We're all hopelessly paranoid, making trust impossible, and rigidly stratified, making flexible response or communication impossible, oh and so totally self-centered that the mere notion of cooperation causes outbreaks of hives
Hello, FBI? Mid-level functionary from FEMA here. Nasty computer virus we're having, eh? Yeah, I haven't had power for a week either... no, I can't get money out of the bank machine either. But the good news is that the price of bread is down to ten cigarettes here in Wichita...
Anyway, I know you've never heard of me, and have no way of verifying my identity. And I know we're in the middle of an unprecedented national crisis. But it would really help us out if you could forward all your operational plans and the locations of all your agents as soon as possible. You know, I really value your trust, flexibility, and co-operation on this one. 'Kay, thanks, bye.
Way back when I was in the navy, it was pretty much standard practice for them to use tear gas on us as part of chemical warfare training (obviously, they don't use stronger stuff as most of it is lethal).
For one drill, we were supposed to wait until we felt the effects of the gas before we put our masks on... I thought it would be a bit of itching and nose running, but when it happened, the tear gas hit me instantly, like a ton of bricks -- eyes stinging, mucous membranes going nuts, unable to breathe. And this was without a high enough concentration for the gas to be visible in the air.
Another fun fact about tear gas, which I found out later that day in the shower, is that tear gas residue on your skin hurts like hell if it gets wet.
It is absurd to argue that a precaution should be abandoned because some troublemakers slip through. By the same argument, looking at a criminal record is similarly useless, because crimes are sometimes committed by people with no previous record.
I prefer to look at it from the liability standpoint. Say my bank hired a teller without looking at his/her easily available credit report, and then the teller ended up selling my personal information to identity thieves to cover debts. If the teller's credit report had shown an obvious history of financial problems, you had better believe that I and my lawyer would be holding the bank liable for all damages related to the breach.
I think it's appropriate to demand credit checks in cases where the employee would be dealing with sensitive information. A person in financial difficulty (or with a proven history of getting him/herself into difficulty) might find a strong temptation to betray the information.
In fact the military does the same thing. Credit checks are a standard part of the procedure for granting security clearances.
Edit wars and Stephen Colbert are the wrong test of Wikipedia. What I have often wondered is how hard it would be for a small, quiet conspiracy to cause considerable damage to the factual accuracy of Wikipedia, especially in historical articles that don't get a lot of attention.
To: Pluto "luto@planets.org" From: Punctual D. Industrious "fastdegrees@spam.net" Subject: PLANETARY STATUS FAST based on your LIFE EXPERIENCE
Are you being held back because you don't have STATUS? Is NASA ignoring you? Not getting name recognition you deserve from grade schoolers?
You may already qualify for PLANETARY STATUS based on your LIFE EXPERIENCE. Prestigious non-accredited astronomy associations want to give you the life you deserve.
Gas Giant or Terrestrial Body status available. Acceptance guaranteed. No exams or essays. Fast delivery of official certificate worldwide.
OMG who the fuck cares. Seriously. This whole Pluto thing has got to be the most ridiculous "news" event of my entire life. The only redeeming quality of it all is that it gives Stephen Colbert something to make fun of.
"Most ridiculous", eh? I would point out that CNN's "Latest News" banner carries links to the following stories, any one of which will make you stupider than reading about a meeting of astronomers:
# JonBenet suspect to face court Monday # Former President Ford undergoes angioplasty # DNA shows woman held in 'dungeon' is missing girl # Oprah's school opens in S. Africa # Lost fishermen: No drugs, no cannibalism # Cat goes for a walk... on front paws only # It's real life CSI for dinosaur detectives
Look on the bright side, at least the Pluto story has the public thinking about planetary science. There's something about spaceflight that galvanizes public attention -- no need to be a curmudgeon about it.
The article describes its function as an operating system, but from the description it actually seems closer to the functions of a kernel.
Does this mean we should call the brain the Brain/Thalamus? It's unfair to give the entire package precedence over the kernel, as one is useless without the other.
The U.S. citizen has lost all notion of public shame. What in South Korea gets you ostracized, in the U.S. get you on "Entertainment Tonight".
I can think of several examples where spammers' personal info was posted to Slashdot, and the (alleged) spammer was subjected to harassment in virtually all of the ways described in the article.
The science behind evolution has been building for the last 250 or so years on empirical evidence gathered by a vast number of educated men and women. You don't have to be an expert to understand the concepts!
Theologians are smart, educated people and have been at it for about 10 times as long as evolutionary scientists. They have some pretty clever arguments, too. This is my point. Unless you are capable of checking for yourself, why believe one over the other?
