Bonus: they didn't actually do anything. This is a "resolution", not a law. It has no effect. It doesn't even give any official directions to the US representative to the ITU, who (duh) had absolutely no intention of voting for any such thing anyway.
Whenever you get universal support for anything in Congress, it's because it isn't anything. Bipartisan support for doing nothing is very popular. So is bipartisan support for empty gestures. Eking out even so much as a bare majority along anything other than party lines, for some measure that actually does something, is a herculean task.
There are plenty of functional parts to the UN: WHO, FAO, UNHCR, UNESCO, even the ITU. But it also gets used for a lot of grandstanding, which makes the news a lot more dramatically than the dull slogging work of improving health, agriculture, telecommunications, etc.
It may be their goal, but they won't get it. It's not what the ITU does and they won't succeed in their ludicrous proposals. They only make those proposals because they have no idea what they're talking about.
In fact, most of it is political theater. The ITU attendees themselves are well aware that these proposals stand no chance of passage. But the religious zealots in their countries are as ignorant of that as they are about everything else, and enjoy being pandered to. So when the proposals fail, the government can claim that they tried to prohibit blasphemy, but those blasphemous bastards in the West defeated it.
It's a dangerous and ugly game, because some of these zealots will take it as an excuse for violence. But as far as the leadership is concerned, as long as it's directed against us rather than them, it's all good.
Honestly, my concern is less about the changes that climate will wreak, or even the ways we'll have to adapt to them, but about the ways that persistent denialism prefigures an inability to make decisions wisely. And also about the way those patterns of thought are hampering our ability to make wise choices now.
If denialism were just about the fragments of truth you're talking about, we'd be able to hold a rational debate about them. But those fragments are buried under a mountain of outright lies, delusions, conspiracy theories, bile, and character assassination. Point out where a denialist is wrong, and they'll repeat exactly the same thing tomorrow. There is no debate about what we can or should do about climate change because we're still combating the same falsehoods we've been combating for years, and in the process defaming both individual scientists and science itself.
If that were limited to climate change, it could be something we live with. But they ally themselves with others of similarly appalling unreason and hatred: creationists, birthers, homophobes, etc. These aren't just fringes: like the denialists, they have a central role in determining policy. They're not merely wrong; anybody can be wrong. They are incapable of distinguishing fact from delusion on these issues.
And having broken from reality here, it makes it impossible to hold serious discussions of areas in which they aren't obviously wrong, like economics. That is, I still think they're wrong, and would like to discuss it because I could also be wrong. I can't, however, learn that from somebody who doesn't grasp that there's a difference between truth and lies.
Climate change denialism is a symptom of a pernicious anti-intellectualism which is, in my opinion, more dangerous in the near term than the effects of climate change. It will also prevent us from acting reasonably and responsibly to climate change, but I think it does more damage to the nation than the climate will.
The headline doesn't say "perfect under these parameters". It says "perfect". And we're getting a followup article about a demonstration, so that everybody can go see the "perfect" invisibility cloak, in which nobody outside of a few materials scientists would be interested if it weren't for that misleading application of the word "perfect".
And I was talking about pulling "science writing cards", not "science" cards. The scientists are doing admirable work here. It's some science writers pushing fluff who are not.
It's not "perfect". It has the nifty property that it doesn't reflect anything. But it only works from one angle, and for one frequency (and a microwave frequency at that). It's not even "perfect" at eliminating reflection, just much better than previous ones.
It's a clever but minor advance blown entirely out of proportion because some jackass attached the word "perfect" to it. Everybody who repeated it needs to have their science writing license revoked.
Re:To bad that non college education does not resp
on
MOOC Mania
·
· Score: 1
Autodidacticism is under-rated by others, but it is easily over-rated by those who have done it. It is easy to assume that you have taught yourself all of the important things, and that the things you haven't learned are unimportant.
Skills that are easily tested for are those that are matters of memorization and basic deduction, and the jobs they qualify you for are comparatively low-paying. It's better than purely mechanical or rote jobs, but the big salaries go to those who have skills beyond certification: cooperation, originality, imagination, communication, curiosity.
