Sexual preference and skin color are not disabilities. They don't prevent anyone from doing anything.
Sexual preference can certainly prevent you from leading a normal life in most of the world. In the United States alone it can prevent you from getting married, cost you your job, and put you at risk of a violent attack. There are special clinics that will try to change your orientation if you (or your parents) choose, often resulting in mental trauma. Many people believe that being gay is not just a disability but a willful act of immorality and will fight tooth and nail to uphold that view. Sexual orientation is absolutely a relevant example of how this sort of technology might someday be put to troubling uses.
Someone with color blindness is physically incapable of doing something that a large majority of people can do.
Which in many cases does not affect their life at all. I have a coworker who didn't notice he was red/green color blind until he was in his 30s.
I gave up on LCDs altogether after discovering that the decent ones all have either bad input lag, horrible black levels, terrible image quality at non-native resolutions, or all of the above. I'm using a 9-year old CRT because I can't find a monitor that doesn't make me want to throw it at a wall.
Input lag is a serious problem that often goes unrecognized. I played a collection of old Sega games using a wireless controller on a friend's PS3 hooked up to a large LCD TV and I couldn't believe it. Sonic the Hedgehog was literally unplayable. When running at full speed, my reaction time + input lag was greater than the amount of time it took a spike or robot to cross the screen and hit me. I play perfectly on a Genesis with a CRT TV. I wish more manufacturers cared about responsiveness. Maybe OLEDs will be better.
That said, I can't see much benefit for ARM in all of this as the VAST majority of notebooks ship with an Intel CPU & AMD is attempting their own, and with an x86 CPU it makes life simpler, much simpler rather than dealing with an ARM CPU that likely won't be running Windows and wouldn't be able to run many of the apps that people would probably want unless they're the c. 1.5% that use linux.
What he said in the article was that it doesn't really matter whether ARM is used for the application process because there are already several ARM-based microcontrollers running the wi-fi, hard drive, camera, etc. The application processor is an opportunity for more growth, but the overall growth of the netbook market benefits ARM no matter what.
I don't see how 90% of PCs are going to be replaced by netbooks with tiny portable screens, though. Those are totally unusable for stuff like sustained office work. Maybe we'll all just use docking stations, but wasn't a key feature of netbooks the lack of peripheral complexity?
It's not a great language (family) for general use, but it is a good way to learn something about how CPUs work, what a function call actually is, etc.
Bad science is a product of human cognition. It's not exclusive to any political alignment. You asked for something bad a right-leaning group has done that was on the same order of magnitude as whatever you're blaming Lysenko for, so I gave you one. It was a bad question to begin with since I was talking about the modern American right and you were talking about a guy in Russia seventy years ago, but I answered it. So what if someone else did the same thing? Are you saying that only communists do bad biology?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the modern American left (such as it is) is great with science. Bogus alternative medicine is very popular. I've also seen some feminist sites declare that the growing obesity epidemic is a sham to enforce orthodox ideas about body image, although I haven't looked at that very closely. But these are not central issues of the Democratic Party in the same way that religion-based decision making is for the Republicans.
Let's say I accept that national socialism with all its socialism is right wing
"National Socialism" is a name. The Nazis were facists who supported eugenics, militarism, and nationalism. These are considered right-wing ideas and are diametrically opposed to the sort of international egalitarianism that socialists promoted. In reality, Hitler was violently opposed to socialism and purged socialists and communists after he solidified his hold on power. Prominent right-wing anti-communist Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh supported him. There is no reasonable way that the Nazis can be considered left-wing or socialist. The only reason the idea is popular today is because it lets people compare Obama to Hitler.
what the hell does the holocaust have to do with science
There was plenty of pseudoscience in favor of eugenics. Also, whether there was an actual worldwide Jewish conspiracy is a question of fact which could be dealt with through evidence (but really wasn't, although I'm sure they had plenty of rationalizations).
By the way, was Lysenko really totally responsible for the famines? I don't know that much about Soviet history, but my understanding was that they had plenty of agricultural trouble before and after him, mainly due to collectivization. I agree that he was a first-class asshole, though.
