What makes you think that what we learn from the LHC won't have an application in batteries and cancer treatment?
What makes you think that my intensive study of my navel lint won't have applications in batteries and cancer treatment? Worth at least a billion, don't you think?
I'm all for basic research, but there's a vast ton of basic research that could be funded. The LHC puts nine billion eggs in one basket. Maybe it'll pay off in the biggest, most amazing new technology of all time. Maybe it'll tick off a box on the Standard Model that we can hang on our wall and gaze at proudly.
It is not trivial for a smart terrorist to avoid capture by the TSA. It's possible, but not trivial, and there is a risk.
The TSA keeps trying to close that window, which is why you now get to take a trip through the nudie booth whenever you board an airplane. It's still certainly possible to get through, but not guaranteed. There are other targets with a much higher likelihood of success.
It's still not at all clear why they haven't done that. And they do keep trying to get on planes, as the Underwear Bomber and Shoe Bomber showed. AQ and the TSA are both fascinated with planes, apparently. Presumably the TSA's fascination is following AQ's, but I really don't know why.
Right, but not in the US, and none on airplanes or even airports. There are plenty of hotels, night clubs, and trains right here in the US.
There are ones like the Times Square Bomber, but that wasn't so much "foiled" as "failed". The bomb didn't work. If it had worked, it would have killed a few people. Al Qaeda seems to be reduced to sending us its idiots. More Americans kill themselves with fireworks than AQ has.
We've definitely helped them succeed a hell of a lot more than they had any right to. "Chickenshit" is a pretty damn good way of putting it.
But they haven't capitalized on it. Given how much we overreacted last time, how much more could they accomplish with even more more successful attack? Have a suicide bomber on a train or at the Super Bowl, and they can have TSA agents groping us every time we go to the mall. And that would seriously start to wound the US economy.
The goal of the TSA isn't to catch terrorists. Only the most egregiously stupid terrorists would be caught by the TSA.
The goal of the TSA is to discourage terrorists from even trying. The TSA's effectiveness could be measured not by "how many terrorists are caught" (zero) but by "how many terrorists have succeed" (also zero).
The tiger-repelling-rock analogy is specious: you know for a fact that there aren't any tigers around here. You don't know how many terrorists there are. Zero? Ten? Ten thousand?
It's not zero. While the TSA hasn't caught any, the FBI has. How many of those terrorists would have attempted to use airplanes, if the TSA hadn't been there? I honestly can't tell you: most of the ones the FBI has caught were ass-clowns who were probably going to blow themselves up before they left their driveways. And we don't know how many terrorists gave up before they even started.
What's perplexing is why they haven't shifted to softer targets. The TSA, overzealous as it is, makes airplanes too hard to attack, but there are millions of other, better targets. A bomb on a commuter rail would cause a whole lot of mayhem with a far lower chance of getting caught. The TSA can't claim credit for that.
But I don't doubt that they deserve at least a little credit for the zero attacks on planes since 9/11. We know at least some wanted to try.
Totally with you on the "not a religion". That's a dumb meme.
As for "not of waste of money", I'd call that "not proven", at least in the case of the LHC. Maybe yes, maybe no. Worth the gamble, in my opinion, though it's close. $9 billion buys an awful lot of research into, say, batteries or cancer treatment.
Yeah, there was some definite fail going on there. The banks were presumably loaning it out to somebody, with the intention of turning a profit on it (there's no point in taking the money from the Fed, even at.01% interest, if you can't loan it out again), but the banks aren't saying where.
It definitely didn't go where you'd hope it would go, to ordinary businesses, at least not in the amounts you'd hope for.
WTF is that the Fed wanted money pumped into the system, to compensate for all of the (virtual) money that was disappearing. They were afraid of a deflationary cycle, where too little money was chasing too many goods, causing prices to fall, fewer goods to be made, more workers fired, and even less money.