A college education is a crude measure of this, and one that is increasingly more expensive than it needs to be. But college offers a breadth that autodidacts often lack. The humanities requirements in particular seem irrelevant to those with technical skills, but they genuinely are important in ways that don't show up on tests.
I'm not saying that all autodidacts lack this. Companies are foolish if they automatically reject a candidate who lacks a college degree. But when a resume crosses my desk without one, it's going to have to have something special to show me that you have the spark that makes you a member of my team, not just a drone who knows how to connect the dots. Similarly, the college grad had better be prepared to sparkle in the interview, because I'm not looking for somebody who scratched out a grade without learning the lessons.
I think that you're correct, but I'd say that America probably never was all that progressive as a nation. Socialism never got a real foothold in the US, in part because victories by unions eliminated the worst of the abuses without setting real groundwork for progressivism.
The nation has drifted much further to the right than I believe is its natural state. And I think that the implosion of the Republican party, or a drawn-out drift back from the brink of lunacy, will gradually let the nation drift back closer to its center. But it's unlikely to ever become a truly leftist country. I just don't think that's where the country has ever really lived.
"Climate change, the drug war, and civil liberties" are not on either list. The mainstream candidates don't care about them because the voters don't care about them.
It's of no use getting wrapped up in our Slashdot bubble and insist that the things that are important to us must be the top priorities of the nation. A President has to be picked by half the country (or a bit less). We can rant and rave all we want that their priorities are wrong, but all that gets us is the joy of ranting and raving.
Democracy sucks, but less than the other options. We're stuck here in a country that cares more about Afghanistan than about getting their junk groped at the airport. Unless they're service members, or their family, the odds are that the latter affects them more. But it's no use telling me that. Tell them.
I suppose this debate is going to try to do that, and maybe it'll change something. But it's not going to suddenly propel a minority issue into a game-changer.
Those videos are interesting, but it's not quite taking pictures of light itself. Light's still too fast (and technology too slow) for that. What you see is a composite shot, of many repeats of the same experiment, with very high precision pictures taken of each particular instant.
They repeat the experiment every dozen nanoseconds. It takes an hour to take a picture of a nanosecond process. The inventors refer to it as "the world's slowest fastest camera".
Meaning... if we ignore the predictions that were outright wrong, and infer predictions that weren't actually made from text that could just as easily be used to infer opposite conclusions... then we might alter the consensus that he was a complete loon?
In what way is it different from the periodic motion of a pendulum or a planet?
Periodic motion is nothing new. The conservation of momentum and energy in the absence of friction or other forces is also old hat, and nobody thinks it's anything akin to perpetual motion. So what's going on here that's actually novel?
Apple needs to ensure that it has enough of a market share in the iPhone that developers continue to target it. Even if iOS and their hardware were superior, some people expect to use third-party add-ons, especially games. If their market share dips to a point where popular game-makers start to treat it as an afterthought, they'll go downhill quickly.
Right now they're getting the best of both worlds: a premium product with a premium price, and a hefty market segment. They seem to be managing it well, but they have to remain on top or the low-end will catch up.
There aren't many socialists, while the libertarian whiners are all over the Web.
The Occupy-style progressives were pretty whiny, but fortunately they've mostly gone away. Libertarian whiners, by contrast, are quite convinced that if they whine long enough somebody will finally listen to them.
If he had accepted corporate donations he might have been able to get his name out there to generate more support than 7%. People can't vote for candidates they've never heard of.
He seems to imagine that the world owes it to him to get out his message that the world doesn't owe you anything. That alone is good enough reason not to vote for him.
I've never known a libertarian who wasn't whining.
I assume the non-whining libertarians are out there, and I'm just not noticing. But among those libertarians I have heard speak, what comes out of their mouth always seems tantamount to "Why doesn't everybody listen to MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?"
Re:Total crap -- /. summary is wrong (stunning!)
on
The Great Meteor Grab
·
· Score: 2
Over large swaths of land, the US government has leased the right to dig up whatever minerals they find there. It doesn't apply to fenceposts, but it does apply to rocks.