You should try getting your history from history books. It's much deeper and more interesting than the made-for-TV remix you get from political rhetoric.
Either the AGW proponents have proved their case, or they have not. It shouldn't matter that their opponents are even less credible than they are.
Ideally, yes. The problem is that I'm not a climate scientist or anything close. Even if I were capable of finding all the relevant journal articles (doubtful) and had time to read and comprehend them (also doubtful), would I be able to interpret them correctly? Probably not. As with most issues I'm not directly involved in, I rely on experts to interpret and summarize the raw research. But even the summaries may not be reliable. It turns out that it's much easier to come up with intellectually dishonest arguments than it is to refute them. My role thus becomes that of a jury -- deciding the credibility of the experts themselves.
The tricky part is that it's not too hard to sound credible even if your arguments are total bunk. Again, I direct you to the evolution debate, in which the proportion of Americans who accept biological evolution hasn't changed in decades despite overwhelming evidence for one side. There are a few things I can work with, though:
1. Most of the skeptics seem to be concentrated in the same chunk of the political spectrum (right/libertarian) and have very strong political, economic, and emotional motivations for their skepticism. 2. The skeptics promote a conspiracy theory involving thousands of people. 3. The motivations given for these conspirators rely on strawman versions of environmentalist and left-leaning positions. Being a left-leaning person myself, I know for a fact that almost none of us are out to destroy capitalism, wreck the global economy, or live out some gaia hypothesis-based escape fantasy, and the few who are have no influence among scientists. 4. The skeptics seem to be almost entirely outside of the earth science community. According to Wikipedia, there are no major scientific bodies who oppose the idea of human-caused climate change.
And a few other things, but I don't want to draw too much from a Slashdot discussion. Against this I have some cherry-picked emails being interpreted by people who seem to have unrealistic expectations for the purity of data, the sorts of things people say in private, and the implications that actually has for a worldwide consensus. Having taken my share of data under time and budget constraints, I'm not that excited by a bit of fudging, and given the items I listed above I don't trust the skeptics to make honest, informed, and in-context criticisms.
Since when does the right care about science? They can't even get an issue as simple and data-rich as sex education right, but now I'm supposed to believe that it's all about the evidence?
I used to have doubts about AGW because I heard so many skeptics, but now that they've dropped their masks and are trying to move in for the kill I see that the whole thing is just like the evolution "debate". Conspiracy theories ("It's the evil liberals! They want to destroy capitalism!"), quotes out of context, repeating the same tired debunked arguments year after year... The only difference is that the ideology behind it is a little more popular -- the strawman liberal is apparently a more plausible villain to most people than the strawman atheist.
Digg has ceased to be relevant precisely because of "bury brigades" - organized groups of people who mod down anything they disagree with.
I've never read Digg at length, so I can't speak to its relevance or any cause for its supposed demise.
The purpose of Slashdot's moderation as stated is NOT to "see things gone", it's to see things rise to the top. The most insightful comments are supposed to rise. The -1 moderation options were only provided to be a last resort against truly ridiculous abuses such as GNAA trolling.
That is the way it's intended to work. I think this system is flawed, mainly because...
Organized groups work out how to use and abuse the system
...it assumes intentional abuse is the only or even the biggest problem. I see a far more pernicious and widespread problem, which is that mod systems inflate the ego incentive to talk out of your ass. The main thing that makes a discussion site valuable is the signal to noise ratio. Arguably, the ass-talking is worse than the GNAA stuff since the latter is more obvious and less likely to misinform me.
If you really want to see the cream rise to the crop, then give more room on the top and don't worry so much about pushing things down.
That might help a little, but numerical scales don't work that well in practice. Instead of seeing a distribution centered on the middle value the scores tend to polarize towards the highest and lowest.
And remember, what you (personally) feel is "off-topic" is relevant and even insightful to other people, which is another reason why giving out weapons is a bad thought.