But the Fed doesn't have branch offices, so they can't make loans to companies or individuals. Instead, they hired the major banks to do it. The gave the money to the banks, who loaned it out a higher rate. The higher rate compensates them for the risks of the losses they were taking: they still owed the money back to the Fed whether the loan was repaid or not. It also pays them for all of the infrastructure they have to maintain to make and service those loans: employees, computers, etc.
None of that is figured into that estimate of "profit", which was based on the difference between the rates, without taking their costs into account. And it amounts to getting about 1% of the transaction cost.
The fact that this was done without supervision by Congress is noteworthy, and needs to be investigated. Monetary policy needs to be coordinated, while the goal is to create some space between the Fed and the government to reduce the influence of politics, the government is still supposed to supervise the Fed.
But as fiscal policy, this is reasonably orthodox. The banks were paid to do what the banks do: give loans so that the economy can expand. Getting somebody else to do the same job would have cost more. The numbers are proportional to what you'd expect of trying to manage a country with a $14 trillion GDP when it's in a crisis.
Nobody completely understands what "measurement" means, but in this case, what it means is that you have to interact the diamond with an even larger-scale system (i.e. your measurement apparatus, and then your eyeballs reading that measurement apparatus, and so on).
The more mass you add to the experiment, the smaller the variation can be, until it is effectively nonexistent. It must be in one state or the other, and you know that the two states will necessarily be opposite.
But as long as the objects are isolated from the rest of the world, they can potentially maintain superposition. It is in neither one state nor the other.
What you're talking about is called a "hidden variables theory"; the idea that it really is in one state or the other, but we just don't know which. That's classical uncertainty, rather than quantum uncertainty.
Surprisingly, it is possible to detect the difference between quantum uncertainty and classical. It's been done, and the hidden variables were ruled out. The explanation is rather involved; let's just say that it has to do with the difference between summing up all of the possibilities for the state (including the classically impossible ones), and you get a small difference. The WP article on it actually pretty good:
Yeah, this. I do use Chrome, but only for a carefully selected set of web sites, not general browsing. When I do use it for general browsing, I'm confronted with an array of dancing, prancing jiggies trying to draw my attention to everything except the words I'm trying to read.
Ironically, that's now part of the reason I use Chrome. Some web sites don't play well with NoScript, downloading bits of JavaScript from world+dog, and various reloading bits that make it hard to tell just what piece isn't getting loaded. It's easier to just let my Chrome download all of the crapware, view the site, and then be done with it. I rarely want to visit such sites more than once anyway.
But my main browsing is in NoScript-protected Firefox (with the damn GIF animations turned off).
Alternative Medicine nuts are usually liberal nuts, not conservative nuts. It's an albatross around the neck of sane liberals trying to make choices based on science rather than delusion.
The difference, I think, is that the liberals at least try to marginalize their nuts, while conservatives make them the front-runners.
The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
A bicycle + rider weighs 200 pounds, not 2,000 pounds.
A bicycle rider will be seriously injured by a collision with a pedestrian. A driver won't, and isn't looking as closely for them, especially when they're not expecting them.
I think the comic is funny and insightful, but also potentially misleading.
If you only had one password to remember, either password is fairly easy. The shorter one quickly enters muscle memory even after you forget what it meant.
By the time you add even one more password "shoe ocelot epidemic tundra", you'll already start to mix up the order of words and jumble words between the two. "Correct horse battery staple" jumps out because it's the first one you memorized; you saw it in an engaging comic strip. Start to add more, ones that you have to make up, and it's going to get a LOT harder.
It may well be that the set-of-common-words is easier to memorize and has more bits per effort, but it's not a panacea. Switch to it and you're still going to find that you're still frustrated.
Probably. But Apple has a remarkable way of taking a product that everybody has made before and giving it a makeover into something everybody wants. The underlying technology is the same, or even worse, but the interface finds the sweet spot of giving a lot of people exactly what they want.
It rarely seems like a significant technological advance to Slashdot users, who usually want more control over their devices. But many people don't want maximum control; as long as they get most of what they want right in front of them it makes them very happy.
It often incorporates a cutting-edge technological decision. Sometimes that means cutting things away, like skipping the floppy drive. Sometimes it means adding something, like Siri or a touchscreen phone.