The ruling here is that the meteorites aren't included in that. Yes, they're minerals, but for this purpose they're also part of the national heritage. So we're going to treat them in the same category as other heritage items, i.e. ancient artifacts. These aren't artifacts, but they're saying they're going to treat them according to the rules that govern artifacts, and for the same reason: that wasn't the intention of leasing the mineral rights.
which is precisely why Saudi Arabia's bid is just noise that is doomed to fail.
And they're well aware of that. I suspect that this bit of idiocy is aimed more at their populace and neighbors than it is at the UN. It's breast-beating, "Look how pious and righteous we are" with no fear of it actually passing anything. (Unlike the asshole Congressman, who actually does seem to imagine that he's somehow genuinely leading the fight against evolution/for school prayer/against those dastardly climate hoaxers.)
I assume they're also aware of how much animosity this stunt creates outside of their friends and neighbors, though. It is unfortunate that the UN gives them an opportunity to make everybody else nervous that they actually mean it. The US government knows it will not happen, but the citizens get cranky, and that ratchets up anti-Muslim sentiment (especially combined with the genuine violence.) And it risks stirring up that violence by making people believe that the government is on their side.
I'm all for the UN: the only way to tamp down the effects of this kind of stunt is the fact that the other nations of the world are there to remind each other not to escalate. The UN does all sorts of other good as well. But it's not an unmitigated good, and days like this are one reason.
Personally, I was very disappointed at the removal of video from the Nano. I used it on rare occasions, like airplane flights, on my 3rd gen Nano. When it died I got a 6, and was shocked at how crippled the 6 was. I returned it and found myself a 5th gen Nano (which actually cost more) and am very happy with it.
AKA the Subcommittee for Supoenas and Persecution. I'm sure it will come as a shock to absolutely nobody that he's also a climate denier who wants to haul climate scientists in front of the subcommittee to investigate their "hoax":
Slashdot Mirror
Bonus: they didn't actually do anything. This is a "resolution", not a law. It has no effect. It doesn't even give any official directions to the US representative to the ITU, who (duh) had absolutely no intention of voting for any such thing anyway.
Whenever you get universal support for anything in Congress, it's because it isn't anything. Bipartisan support for doing nothing is very popular. So is bipartisan support for empty gestures. Eking out even so much as a bare majority along anything other than party lines, for some measure that actually does something, is a herculean task.
There are plenty of functional parts to the UN: WHO, FAO, UNHCR, UNESCO, even the ITU. But it also gets used for a lot of grandstanding, which makes the news a lot more dramatically than the dull slogging work of improving health, agriculture, telecommunications, etc.
It may be their goal, but they won't get it. It's not what the ITU does and they won't succeed in their ludicrous proposals. They only make those proposals because they have no idea what they're talking about.
In fact, most of it is political theater. The ITU attendees themselves are well aware that these proposals stand no chance of passage. But the religious zealots in their countries are as ignorant of that as they are about everything else, and enjoy being pandered to. So when the proposals fail, the government can claim that they tried to prohibit blasphemy, but those blasphemous bastards in the West defeated it.
It's a dangerous and ugly game, because some of these zealots will take it as an excuse for violence. But as far as the leadership is concerned, as long as it's directed against us rather than them, it's all good.
I had some of those bars, from mid-80s MREs. They were just awful: as one friend put it "the more you chew it, the bigger it gets".
If you thought of them as more akin to Tootsie Rolls than chocolate, they weren't so bad (though I'm not a fan of Tootsie Rolls, either).
Honestly, my concern is less about the changes that climate will wreak, or even the ways we'll have to adapt to them, but about the ways that persistent denialism prefigures an inability to make decisions wisely. And also about the way those patterns of thought are hampering our ability to make wise choices now.
If denialism were just about the fragments of truth you're talking about, we'd be able to hold a rational debate about them. But those fragments are buried under a mountain of outright lies, delusions, conspiracy theories, bile, and character assassination. Point out where a denialist is wrong, and they'll repeat exactly the same thing tomorrow. There is no debate about what we can or should do about climate change because we're still combating the same falsehoods we've been combating for years, and in the process defaming both individual scientists and science itself.