By that logic, there shouldn't be a mod system at all. Slashdot is set up to value some types of content more than others. It's one of the things that distinguishes it from a general-purpose message board.
Regarding your other comment, I think that a lot of your troubles come from the hostile tone of your comments. For example, your supposedly innocent YouTube link comment contains the sentence "Anyone who says different [from me], is a clueless idealistic moron". I think that's a fair troll mod, although I probably wouldn't spend a mod point on it myself. If this were my site I would have avoided the whole issue by not having YRO in the first place, which has been nothing but teenage anarchist/libertarian flamebait since it started ten years ago. This comment here is another example of a fair troll mod.
I get the impression that what you really want is a political discussion site. Have you tried looking in that direction? They tend to be more accommodating of your style of rhetoric and what you want to talk about.
[Speaking of the value of offtopic political discussions, I must point out that we're basically having one here. I'm coming from a sort of squishy left-leaning perspective which says that human nature causes more trouble than organized power, while you're coming from more of a paranoid libertian-leaning perspective which says exactly the reverse. As an exercise, I invite you to consider the outcome of this discussion once it's over and whether it actually informed anyone or changed anyone's mind. If you really want to learn more about where I'm coming from, there's an essay by Clay Shirky called "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" and a book by Thomas Gilovich called "How We Know What Isn't So" that would probably be more helpful than Slashdot comments.]
I hadn't heard that term before so I Googled it, and apparently "bury brigades" are people who mod down comments and stories that they're ideologically opposed to. The thing is, I'm not concerned about some supposed ideological bias, I'm concerned about comments that are off-topic, uninformed, inflammatory, and most of all uninteresting, which is how I'd describe almost every political discussion I've seen here. Looking at your posting history is seems like many of your comments are exactly what I would like to see gone, so I can see why you'd feel threatened by this. Sorry -- it's nothing personal.
IMHO, stories which would cause "bury brigades" to be relevant ought to be offtopic for a tech news site, anyway, or at least confined to the YRO ghetto. While I'm complaining, it would also be nice if groups of stories could be kept to a consistent section. I've been trying to avoid the copyright/piracy stories for years but won't stay in one place.
Really? I think Slashdot would be greatly improved by adding *more* downmodding as well as increasing the upmod cap. The problem I see is that the people who don't read the articles and have no idea what they're talking about drown out the few people with real expertise. Go to any science article and you'll see this -- "I'm not a physicist or anything, but [three paragraphs of uninformed speculation garbage]" gets heavily upmodded by other people who aren't physicists either. Then you have the issue that any article that can veer off into politics will, and political discussions are even worse about uninformed speculation. But the worst has to be when the summary has nothing to do with the article. You can immediately tell which third of the commenters read the article and which two thirds didn't.
I'd like to see the mod options revamped as follows, with the scale ranging from -1 to +10:
-1, Did not read the article -1, Wrong (wipes out all political discussions) -1, Unqualified to make this comment -1, Causing trouble (why bother with the distinction between Troll and Flamebait?) -1, Adds nothing to the discussion -1, Overrated
+1, Provides expert information relevant to the article +1, Provides informed analysis relevant to the article +1, Asks an interesting question relevant to the article [Maybe one more?]
Some of the options are similar to the current scheme, but mine are more specific. I left Funny out since it's so heavily abused, but it's easy to filter so you can add it back in if you want. Everything else can stay at the default score. The new scheme encourages what's good about Slashdot (highly technical people commenting on technical issues) and discourages what's bad about internet discussions (uninformed people inflating their egos and drowning everyone else out).
"True believer" is often used as a derogatory term for a person whose beliefs are fixed beyond all reason. Some people who claim to be open-minded throw the phrase around very recklessly. I feel that this is arrogant. Discovering new facts using rigorous methodologies is difficult and time-consuming. Everyone uses heuristics most of the time -- hearsay, incomplete evidence, confirmation bias, etc. IMHO, to wildly criticize others (especially when it's millions of people you've never met) for not wanting to change their core beliefs based on the opinions of random strangers shows a lack of humility, self-consciousness, and reason. Furthermore, such critics rarely have well-grounded beliefs themselves. These are the supposed characteristics of true believers, hence my paradoxical joke that only true believers believe in true believers.
