracer is mapped using the emission of annihilation photons. At least, in PET scanning. In other forms, like 2-deoxy-glucose mapping, other techniques are used to basically study the same thing.
the images are then colorized, usually using a colormap called "jet"; blue towards low values, red towards high, green and yellow in the middle (essentially, an approximation of wavelength -> color).
Since many of them were taken with techniques insensitive to color, why does this surprise you?
Most of the photographs in your biology and neuroscience textbooks are artificially colorized [what, you think that when your brain gets very active, it also gets very red? =) ].
I was just pointing out that Penny Arcade can do whatever the fuck well they please so long as there's no reasonable charge that they provide information possibly harmful to his physical wellbeing. And that's a *good thing* (tm).
Except they're not saying they think he's an idiot and disagree with his opinion, they're saying they hate him, which is very different. If the T-Shirt said "I disagree with Jack Thompson," that would be a different story.
And he's saying they're vile sinners who are going to hell!
I think hate is the appropriate word in that case.
Why is the T-Shirt a bit much? Thompson has publicly expressed his views against a certain industry and group of individuals, and some of those people are expressing the view that Thompson is an idiot and his opinion is asinine.
If you say that a group of people are vile sinners who are going to hell, you can bet damn right that group of people is going to publicly disagree with you. I don't really see the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The google search for Miserable Failure seems to have been uncorrupted by this latest move.
A true testament to Google's ability to gracefully decay when replacing all the substantive information with political crud.
If google had the chance to make the kind of impact on the world and on history that the Wright Brothers did, I'm pretty sure they would trade that kind of impact for the chance for their search business to be successful 105 years later.
That would be like saying, "Man. If scientists Exxon were to invent cold fusion that would TOTALLY UNDERMINE THEIR GAS BUSINESS because someone else might steal the design and make more money off of it!"
Most of this comment isn't even a reply to what I wrote, but here:
"If you want to try to cure yourself of the problem and remove the cultural blinders, you have to do a Nigger Thought Experiment. If you prefer, you can do a Kike Thought Experiment. Instead of the Danish cartoons, image a big-lipped, bug-eyed 'nigger' eating a giant watermelon. Or perhaps you'd prefer a cloaked, hook-nosed 'kike' with a giant bag of gold 'jewing' some gentile out of his money? Would you be defending the right of the papers to publish such cartoons based on the 'enlightenment values' of the West? Would you be so proud of your precious 'free speech'?"
Yeah. This is allowed. Organizations like the KKK? Allowed to spew their hatred. That argument is totally bogus. The civilized world doesn't riot when people publish offensive stuff. Most of the time, it gets an hour or so of press and then ignored.
The cartoons were targetted at a very specific and very vocal muslim population that uses violence as a means to solving their problems. As people who want to be in prominent places, they can be ridiculed. I can see how the way it was done is *highly offensive*, but that doesn't make it okay to burn stuff down. You're just deluding yourself into the most extremeist form of political correctness if you think so.
"Here is a small list of some of the things we do to Muslims, without even a hint that there might be some moral issues involved"
You and I both know that's bullshit. No one imprisons muslim women to take them away from their families just for fun. No one bombs innocent children, calls it a mistake, but really meant to do it on purpose. No one chops down olive tree groves just to laugh at dejected muslim faces.
Lastly, It's clear you've never read the history of the Palestinian refugees and how they got there. Before you reply - and I'm pretty sure there's going to be a reply here - go look up exactly what forced Palestinian people from their lands. [Try "Arab Israelis" as a start"]
It's just like Jon Stewart says. The moderate is quiet primarily because you don't see moderate protestors out on the streets, chanting "USE COMMON SENSE! FOR SHAME, THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE DOING BEFORE YOU DO IT!"
/* however, I really do think that a large portion of muslims living in islamic countries do believe in this sort of protest. the funny thing is that most of these people who are protesting have never seen the cartoons. and the real funny thing is that many of the protestors in the most extremist groups can't actually read the papers in arabic, much less the ones printed in european languages. you're really dealing with an ignorant, uneducated minority group in that case, and that population of people isn't going to stop burning shit */
What kind of protest would that be?