If that were limited to climate change, it could be something we live with. But they ally themselves with others of similarly appalling unreason and hatred: creationists, birthers, homophobes, etc. These aren't just fringes: like the denialists, they have a central role in determining policy. They're not merely wrong; anybody can be wrong. They are incapable of distinguishing fact from delusion on these issues.
And having broken from reality here, it makes it impossible to hold serious discussions of areas in which they aren't obviously wrong, like economics. That is, I still think they're wrong, and would like to discuss it because I could also be wrong. I can't, however, learn that from somebody who doesn't grasp that there's a difference between truth and lies.
Climate change denialism is a symptom of a pernicious anti-intellectualism which is, in my opinion, more dangerous in the near term than the effects of climate change. It will also prevent us from acting reasonably and responsibly to climate change, but I think it does more damage to the nation than the climate will.
The headline doesn't say "perfect under these parameters". It says "perfect". And we're getting a followup article about a demonstration, so that everybody can go see the "perfect" invisibility cloak, in which nobody outside of a few materials scientists would be interested if it weren't for that misleading application of the word "perfect".
And I was talking about pulling "science writing cards", not "science" cards. The scientists are doing admirable work here. It's some science writers pushing fluff who are not.
It's not "perfect". It has the nifty property that it doesn't reflect anything. But it only works from one angle, and for one frequency (and a microwave frequency at that). It's not even "perfect" at eliminating reflection, just much better than previous ones.
It's a clever but minor advance blown entirely out of proportion because some jackass attached the word "perfect" to it. Everybody who repeated it needs to have their science writing license revoked.
Autodidacticism is under-rated by others, but it is easily over-rated by those who have done it. It is easy to assume that you have taught yourself all of the important things, and that the things you haven't learned are unimportant.
Skills that are easily tested for are those that are matters of memorization and basic deduction, and the jobs they qualify you for are comparatively low-paying. It's better than purely mechanical or rote jobs, but the big salaries go to those who have skills beyond certification: cooperation, originality, imagination, communication, curiosity.
A college education is a crude measure of this, and one that is increasingly more expensive than it needs to be. But college offers a breadth that autodidacts often lack. The humanities requirements in particular seem irrelevant to those with technical skills, but they genuinely are important in ways that don't show up on tests.
I'm not saying that all autodidacts lack this. Companies are foolish if they automatically reject a candidate who lacks a college degree. But when a resume crosses my desk without one, it's going to have to have something special to show me that you have the spark that makes you a member of my team, not just a drone who knows how to connect the dots. Similarly, the college grad had better be prepared to sparkle in the interview, because I'm not looking for somebody who scratched out a grade without learning the lessons.
I think that you're correct, but I'd say that America probably never was all that progressive as a nation. Socialism never got a real foothold in the US, in part because victories by unions eliminated the worst of the abuses without setting real groundwork for progressivism.
The nation has drifted much further to the right than I believe is its natural state. And I think that the implosion of the Republican party, or a drawn-out drift back from the brink of lunacy, will gradually let the nation drift back closer to its center. But it's unlikely to ever become a truly leftist country. I just don't think that's where the country has ever really lived.
Got one yesterday. Fuckers piss me off.
Here is Rasmussen's list of things that the voters care about:
Economy
Health Care
Gov't Ethics and Corruption
Taxes
Energy Policy
Education
Social Security
Immigration
National Security/War on Terror
Afghanistan
Or a similar list from NBC/WSJ:
"Climate change, the drug war, and civil liberties" are not on either list. The mainstream candidates don't care about them because the voters don't care about them.
It's of no use getting wrapped up in our Slashdot bubble and insist that the things that are important to us must be the top priorities of the nation. A President has to be picked by half the country (or a bit less). We can rant and rave all we want that their priorities are wrong, but all that gets us is the joy of ranting and raving.
Democracy sucks, but less than the other options. We're stuck here in a country that cares more about Afghanistan than about getting their junk groped at the airport. Unless they're service members, or their family, the odds are that the latter affects them more. But it's no use telling me that. Tell them.
I suppose this debate is going to try to do that, and maybe it'll change something. But it's not going to suddenly propel a minority issue into a game-changer.