Just think of your high school biology class where you learned about the white butterflies that, over a relatively short time (10s of generations), changed into black butterflies.
Aside from the obvious question of whether you personally can verify this (if not, it may as well be the same as any biblical parable), recessive genes could cause this to happen, it need not be an artifact of evolutionary mutation.
if there wasn't some unsubstantiated book that contradicted the concept of evolution, you'd believe it in a second, just as you believe the earth revolves around the sun.
Oh ye of little faith:
He established the earth upon its foundations, so that it will not totter, forever and ever. - Psalm 104:5
The world is firmly established, it will not be moved. - Psalm 93:1 & 1 Chronicles 16:30
(There are other passages, but these are the most obvious.)
Although I agree with you, I think you have turned my comment on its head. I am saying that evolution is obviously a successful idea, so why should we care what idiots think? Those people are not the people who will be developing the successful drugs. Since drug companies like to make money, and since people like to live, the anti-evolutionists will only ever be annoying noisemakers.
Also, I'm not interested in forcing anyone to believe anything. Science has its own incorrect orthodoxies which need to be broken from time to time.
that means it would help a lot if the general public knew at least enough about science to know when the people we elect say things as dumb or dumber than "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday."
There is some confusion in this thread about the difference between being intelligent and being educated. Even if we somehow forced every person in the country to believe in evolution, we would still have pointy-haired bosses who put floppy disks in the DVD drive. That's my point: why care what stupid people think? They can't possibly understand evolution, so to insist that they believe in it is at best a hollow victory.
Really? Not in science class, which you have for probably about 8 years or more? Not even in science classes you take in college (assuming you go)?
I took engineering. Molecular biology did not come up that much.
I may not remember all my organic chem, but that doesn't mean I'll stop believing in what can be done using that knowledge.
Me either. But most people I know -- who got BA's in college and regular jobs -- couldn't forget that stuff fast enough, probably because they didn't care to understand it in the first place.
If people were more intelligent, perhaps we wouldn't have many of the problems that we face today.
That's a big, unproven "perhaps". It suggests that nations run by intelligent elites should have few problems, but the opposite is true in practice. Also, you are confusing "intelligent" with "educated". We can't do anything about making our population more intelligent. But we're educating the hell out of them and still they don't want to learn chemistry. This means that even if they "believe" in evolution, it is fragile because they won't understand it. I say, let's just exclude it from the conversation, maybe we'll get more done.
Also, it's pretty bad when people cannot accept something as provenly true as evolution. for example consider the following: do these people who don't accept evolution also believe DNA evidence should not be used in criminal (e.g. rape) cases? what about paternity tests? it's the same science.
Actually, most of the creationists' argument is that something as complicated as DNA could not possibly arise spontaneously, and must have been designed.
the molecular evidence for evolution is so staggering, yet most debates only talk about fossil records because they are by their nature less precise and less complete and hence easier to attack.
No argument here, but I think that reinforces my point. We shouldn't care what Joe/Jane Lunchpail thinks, because s/he can't possibly understand the facts. Hell, I have a graduate degree (though not in biology) and I don't understand it.
Why would they? Jobs in science are far from the most lucrative available. I know because I've got several friends who went to law school (many of whom got undergrads in science).
Your average non-scientist citizen is not likely to go and check all the sources to verify that, yes indeed, evolution is the most likely explanation for the diversity of species. So, to demand that this average citizen believe in evolution is to demand the same leap of faith as for that citizen to believe in creation. Either way, some "expert" is telling this citizen what to think about something s/he doesn't understand.
Why don't these polls include an "I don't know, I don't have time to check the facts, and it really doesn't matter in my everyday life" option? I think that would be the best response for a thinking non-scientist.
Only a tiny minority of Americans will ever use the fact of human evolution in their lifetimes. Indeed, the vast majority of the American public will never deal with science directly in their working lives. So what difference does it make what they believe?
1. I'm assuming that traditional encyclopedias have solved this problem, and they are not getting constantly sued. One needs only to re-use their solution.
2. The possibility of litigation is why God invented disclaimers. "Although this expert believes to the best of his/her knowledge blah blah, use this information at your own risk, etc."
3. I don't think an "anonymous" editor would be immune from this anyway. If somebody hired a private investigator who found out the editor's real identity, they could be sued in the same way. I suspect it wouldn't be impossible, given a bit of time, effort, and cash, to obtain a Wiki user's real identity.
If you care to have accurate information this statement is true of all sources.
My problem with Wiki is not that you have to verify the source. You correctly point out that one has to do that of all sources.