No, it's not inaccurate, unless you're claiming that protons don't have a charge. The ions here are nothing like wires. In a wire, the atoms (nuclei and nonconductive electrons) are fixed in position while the conduction band electrons are free to move from atom to atom. But in this desalinization process, the nuclei themselves actually move -- that's what makes it desalinization. The sodium and chlorine ions are true charge carriers. Ion conduction is not uncommon. Here's some more info on that:
What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Yeah, cause creativity and communications skills contribute nothing to technical accomplishments, right? I've worked with people who think this way. The smallest issue takes three emails and a face to face meeting to resolve because it never occurs to them that how they write actually matters. Having skills and interests outside of your field makes you smarter within your field, and easier to work with too.
I think these fringe people are being focused on because it's easy to try to claim they represent a much larger portion of people than they really do
Depending on how you count, 30-60% of Republicans are birthers. That's hardly a trivial number. DailyKos has sponsored a lot of polls showing this, but since you probably won't trust their results here's a different pollster:
It's also worth noting that, unlike the 9/11 truthers or the 2004 election conspiracists (who were rightly derided as lunatics), the birthers and deathers have a major media network and high-profile Republicans supporting them.
I also note that your link shows people protesting "socialism", waving a sign that says "save our seniors", waving a confederate flag, etc., and that you're using the same sort of rhetoric (Americans "awakening" as if to some vast conspiracy). Are those the serious issues you want to discuss? If so, you ought to be reading some history books, not debating in public. The reality is that there is no conspiracy. There is no socialist revolution, certainly not from a centrist like Obama. Your party lost the last election rather badly and now you're angry about it. The sooner your side grows up and starts taking that seriously, the sooner you can get reelected. We know -- we had to do it too.
It's important to take inflation into account when looking at price increases over a 10-20 year time span. According to MeasuringWorth, $60 today was ~$55 in 2005, ~$45-48 in 2000, ~$38-42 in 1995, and ~$35 in 1990. So prices might have gone up, but not that much.
Ignoring inflation is a very common error in stories about spending, probably because it's an error that makes the story more exciting.
fMRI measures blood flow/oxygenation, not "flows of energy". The idea is that the parts of the brain that are being used more will draw more blood. However, the measurement process has some noise. According to the article, the scientists were showing how using bad statistics to try to filter out the noise can result in false positives.
But of course, as the physicist noted, you were more interesting in scoring cheap philosophical points than contributing to the discussion. It's sad that almost every time there's a science story on Slashdot the people talking out of their asses drown out the few who actually understand what's going on.
But the same thing is happening with milk and other food producers seeking to change the definition of "organic" so they can sell more food without actually being organic.
That's probably not the best example given that "organic" has several much older definitions which happen to include almost all food, while the newer marketing term has given us such gross violations of language as "organic table salt".
Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance
Nobody's going to use an annoyingly cutesy word like "gibibyte", which seems just as silly now as it did ten years ago. Using the abbreviated prefixes might be a good idea, though.
Just for reference (since some people are freaking out about how much space they're "losing") here's the percentage difference between the SI and binary sizes:
So for the foreseeable future your hard drive will be about 10% smaller than advertised. Not a big deal, IMHO (it's not like you're paying for the missing bits), but still worth pointing out.
More importantly, there was never a clear distinction made between arrays and pointers.
That's because at a low level there isn't one. If you write assembly code, you refer to arrays using a base address (aka a pointer) and an offset (aka an index). This is not so great for applications but is excellent for systems/embedded programming, which C was designed for. In those domains, an array may not represent a fixed-size buffer in SRAM. You can use array notation to address memory-mapped hardware registers, for instance. Many of C's features didn't really make sense to me until I started doing embedded programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Sexual preference and skin color are not disabilities. They don't prevent anyone from doing anything.