Those videos are interesting, but it's not quite taking pictures of light itself. Light's still too fast (and technology too slow) for that. What you see is a composite shot, of many repeats of the same experiment, with very high precision pictures taken of each particular instant.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/
They repeat the experiment every dozen nanoseconds. It takes an hour to take a picture of a nanosecond process. The inventors refer to it as "the world's slowest fastest camera".
Meaning... if we ignore the predictions that were outright wrong, and infer predictions that weren't actually made from text that could just as easily be used to infer opposite conclusions... then we might alter the consensus that he was a complete loon?
Whatever works for ya, I guess.
In what way is it different from the periodic motion of a pendulum or a planet?
Periodic motion is nothing new. The conservation of momentum and energy in the absence of friction or other forces is also old hat, and nobody thinks it's anything akin to perpetual motion. So what's going on here that's actually novel?
You might want to check your watch. That moronic "messiah" meme died off four years ago. Perhaps it's time for some new batteries.
Apple needs to ensure that it has enough of a market share in the iPhone that developers continue to target it. Even if iOS and their hardware were superior, some people expect to use third-party add-ons, especially games. If their market share dips to a point where popular game-makers start to treat it as an afterthought, they'll go downhill quickly.
Right now they're getting the best of both worlds: a premium product with a premium price, and a hefty market segment. They seem to be managing it well, but they have to remain on top or the low-end will catch up.
There aren't many socialists, while the libertarian whiners are all over the Web.
The Occupy-style progressives were pretty whiny, but fortunately they've mostly gone away. Libertarian whiners, by contrast, are quite convinced that if they whine long enough somebody will finally listen to them.
If he had accepted corporate donations he might have been able to get his name out there to generate more support than 7%. People can't vote for candidates they've never heard of.
He seems to imagine that the world owes it to him to get out his message that the world doesn't owe you anything. That alone is good enough reason not to vote for him.
This guy is a libertarian, why is he whining?
I've never known a libertarian who wasn't whining.
I assume the non-whining libertarians are out there, and I'm just not noticing. But among those libertarians I have heard speak, what comes out of their mouth always seems tantamount to "Why doesn't everybody listen to MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?"
Over large swaths of land, the US government has leased the right to dig up whatever minerals they find there. It doesn't apply to fenceposts, but it does apply to rocks.
The ruling here is that the meteorites aren't included in that. Yes, they're minerals, but for this purpose they're also part of the national heritage. So we're going to treat them in the same category as other heritage items, i.e. ancient artifacts. These aren't artifacts, but they're saying they're going to treat them according to the rules that govern artifacts, and for the same reason: that wasn't the intention of leasing the mineral rights.
which is precisely why Saudi Arabia's bid is just noise that is doomed to fail.
And they're well aware of that. I suspect that this bit of idiocy is aimed more at their populace and neighbors than it is at the UN. It's breast-beating, "Look how pious and righteous we are" with no fear of it actually passing anything. (Unlike the asshole Congressman, who actually does seem to imagine that he's somehow genuinely leading the fight against evolution/for school prayer/against those dastardly climate hoaxers.)
I assume they're also aware of how much animosity this stunt creates outside of their friends and neighbors, though. It is unfortunate that the UN gives them an opportunity to make everybody else nervous that they actually mean it. The US government knows it will not happen, but the citizens get cranky, and that ratchets up anti-Muslim sentiment (especially combined with the genuine violence.) And it risks stirring up that violence by making people believe that the government is on their side.
I'm all for the UN: the only way to tamp down the effects of this kind of stunt is the fact that the other nations of the world are there to remind each other not to escalate. The UN does all sorts of other good as well. But it's not an unmitigated good, and days like this are one reason.
And they seem to have celebrated by screwing it.
Personally, I was very disappointed at the removal of video from the Nano. I used it on rare occasions, like airplane flights, on my 3rd gen Nano. When it died I got a 6, and was shocked at how crippled the 6 was. I returned it and found myself a 5th gen Nano (which actually cost more) and am very happy with it.
Georgians.
AKA the Subcommittee for Supoenas and Persecution. I'm sure it will come as a shock to absolutely nobody that he's also a climate denier who wants to haul climate scientists in front of the subcommittee to investigate their "hoax":
http://onlineathens.com/stories/022311/new_789646706.shtml