My problem is that anonymous editing (in which I include editing by people with usernames, as they are effectively anonymous) means that you can never know the adgendas or biases of those who are publishing the facts. Some pages are obviously biased, and called out for being so. What I worry about are the specialist pages, where only a specialist could recognize an error or spot a bias.
I would like to see Wiki adopt an "edition" system, where an expert -- whose identity and credentials are verified by Wiki -- "signs" certain articles, to acknowledge that the facts are correct as s/he views them. In keeping with Wiki's philosopy, there is no reason why multiple signed "editions" of articles could exist, signed by different experts.
Under such a system, you would know who takes responsibility for the facts as they are presented, and you would know their motivations, conflicts of interest, and backgroud.
It is possible with items that take no physical space (music on your iPod or NetFlix rentals), but not so with anything else.
It is true that data takes essentially no physical space, but it is not true that it takes no resources. A file sitting on a filesystem is maintained in various ways; it is scanned to build file databases, possibly moved in a defrag, possibly copied in a RAID configuration or backup. These operations take a tiny but nontrivial amount of processing time. There is also the extra cost of the larger drives needed to store such a large filesystem, and many other small costs. Once the filesystem becomes sufficiently large, the cost of maintaining the filesystem becomes an issue on the basis of incremental cost per additional file.
Now, I agree that this cost is at most a penny per year per file, so one sale every few years will probably make up for it. However, the same principle applies to digital music as it does to physical music -- the warehousing costs are much, much smaller in the digital world, but they are not zero.
Maybe they're trying to phase out pilots all together?
I would always prefer to have a pilot on board. It gives me the security of knowing that there is at least one human, with the power to decide whether the airplane leaves the ground or not, whose life depends on the decision just as mine does.
If it gets to the point where computerized pilots are provably more efficient and safer than humans, legislation should require that on every flight, a mid-level airline executive should be on board the plane, with the authority to instruct the computer to land and/or not take off.
Slashdot Mirror
We're all hopelessly paranoid, making trust impossible, and rigidly stratified, making flexible response or communication impossible, oh and so totally self-centered that the mere notion of cooperation causes outbreaks of hives
... no, I can't get money out of the bank machine either. But the good news is that the price of bread is down to ten cigarettes here in Wichita ...
Hello, FBI? Mid-level functionary from FEMA here. Nasty computer virus we're having, eh? Yeah, I haven't had power for a week either
Anyway, I know you've never heard of me, and have no way of verifying my identity. And I know we're in the middle of an unprecedented national crisis. But it would really help us out if you could forward all your operational plans and the locations of all your agents as soon as possible. You know, I really value your trust, flexibility, and co-operation on this one. 'Kay, thanks, bye.
Way back when I was in the navy, it was pretty much standard practice for them to use tear gas on us as part of chemical warfare training (obviously, they don't use stronger stuff as most of it is lethal).
... I thought it would be a bit of itching and nose running, but when it happened, the tear gas hit me instantly, like a ton of bricks -- eyes stinging, mucous membranes going nuts, unable to breathe. And this was without a high enough concentration for the gas to be visible in the air.
For one drill, we were supposed to wait until we felt the effects of the gas before we put our masks on
Another fun fact about tear gas, which I found out later that day in the shower, is that tear gas residue on your skin hurts like hell if it gets wet.
It is absurd to argue that a precaution should be abandoned because some troublemakers slip through. By the same argument, looking at a criminal record is similarly useless, because crimes are sometimes committed by people with no previous record.
I prefer to look at it from the liability standpoint. Say my bank hired a teller without looking at his/her easily available credit report, and then the teller ended up selling my personal information to identity thieves to cover debts. If the teller's credit report had shown an obvious history of financial problems, you had better believe that I and my lawyer would be holding the bank liable for all damages related to the breach.
I think it's appropriate to demand credit checks in cases where the employee would be dealing with sensitive information. A person in financial difficulty (or with a proven history of getting him/herself into difficulty) might find a strong temptation to betray the information.
In fact the military does the same thing. Credit checks are a standard part of the procedure for granting security clearances.
Edit wars and Stephen Colbert are the wrong test of Wikipedia. What I have often wondered is how hard it would be for a small, quiet conspiracy to cause considerable damage to the factual accuracy of Wikipedia, especially in historical articles that don't get a lot of attention.
To: Pluto "luto@planets.org"
From: Punctual D. Industrious "fastdegrees@spam.net"
Subject: PLANETARY STATUS FAST based on your LIFE EXPERIENCE
Are you being held back because you don't have STATUS? Is NASA ignoring you? Not getting name recognition you deserve from grade schoolers?