Sexual preference can certainly prevent you from leading a normal life in most of the world. In the United States alone it can prevent you from getting married, cost you your job, and put you at risk of a violent attack. There are special clinics that will try to change your orientation if you (or your parents) choose, often resulting in mental trauma. Many people believe that being gay is not just a disability but a willful act of immorality and will fight tooth and nail to uphold that view. Sexual orientation is absolutely a relevant example of how this sort of technology might someday be put to troubling uses.
Someone with color blindness is physically incapable of doing something that a large majority of people can do.
Which in many cases does not affect their life at all. I have a coworker who didn't notice he was red/green color blind until he was in his 30s.
I gave up on LCDs altogether after discovering that the decent ones all have either bad input lag, horrible black levels, terrible image quality at non-native resolutions, or all of the above. I'm using a 9-year old CRT because I can't find a monitor that doesn't make me want to throw it at a wall.
Input lag is a serious problem that often goes unrecognized. I played a collection of old Sega games using a wireless controller on a friend's PS3 hooked up to a large LCD TV and I couldn't believe it. Sonic the Hedgehog was literally unplayable. When running at full speed, my reaction time + input lag was greater than the amount of time it took a spike or robot to cross the screen and hit me. I play perfectly on a Genesis with a CRT TV. I wish more manufacturers cared about responsiveness. Maybe OLEDs will be better.
So you'd get around 1/100*0.04, that is 0.0004 watt of RF radiation.
Most of the radiation is passing through you (your head doesn't block the signal), so I think you'd actually get a lot less than that.
That said, I can't see much benefit for ARM in all of this as the VAST majority of notebooks ship with an Intel CPU & AMD is attempting their own, and with an x86 CPU it makes life simpler, much simpler rather than dealing with an ARM CPU that likely won't be running Windows and wouldn't be able to run many of the apps that people would probably want unless they're the c. 1.5% that use linux.
What he said in the article was that it doesn't really matter whether ARM is used for the application process because there are already several ARM-based microcontrollers running the wi-fi, hard drive, camera, etc. The application processor is an opportunity for more growth, but the overall growth of the netbook market benefits ARM no matter what.
I don't see how 90% of PCs are going to be replaced by netbooks with tiny portable screens, though. Those are totally unusable for stuff like sustained office work. Maybe we'll all just use docking stations, but wasn't a key feature of netbooks the lack of peripheral complexity?
Chinese alternative history movies where well known US actors find themselves on the losing side of World War 2.
That would be rather odd given that China and the US were on the same side in World War 2.
It's not a great language (family) for general use, but it is a good way to learn something about how CPUs work, what a function call actually is, etc.
Bad science is a product of human cognition. It's not exclusive to any political alignment. You asked for something bad a right-leaning group has done that was on the same order of magnitude as whatever you're blaming Lysenko for, so I gave you one. It was a bad question to begin with since I was talking about the modern American right and you were talking about a guy in Russia seventy years ago, but I answered it. So what if someone else did the same thing? Are you saying that only communists do bad biology?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the modern American left (such as it is) is great with science. Bogus alternative medicine is very popular. I've also seen some feminist sites declare that the growing obesity epidemic is a sham to enforce orthodox ideas about body image, although I haven't looked at that very closely. But these are not central issues of the Democratic Party in the same way that religion-based decision making is for the Republicans.
Let's say I accept that national socialism with all its socialism is right wing
"National Socialism" is a name. The Nazis were facists who supported eugenics, militarism, and nationalism. These are considered right-wing ideas and are diametrically opposed to the sort of international egalitarianism that socialists promoted. In reality, Hitler was violently opposed to socialism and purged socialists and communists after he solidified his hold on power. Prominent right-wing anti-communist Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh supported him. There is no reasonable way that the Nazis can be considered left-wing or socialist. The only reason the idea is popular today is because it lets people compare Obama to Hitler.
what the hell does the holocaust have to do with science
There was plenty of pseudoscience in favor of eugenics. Also, whether there was an actual worldwide Jewish conspiracy is a question of fact which could be dealt with through evidence (but really wasn't, although I'm sure they had plenty of rationalizations).