I just wanted to let you know that it's not a foregone conclusion, but that I do research in this area, and nativism has fallen very far out of favor. "Geometry is instinctual" seems like a very high degree of misguided nativism.
Of course, that's like saying that your eye knows geometry, because it's able to bend light in very specific ways and be flexible across a wide variety of situations. Not only that, but it adjusts to geometrically position objects in your visual field to give maximum light exposure. But eyes don't know geometry.
I'm not saying that there aren't some very neat aspects of our visual systems. I study visual systems. But this seems more like an artifact of visual systems than it does "knowledge of geometry".
You can patent atreatment? Like, if you discover that applying orange slices specially cut with a very clever machine in concentric circles around my head cures me of AIDS, while I understand your patenting of this very special device (which is the only device that can produce these very special orange slices), I don't understand your patenting of the CLINICAL USE.
I mean, presumably, once I have one of these devices or I get ahold of some of these orange slices, I ought to be able to use them, right?
"It strikes me as interesting that he's out to "debunk" intelligent design. Isn't the complaint that everyone here on Slashdot makes against it that it's unfalsifiable- unable to be proved false?"
There is a nearly universal skepticism in Academia (and, well, the world at large) for things that have no evidenciary support. Demonstrating that I.D. has no evidenciary support is the same as "debunking" it. A serious claim need not be falsifiable to be wrong, it simply must have no support. It is up to the scientist to demonstrate "the burden of proof".
Intelligent Design as a "theory" has never once offered any proof that has ever stood up to any intellectual rigor. More importantly, as a "scientific" theory (as proponents claim), it has never inspired or guided the production of new, published, empirical data.
It also has the potential to heal other nerve injuries, such as blindness, deafness, and those caused by stroke.
I'm not trying to sound like a smartass - and I really think this is a neat discovery, to isolate an associated molecule, perhaps - but did anyone with a serious biology background really believe that a neurally modulated social interaction that had obvious and enduring systemic physiological effects *wasn't* associated with circulating factors or hormones?
I mean, there's a systemic effect that's present for a limited duration. I'm not trying to "ruin love", but why should it have worked any differently?
If anyone's seen the Enron Movie "The Smartest Guys in the Room", the whole thing sounds a lot like the Enron scandal. Enron essentially posted "earnings" which weren't really earnings yet; they were scamming their stockholders into thinking their company was making money by "projecting" future earnings into their current quarterly earnings reports.
Obviously, this is illegal. It may be hard to imagine why it would be illegal to do the same thing in reverse - i.e., project losses without any actual substantial loss taking place - but the MPAA/RIAA is showing that it can be a valuable force in getting the entertainment industry leverage in legislation.
Just seems like a very strange practice, projecting ghost earnings or ghost losses to manipulate the market. And also an illegal one.
"It's theorized that groups of Europeans are immune to AIDS due to surviving the black plague"
By who?
"I don't know if it's accurate or not, but there's speculation that generations of people who haven't been exposed to previous flu oubreaks have less of an innate response to new outbreaks."
Sure, but I'd be willing to be that almost every American has had quite a dose of exposure to the flu. An "outbreak" strain or not.
I was just wondering if any biologist/virologist/etc had ever suggested anything to the effect of "Flu outbreaks happen about once-a-generation because the chance of one flu outbreak happening is affected by previously ineffective virus mutations", as you seem to imply. I'm not sure if that's what you were implying, but you did suggest that this had been studied, and I was wondering where, and by whom.
On the basis of what data?
Flu outbreaks due to virus mutation have no such constraint that I know about. I'd really appreciate a reference on this one.
Like many others who attack ID, you are illegitimately broadening the scope and beating up on a straw man. The only question in scope here is the question of species formation. Creation of the universe, etc., while many ID proponents certainly have strong opinions on it, is not part of the core theory, any more than it's part of the core theory of darwinism.
What? No I'm not. Intelligent Design is an absurd argument which tries to say that species formation (a very complex thing) is less likely than a much more complex thing (God creating species and accounting for their diversity). No matter how unlikely species formation is, God, as an "intelligent designer", is more unlikely.
What is so difficult about this?
"The Intelligent Designer doesn't have to be the Christian God, nor does it even need to be a God at all. It could be little green men."