I've got no idea if they'll succeed this time, but I wouldn't count them out and I wouldn't dismiss the idea as being just like something else. The details turn out to be 90% of the problem.
Sony, on the other hand... I'm not expecting much.
Wall Street is useful to a lot of people. At its best, it brings together many individuals to invest in a company. If the company has good ideas and is well-managed, they take the cash and turn it into real products and services. The customers win, the employees win, the investors win.
Without something to bring those together, the flow is a lot more limited. It means that if you can't afford to leave your cash locked up for years, you can't use it at all. If you have to do the whole thing yourself, you wouldn't be able to fund big ideas.
Both technology companies and 401k planners head to Wall Street to find each other. We wouldn't have either good retirement accounts or widespread Internet without it. Big ideas require big cash, and even VCs are limited in what they can do.
That doesn't mean that everything Wall Street does is great. Indeed, a lot of it is crap. It is, however, not all bad, and smart people can do well on the market if they keep a level head.
I would like to see mechanisms imposed to constrain the worst of the stupidity, and I think that the Tobin tax is a good start. But I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Right, I didn't want my comment to be any more involved than it already was. I did try to allude to it.
Yes, we see a redshifted version, and the simplest explanation so far that matches the data to a lot of decimal places is that the hydrogen is/was doing exactly the same thing when it left the source, and we see it shifted to the red. Or it could be some other model, but just tinkering with the fine tuning constant (or other constants) doesn't fit the data. You'd need a lot of other changes, which ultimately result in a more complicated model.
We do have the ability to look out into space, sometimes pretty far, and we can observe that some things happen the same way there as out here.
You can observe things like the color of distant stars, the rotations of galaxies, even the cosmic background radiation. We can see, for example, that hot hydrogen on a distant star has exactly the same kind of spectroscopic signature that hydrogen here on earth does.
The simplest explanation for that is that the fine structure constant is the same there as here. There are other possible explanations, but they're a lot more complicated and don't have any additional explanatory power, so we tend to stick with the simplest one. The burden of proof is on people to come up with either a counterexample or a simpler theory.
We are stuck in one tiny corner of the universe, but we've done a remarkable job of observing the rest of it from here. There's a lot more to learn, but there's reason to believe that we're not as parochial as our small size might lead one to believe.
That's been my experience as well. I remember only one exception: spam sent to an email address that had only ever been used at Snapfish (and for the life of me I have no idea why I did that. Somebody must have been desperate to share some photos with me in the least convenient possible way).
I notified HP about it, accusing them of either selling their spam list or possibly a data breach. They protested that it wasn't their fault, and it wasn't repeated.
Unfortunately, the "real source" is precisely what we're talking about. But I would like to know Haught's side of the story.
The debate wasn't the usual pointless "is science better than religion" bit. It was a debate about whether you can successfully believe in both religion and science, which isn't nearly settled and a great many scientists believe you can do both. Without seeing the video, I can't know why Haught was thought to have lost it.
I didn't "backpedal", and I don't have to "admit" that Israel deserves skepticism. I said as much; this isn't something you're drawing out of me.
But my point wasn't to try to claim that I had some solution that identified the bad guys. My point is that it's complex and that standing there pointing out the wrongs doesn't get us anywhere, ESPECIALLY when (as in the case of the original poster) the person seems to be ignoring all of them by one side.
All I've done is to bring the question where it could potentially be hashed out, starting with recognizing that each side has reasons to be deeply distrustful and suspicious of the other. The OP was already there for half of it, but completely ignorant of the other half. I corrected that, not that it's going to do anybody any good.
I didn't intend it to lead anywhere. I'm as frustrated about this as you are.
I'm just also frustrated by people who come into this with "Oh, those poor sweet Palestinians, they never did anything, never hurt a fly." We're not going to find easy answers, and we can at least stop pretending that it's simple.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think that what we learn from the LHC won't have an application in batteries and cancer treatment?
What makes you think that my intensive study of my navel lint won't have applications in batteries and cancer treatment? Worth at least a billion, don't you think?