By the way, was Lysenko really totally responsible for the famines? I don't know that much about Soviet history, but my understanding was that they had plenty of agricultural trouble before and after him, mainly due to collectivization. I agree that he was a first-class asshole, though.
You should try getting your history from history books. It's much deeper and more interesting than the made-for-TV remix you get from political rhetoric.
Sure. The Holocaust.
(What? It's no less ridiculous than tying the modern progressive movement to Stalin.)
Either the AGW proponents have proved their case, or they have not. It shouldn't matter that their opponents are even less credible than they are.
Ideally, yes. The problem is that I'm not a climate scientist or anything close. Even if I were capable of finding all the relevant journal articles (doubtful) and had time to read and comprehend them (also doubtful), would I be able to interpret them correctly? Probably not. As with most issues I'm not directly involved in, I rely on experts to interpret and summarize the raw research. But even the summaries may not be reliable. It turns out that it's much easier to come up with intellectually dishonest arguments than it is to refute them. My role thus becomes that of a jury -- deciding the credibility of the experts themselves.
The tricky part is that it's not too hard to sound credible even if your arguments are total bunk. Again, I direct you to the evolution debate, in which the proportion of Americans who accept biological evolution hasn't changed in decades despite overwhelming evidence for one side. There are a few things I can work with, though:
1. Most of the skeptics seem to be concentrated in the same chunk of the political spectrum (right/libertarian) and have very strong political, economic, and emotional motivations for their skepticism.
2. The skeptics promote a conspiracy theory involving thousands of people.
3. The motivations given for these conspirators rely on strawman versions of environmentalist and left-leaning positions. Being a left-leaning person myself, I know for a fact that almost none of us are out to destroy capitalism, wreck the global economy, or live out some gaia hypothesis-based escape fantasy, and the few who are have no influence among scientists.
4. The skeptics seem to be almost entirely outside of the earth science community. According to Wikipedia, there are no major scientific bodies who oppose the idea of human-caused climate change.
And a few other things, but I don't want to draw too much from a Slashdot discussion. Against this I have some cherry-picked emails being interpreted by people who seem to have unrealistic expectations for the purity of data, the sorts of things people say in private, and the implications that actually has for a worldwide consensus. Having taken my share of data under time and budget constraints, I'm not that excited by a bit of fudging, and given the items I listed above I don't trust the skeptics to make honest, informed, and in-context criticisms.
Since when does the right care about science? They can't even get an issue as simple and data-rich as sex education right, but now I'm supposed to believe that it's all about the evidence?
I used to have doubts about AGW because I heard so many skeptics, but now that they've dropped their masks and are trying to move in for the kill I see that the whole thing is just like the evolution "debate". Conspiracy theories ("It's the evil liberals! They want to destroy capitalism!"), quotes out of context, repeating the same tired debunked arguments year after year... The only difference is that the ideology behind it is a little more popular -- the strawman liberal is apparently a more plausible villain to most people than the strawman atheist.
Which state are you in?
Digg has ceased to be relevant precisely because of "bury brigades" - organized groups of people who mod down anything they disagree with.
I've never read Digg at length, so I can't speak to its relevance or any cause for its supposed demise.
The purpose of Slashdot's moderation as stated is NOT to "see things gone", it's to see things rise to the top. The most insightful comments are supposed to rise. The -1 moderation options were only provided to be a last resort against truly ridiculous abuses such as GNAA trolling.
That is the way it's intended to work. I think this system is flawed, mainly because...
Organized groups work out how to use and abuse the system
If you really want to see the cream rise to the crop, then give more room on the top and don't worry so much about pushing things down.
That might help a little, but numerical scales don't work that well in practice. Instead of seeing a distribution centered on the middle value the scores tend to polarize towards the highest and lowest.
And remember, what you (personally) feel is "off-topic" is relevant and even insightful to other people, which is another reason why giving out weapons is a bad thought.