No. This is a philosophical problem called "First Cause". This is what will happen. You will say it was little green men. I will say something like, "And where did they come from?", and you will say something like, "Oh, the little green men before them." And I will say, "And where did THEY come from?" and you will say, "The little green men before THEM". And then at some point, we will reach the end.
Intelligent Design is an absurd argument that rests on assigning the complexity of origins of one thing (say, for instance, very complicated molecules) to the infinately more complex and unlikely appearance of something that could have created these things (say, God). The reason we must have God as the intelligent designer is the simple reason that God gives us the clever property of having always existed and very nice things that solve the issue in the Argument of First Cause. Not nicely, mind you, because there IS no way to solve that issue nicely (Where did GOD come from? etc).
Intelligent Designers are very clever creationists in sheep's clothing. This is not a difficult thing to understand. They don't want to talk about God, because as soon as they do, they give up the game.
There is no science in Intelligent Design. If you can name one paper in a recently published, reputable scientific journal (i.e., peer reviewed) with new empirical data (not simply a review article of previously published hogwash arguments, but NEW EMPIRICAL DATA), that is derived from the viewpoint of intelligent design, I will stand corrected.
ID People don't want to talk about the intelligent designer. They say things like, "You can't look at a watch and tell things about the watchmaker!", and other absurdities.
If they talk about "God" as the Intelligent Designer, they give up the game and lose. So they talk about the Intelligent Designer as some sort of force we don't need to understand anything about to understand Intelligent Design. It's an absurd argument.
This whole thing was taken care of by Socrates quite some time ago (well, Plato, in Apologia). Socrates asks, "Who believes in Equestrian Phenomena, and does not acknowledge horses?" The answer of course, is no one. "Who believes in human phenomena, and does not acknowledge humans?" Again. "And who believes in divine phenomena, but does not acknowledge gods?" Answer: Intelligent Design proponents.
Evolution isn't a theory about the start of life. Evolution is an attempt to explain variability (and patterns of variability) among and within different species, and how that variability is systematically affected by certain factors.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, commence flame war.
this directly relates to a story that was originally posted under the YRO heading. it makes sense to keep posting information about that story there, because people who read yro.slashdot.org might want to know the latest in the Sony DRM rootkit saga.
Infinium Labs Legal Team: "omg you posted teh libelous statements against us and damaged our emotional reputation and possibly our physical reputation!"
Slashdot Legal Team: "..."
Infinium Labs Legal Team: "We cast Jack Thompson lvl 10!"
Slashdot Legal Team: "...he hates you guys, and everything about gaming."
Jack Thompson: "omg you put words in my mouth you infuriating pixelate! Prepare the PR-machine for WAR!"
Could you please explain how you will go about proving that something does *not* exist?
I believe the burden is on positive evidence.
yes, the imaging you're talking about is called metabolic mapping. radioactive labels are placed on otherwise normal glucose molecules, and as those glucose molecules make their way to placed they're required (i.e., places of high activity), the presence of their radioactive tracer is mapped using the emission of annihilation photons. At least, in PET scanning. In other forms, like 2-deoxy-glucose mapping, other techniques are used to basically study the same thing.
the images are then colorized, usually using a colormap called "jet"; blue towards low values, red towards high, green and yellow in the middle (essentially, an approximation of wavelength -> color).
Since many of them were taken with techniques insensitive to color, why does this surprise you?
Most of the photographs in your biology and neuroscience textbooks are artificially colorized [what, you think that when your brain gets very active, it also gets very red? =) ].
I know. =)
I was just pointing out that Penny Arcade can do whatever the fuck well they please so long as there's no reasonable charge that they provide information possibly harmful to his physical wellbeing. And that's a *good thing* (tm).
Except they're not saying they think he's an idiot and disagree with his opinion, they're saying they hate him, which is very different. If the T-Shirt said "I disagree with Jack Thompson," that would be a different story.
And he's saying they're vile sinners who are going to hell!
I think hate is the appropriate word in that case.
Why is the T-Shirt a bit much? Thompson has publicly expressed his views against a certain industry and group of individuals, and some of those people are expressing the view that Thompson is an idiot and his opinion is asinine.
If you say that a group of people are vile sinners who are going to hell, you can bet damn right that group of people is going to publicly disagree with you. I don't really see the problem.