I'm all for basic research, but there's a vast ton of basic research that could be funded. The LHC puts nine billion eggs in one basket. Maybe it'll pay off in the biggest, most amazing new technology of all time. Maybe it'll tick off a box on the Standard Model that we can hang on our wall and gaze at proudly.
It is not trivial for a smart terrorist to avoid capture by the TSA. It's possible, but not trivial, and there is a risk.
The TSA keeps trying to close that window, which is why you now get to take a trip through the nudie booth whenever you board an airplane. It's still certainly possible to get through, but not guaranteed. There are other targets with a much higher likelihood of success.
It's still not at all clear why they haven't done that. And they do keep trying to get on planes, as the Underwear Bomber and Shoe Bomber showed. AQ and the TSA are both fascinated with planes, apparently. Presumably the TSA's fascination is following AQ's, but I really don't know why.
Right, but not in the US, and none on airplanes or even airports. There are plenty of hotels, night clubs, and trains right here in the US.
There are ones like the Times Square Bomber, but that wasn't so much "foiled" as "failed". The bomb didn't work. If it had worked, it would have killed a few people. Al Qaeda seems to be reduced to sending us its idiots. More Americans kill themselves with fireworks than AQ has.
We've definitely helped them succeed a hell of a lot more than they had any right to. "Chickenshit" is a pretty damn good way of putting it.
But they haven't capitalized on it. Given how much we overreacted last time, how much more could they accomplish with even more more successful attack? Have a suicide bomber on a train or at the Super Bowl, and they can have TSA agents groping us every time we go to the mall. And that would seriously start to wound the US economy.
The goal of the TSA isn't to catch terrorists. Only the most egregiously stupid terrorists would be caught by the TSA.
The goal of the TSA is to discourage terrorists from even trying. The TSA's effectiveness could be measured not by "how many terrorists are caught" (zero) but by "how many terrorists have succeed" (also zero).
The tiger-repelling-rock analogy is specious: you know for a fact that there aren't any tigers around here. You don't know how many terrorists there are. Zero? Ten? Ten thousand?
It's not zero. While the TSA hasn't caught any, the FBI has. How many of those terrorists would have attempted to use airplanes, if the TSA hadn't been there? I honestly can't tell you: most of the ones the FBI has caught were ass-clowns who were probably going to blow themselves up before they left their driveways. And we don't know how many terrorists gave up before they even started.
What's perplexing is why they haven't shifted to softer targets. The TSA, overzealous as it is, makes airplanes too hard to attack, but there are millions of other, better targets. A bomb on a commuter rail would cause a whole lot of mayhem with a far lower chance of getting caught. The TSA can't claim credit for that.
But I don't doubt that they deserve at least a little credit for the zero attacks on planes since 9/11. We know at least some wanted to try.
Totally with you on the "not a religion". That's a dumb meme.
As for "not of waste of money", I'd call that "not proven", at least in the case of the LHC. Maybe yes, maybe no. Worth the gamble, in my opinion, though it's close. $9 billion buys an awful lot of research into, say, batteries or cancer treatment.
Yeah, there was some definite fail going on there. The banks were presumably loaning it out to somebody, with the intention of turning a profit on it (there's no point in taking the money from the Fed, even at .01% interest, if you can't loan it out again), but the banks aren't saying where.
It definitely didn't go where you'd hope it would go, to ordinary businesses, at least not in the amounts you'd hope for.
WTF is that the Fed wanted money pumped into the system, to compensate for all of the (virtual) money that was disappearing. They were afraid of a deflationary cycle, where too little money was chasing too many goods, causing prices to fall, fewer goods to be made, more workers fired, and even less money.
But the Fed doesn't have branch offices, so they can't make loans to companies or individuals. Instead, they hired the major banks to do it. The gave the money to the banks, who loaned it out a higher rate. The higher rate compensates them for the risks of the losses they were taking: they still owed the money back to the Fed whether the loan was repaid or not. It also pays them for all of the infrastructure they have to maintain to make and service those loans: employees, computers, etc.