You may already qualify for PLANETARY STATUS based on your LIFE EXPERIENCE. Prestigious non-accredited astronomy associations want to give you the life you deserve.
Gas Giant or Terrestrial Body status available. Acceptance guaranteed. No exams or essays. Fast delivery of official certificate worldwide.
OMG who the fuck cares. Seriously. This whole Pluto thing has got to be the most ridiculous "news" event of my entire life. The only redeeming quality of it all is that it gives Stephen Colbert something to make fun of.
... on front paws only
"Most ridiculous", eh? I would point out that CNN's "Latest News" banner carries links to the following stories, any one of which will make you stupider than reading about a meeting of astronomers:
# JonBenet suspect to face court Monday
# Former President Ford undergoes angioplasty
# DNA shows woman held in 'dungeon' is missing girl
# Oprah's school opens in S. Africa
# Lost fishermen: No drugs, no cannibalism
# Cat goes for a walk
# It's real life CSI for dinosaur detectives
Look on the bright side, at least the Pluto story has the public thinking about planetary science. There's something about spaceflight that galvanizes public attention -- no need to be a curmudgeon about it.
I just can't understand why this story of Pluto's reclassification is deemed "breaking news" on the major news websites.
Would you rather read about the white, blonde, teenaged abductee-of-the-week? Or anything about Paris Hilton?
I would call it an improvement.
From the summary:
The article describes its function as an operating system, but from the description it actually seems closer to the functions of a kernel.
Does this mean we should call the brain the Brain/Thalamus? It's unfair to give the entire package precedence over the kernel, as one is useless without the other.
The U.S. citizen has lost all notion of public shame. What in South Korea gets you ostracized, in the U.S. get you on "Entertainment Tonight".
I can think of several examples where spammers' personal info was posted to Slashdot, and the (alleged) spammer was subjected to harassment in virtually all of the ways described in the article.
The science behind evolution has been building for the last 250 or so years on empirical evidence gathered by a vast number of educated men and women. You don't have to be an expert to understand the concepts!
Theologians are smart, educated people and have been at it for about 10 times as long as evolutionary scientists. They have some pretty clever arguments, too. This is my point. Unless you are capable of checking for yourself, why believe one over the other?
Just think of your high school biology class where you learned about the white butterflies that, over a relatively short time (10s of generations), changed into black butterflies.
Aside from the obvious question of whether you personally can verify this (if not, it may as well be the same as any biblical parable), recessive genes could cause this to happen, it need not be an artifact of evolutionary mutation.
if there wasn't some unsubstantiated book that contradicted the concept of evolution, you'd believe it in a second, just as you believe the earth revolves around the sun.
Oh ye of little faith:
He established the earth upon its foundations, so that it will not totter, forever and ever.
- Psalm 104:5
The world is firmly established, it will not be moved.
- Psalm 93:1 & 1 Chronicles 16:30
(There are other passages, but these are the most obvious.)
Although I agree with you, I think you have turned my comment on its head. I am saying that evolution is obviously a successful idea, so why should we care what idiots think? Those people are not the people who will be developing the successful drugs. Since drug companies like to make money, and since people like to live, the anti-evolutionists will only ever be annoying noisemakers.
Also, I'm not interested in forcing anyone to believe anything. Science has its own incorrect orthodoxies which need to be broken from time to time.
that means it would help a lot if the general public knew at least enough about science to know when the people we elect say things as dumb or dumber than "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday."
There is some confusion in this thread about the difference between being intelligent and being educated. Even if we somehow forced every person in the country to believe in evolution, we would still have pointy-haired bosses who put floppy disks in the DVD drive. That's my point: why care what stupid people think? They can't possibly understand evolution, so to insist that they believe in it is at best a hollow victory.
Really? Not in science class, which you have for probably about 8 years or more? Not even in science classes you take in college (assuming you go)?
I took engineering. Molecular biology did not come up that much.
I may not remember all my organic chem, but that doesn't mean I'll stop believing in what can be done using that knowledge.
Me either. But most people I know -- who got BA's in college and regular jobs -- couldn't forget that stuff fast enough, probably because they didn't care to understand it in the first place.
If people were more intelligent, perhaps we wouldn't have many of the problems that we face today.
That's a big, unproven "perhaps". It suggests that nations run by intelligent elites should have few problems, but the opposite is true in practice. Also, you are confusing "intelligent" with "educated". We can't do anything about making our population more intelligent. But we're educating the hell out of them and still they don't want to learn chemistry. This means that even if they "believe" in evolution, it is fragile because they won't understand it. I say, let's just exclude it from the conversation, maybe we'll get more done.