None of that is figured into that estimate of "profit", which was based on the difference between the rates, without taking their costs into account. And it amounts to getting about 1% of the transaction cost.
The fact that this was done without supervision by Congress is noteworthy, and needs to be investigated. Monetary policy needs to be coordinated, while the goal is to create some space between the Fed and the government to reduce the influence of politics, the government is still supposed to supervise the Fed.
But as fiscal policy, this is reasonably orthodox. The banks were paid to do what the banks do: give loans so that the economy can expand. Getting somebody else to do the same job would have cost more. The numbers are proportional to what you'd expect of trying to manage a country with a $14 trillion GDP when it's in a crisis.
Nobody completely understands what "measurement" means, but in this case, what it means is that you have to interact the diamond with an even larger-scale system (i.e. your measurement apparatus, and then your eyeballs reading that measurement apparatus, and so on).
The more mass you add to the experiment, the smaller the variation can be, until it is effectively nonexistent. It must be in one state or the other, and you know that the two states will necessarily be opposite.
But as long as the objects are isolated from the rest of the world, they can potentially maintain superposition. It is in neither one state nor the other.
What you're talking about is called a "hidden variables theory"; the idea that it really is in one state or the other, but we just don't know which. That's classical uncertainty, rather than quantum uncertainty.
Surprisingly, it is possible to detect the difference between quantum uncertainty and classical. It's been done, and the hidden variables were ruled out. The explanation is rather involved; let's just say that it has to do with the difference between summing up all of the possibilities for the state (including the classically impossible ones), and you get a small difference. The WP article on it actually pretty good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
Yeah, this. I do use Chrome, but only for a carefully selected set of web sites, not general browsing. When I do use it for general browsing, I'm confronted with an array of dancing, prancing jiggies trying to draw my attention to everything except the words I'm trying to read.
Ironically, that's now part of the reason I use Chrome. Some web sites don't play well with NoScript, downloading bits of JavaScript from world+dog, and various reloading bits that make it hard to tell just what piece isn't getting loaded. It's easier to just let my Chrome download all of the crapware, view the site, and then be done with it. I rarely want to visit such sites more than once anyway.
But my main browsing is in NoScript-protected Firefox (with the damn GIF animations turned off).
Alternative Medicine nuts are usually liberal nuts, not conservative nuts. It's an albatross around the neck of sane liberals trying to make choices based on science rather than delusion.
The difference, I think, is that the liberals at least try to marginalize their nuts, while conservatives make them the front-runners.
Actually, I'm a government contractor. But thank you for playing.
The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
A bicycle moves 15 MPH, not 60 MPH.
A bicycle + rider weighs 200 pounds, not 2,000 pounds.
A bicycle rider will be seriously injured by a collision with a pedestrian. A driver won't, and isn't looking as closely for them, especially when they're not expecting them.
I think the comic is funny and insightful, but also potentially misleading.
If you only had one password to remember, either password is fairly easy. The shorter one quickly enters muscle memory even after you forget what it meant.
By the time you add even one more password "shoe ocelot epidemic tundra", you'll already start to mix up the order of words and jumble words between the two. "Correct horse battery staple" jumps out because it's the first one you memorized; you saw it in an engaging comic strip. Start to add more, ones that you have to make up, and it's going to get a LOT harder.
It may well be that the set-of-common-words is easier to memorize and has more bits per effort, but it's not a panacea. Switch to it and you're still going to find that you're still frustrated.
Probably. But Apple has a remarkable way of taking a product that everybody has made before and giving it a makeover into something everybody wants. The underlying technology is the same, or even worse, but the interface finds the sweet spot of giving a lot of people exactly what they want.
It rarely seems like a significant technological advance to Slashdot users, who usually want more control over their devices. But many people don't want maximum control; as long as they get most of what they want right in front of them it makes them very happy.
It often incorporates a cutting-edge technological decision. Sometimes that means cutting things away, like skipping the floppy drive. Sometimes it means adding something, like Siri or a touchscreen phone.
I've got no idea if they'll succeed this time, but I wouldn't count them out and I wouldn't dismiss the idea as being just like something else. The details turn out to be 90% of the problem.
Sony, on the other hand... I'm not expecting much.
But it isn't the "Obama hates Israel"-fest one tends to associate with Fox News. How unexpectedly civil of them. But we'll see if that continues.
Wall Street is useful to a lot of people. At its best, it brings together many individuals to invest in a company. If the company has good ideas and is well-managed, they take the cash and turn it into real products and services. The customers win, the employees win, the investors win.
Without something to bring those together, the flow is a lot more limited. It means that if you can't afford to leave your cash locked up for years, you can't use it at all. If you have to do the whole thing yourself, you wouldn't be able to fund big ideas.
Both technology companies and 401k planners head to Wall Street to find each other. We wouldn't have either good retirement accounts or widespread Internet without it. Big ideas require big cash, and even VCs are limited in what they can do.
That doesn't mean that everything Wall Street does is great. Indeed, a lot of it is crap. It is, however, not all bad, and smart people can do well on the market if they keep a level head.
I would like to see mechanisms imposed to constrain the worst of the stupidity, and I think that the Tobin tax is a good start. But I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Right, I didn't want my comment to be any more involved than it already was. I did try to allude to it.
Yes, we see a redshifted version, and the simplest explanation so far that matches the data to a lot of decimal places is that the hydrogen is/was doing exactly the same thing when it left the source, and we see it shifted to the red. Or it could be some other model, but just tinkering with the fine tuning constant (or other constants) doesn't fit the data. You'd need a lot of other changes, which ultimately result in a more complicated model.
We do have the ability to look out into space, sometimes pretty far, and we can observe that some things happen the same way there as out here.
You can observe things like the color of distant stars, the rotations of galaxies, even the cosmic background radiation. We can see, for example, that hot hydrogen on a distant star has exactly the same kind of spectroscopic signature that hydrogen here on earth does.
The simplest explanation for that is that the fine structure constant is the same there as here. There are other possible explanations, but they're a lot more complicated and don't have any additional explanatory power, so we tend to stick with the simplest one. The burden of proof is on people to come up with either a counterexample or a simpler theory.
We are stuck in one tiny corner of the universe, but we've done a remarkable job of observing the rest of it from here. There's a lot more to learn, but there's reason to believe that we're not as parochial as our small size might lead one to believe.
That's been my experience as well. I remember only one exception: spam sent to an email address that had only ever been used at Snapfish (and for the life of me I have no idea why I did that. Somebody must have been desperate to share some photos with me in the least convenient possible way).
I notified HP about it, accusing them of either selling their spam list or possibly a data breach. They protested that it wasn't their fault, and it wasn't repeated.
Unfortunately, the "real source" is precisely what we're talking about. But I would like to know Haught's side of the story.
The debate wasn't the usual pointless "is science better than religion" bit. It was a debate about whether you can successfully believe in both religion and science, which isn't nearly settled and a great many scientists believe you can do both. Without seeing the video, I can't know why Haught was thought to have lost it.
I didn't "backpedal", and I don't have to "admit" that Israel deserves skepticism. I said as much; this isn't something you're drawing out of me.
But my point wasn't to try to claim that I had some solution that identified the bad guys. My point is that it's complex and that standing there pointing out the wrongs doesn't get us anywhere, ESPECIALLY when (as in the case of the original poster) the person seems to be ignoring all of them by one side.
All I've done is to bring the question where it could potentially be hashed out, starting with recognizing that each side has reasons to be deeply distrustful and suspicious of the other. The OP was already there for half of it, but completely ignorant of the other half. I corrected that, not that it's going to do anybody any good.
I didn't intend it to lead anywhere. I'm as frustrated about this as you are.
I'm just also frustrated by people who come into this with "Oh, those poor sweet Palestinians, they never did anything, never hurt a fly." We're not going to find easy answers, and we can at least stop pretending that it's simple.
What part of "I'm not trying to establish moral equivalent" is proving beyond your grasp?