Also, it's pretty bad when people cannot accept something as provenly true as evolution. for example consider the following: do these people who don't accept evolution also believe DNA evidence should not be used in criminal (e.g. rape) cases? what about paternity tests? it's the same science.
Actually, most of the creationists' argument is that something as complicated as DNA could not possibly arise spontaneously, and must have been designed.
the molecular evidence for evolution is so staggering, yet most debates only talk about fossil records because they are by their nature less precise and less complete and hence easier to attack.
No argument here, but I think that reinforces my point. We shouldn't care what Joe/Jane Lunchpail thinks, because s/he can't possibly understand the facts. Hell, I have a graduate degree (though not in biology) and I don't understand it.
Why would they? Jobs in science are far from the most lucrative available. I know because I've got several friends who went to law school (many of whom got undergrads in science).
Devil's advocate.
Your average non-scientist citizen is not likely to go and check all the sources to verify that, yes indeed, evolution is the most likely explanation for the diversity of species. So, to demand that this average citizen believe in evolution is to demand the same leap of faith as for that citizen to believe in creation. Either way, some "expert" is telling this citizen what to think about something s/he doesn't understand.
Why don't these polls include an "I don't know, I don't have time to check the facts, and it really doesn't matter in my everyday life" option? I think that would be the best response for a thinking non-scientist.
Okay. Devil's advocate.
Only a tiny minority of Americans will ever use the fact of human evolution in their lifetimes. Indeed, the vast majority of the American public will never deal with science directly in their working lives. So what difference does it make what they believe?
1. I'm assuming that traditional encyclopedias have solved this problem, and they are not getting constantly sued. One needs only to re-use their solution.
2. The possibility of litigation is why God invented disclaimers. "Although this expert believes to the best of his/her knowledge blah blah, use this information at your own risk, etc."
3. I don't think an "anonymous" editor would be immune from this anyway. If somebody hired a private investigator who found out the editor's real identity, they could be sued in the same way. I suspect it wouldn't be impossible, given a bit of time, effort, and cash, to obtain a Wiki user's real identity.
He's just plagiarizing Rick Mercer, who is far funnier than Colbert and still the king of this kind of comedy.
If you care to have accurate information this statement is true of all sources.
My problem with Wiki is not that you have to verify the source. You correctly point out that one has to do that of all sources.
My problem is that anonymous editing (in which I include editing by people with usernames, as they are effectively anonymous) means that you can never know the adgendas or biases of those who are publishing the facts. Some pages are obviously biased, and called out for being so. What I worry about are the specialist pages, where only a specialist could recognize an error or spot a bias.
I would like to see Wiki adopt an "edition" system, where an expert -- whose identity and credentials are verified by Wiki -- "signs" certain articles, to acknowledge that the facts are correct as s/he views them. In keeping with Wiki's philosopy, there is no reason why multiple signed "editions" of articles could exist, signed by different experts.
Under such a system, you would know who takes responsibility for the facts as they are presented, and you would know their motivations, conflicts of interest, and backgroud.
It is possible with items that take no physical space (music on your iPod or NetFlix rentals), but not so with anything else.
It is true that data takes essentially no physical space, but it is not true that it takes no resources. A file sitting on a filesystem is maintained in various ways; it is scanned to build file databases, possibly moved in a defrag, possibly copied in a RAID configuration or backup. These operations take a tiny but nontrivial amount of processing time. There is also the extra cost of the larger drives needed to store such a large filesystem, and many other small costs. Once the filesystem becomes sufficiently large, the cost of maintaining the filesystem becomes an issue on the basis of incremental cost per additional file.
Now, I agree that this cost is at most a penny per year per file, so one sale every few years will probably make up for it. However, the same principle applies to digital music as it does to physical music -- the warehousing costs are much, much smaller in the digital world, but they are not zero.
Maybe they're trying to phase out pilots all together?
I would always prefer to have a pilot on board. It gives me the security of knowing that there is at least one human, with the power to decide whether the airplane leaves the ground or not, whose life depends on the decision just as mine does.
If it gets to the point where computerized pilots are provably more efficient and safer than humans, legislation should require that on every flight, a mid-level airline executive should be on board the plane, with the authority to instruct the computer to land and/or not take off.
Which protest gets you a picture in the paper?
1. Normal-looking people wearing normal clothes, speaking politely
2. Crazy people wearing HAZMAT suits, shouting and carrying on
Face it -- politics is theater. If you don't get noticed, you don't get heard.