By that logic, there shouldn't be a mod system at all. Slashdot is set up to value some types of content more than others. It's one of the things that distinguishes it from a general-purpose message board.
Regarding your other comment, I think that a lot of your troubles come from the hostile tone of your comments. For example, your supposedly innocent YouTube link comment contains the sentence "Anyone who says different [from me], is a clueless idealistic moron". I think that's a fair troll mod, although I probably wouldn't spend a mod point on it myself. If this were my site I would have avoided the whole issue by not having YRO in the first place, which has been nothing but teenage anarchist/libertarian flamebait since it started ten years ago. This comment here is another example of a fair troll mod.
I get the impression that what you really want is a political discussion site. Have you tried looking in that direction? They tend to be more accommodating of your style of rhetoric and what you want to talk about.
[Speaking of the value of offtopic political discussions, I must point out that we're basically having one here. I'm coming from a sort of squishy left-leaning perspective which says that human nature causes more trouble than organized power, while you're coming from more of a paranoid libertian-leaning perspective which says exactly the reverse. As an exercise, I invite you to consider the outcome of this discussion once it's over and whether it actually informed anyone or changed anyone's mind. If you really want to learn more about where I'm coming from, there's an essay by Clay Shirky called "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" and a book by Thomas Gilovich called "How We Know What Isn't So" that would probably be more helpful than Slashdot comments.]
I hadn't heard that term before so I Googled it, and apparently "bury brigades" are people who mod down comments and stories that they're ideologically opposed to. The thing is, I'm not concerned about some supposed ideological bias, I'm concerned about comments that are off-topic, uninformed, inflammatory, and most of all uninteresting, which is how I'd describe almost every political discussion I've seen here. Looking at your posting history is seems like many of your comments are exactly what I would like to see gone, so I can see why you'd feel threatened by this. Sorry -- it's nothing personal.
IMHO, stories which would cause "bury brigades" to be relevant ought to be offtopic for a tech news site, anyway, or at least confined to the YRO ghetto. While I'm complaining, it would also be nice if groups of stories could be kept to a consistent section. I've been trying to avoid the copyright/piracy stories for years but won't stay in one place.
Really? I think Slashdot would be greatly improved by adding *more* downmodding as well as increasing the upmod cap. The problem I see is that the people who don't read the articles and have no idea what they're talking about drown out the few people with real expertise. Go to any science article and you'll see this -- "I'm not a physicist or anything, but [three paragraphs of uninformed speculation garbage]" gets heavily upmodded by other people who aren't physicists either. Then you have the issue that any article that can veer off into politics will, and political discussions are even worse about uninformed speculation. But the worst has to be when the summary has nothing to do with the article. You can immediately tell which third of the commenters read the article and which two thirds didn't.
I'd like to see the mod options revamped as follows, with the scale ranging from -1 to +10:
-1, Did not read the article
-1, Wrong (wipes out all political discussions)
-1, Unqualified to make this comment
-1, Causing trouble (why bother with the distinction between Troll and Flamebait?)
-1, Adds nothing to the discussion
-1, Overrated
+1, Provides expert information relevant to the article
+1, Provides informed analysis relevant to the article
+1, Asks an interesting question relevant to the article
[Maybe one more?]
Some of the options are similar to the current scheme, but mine are more specific. I left Funny out since it's so heavily abused, but it's easy to filter so you can add it back in if you want. Everything else can stay at the default score. The new scheme encourages what's good about Slashdot (highly technical people commenting on technical issues) and discourages what's bad about internet discussions (uninformed people inflating their egos and drowning everyone else out).
"True believer" is often used as a derogatory term for a person whose beliefs are fixed beyond all reason. Some people who claim to be open-minded throw the phrase around very recklessly. I feel that this is arrogant. Discovering new facts using rigorous methodologies is difficult and time-consuming. Everyone uses heuristics most of the time -- hearsay, incomplete evidence, confirmation bias, etc. IMHO, to wildly criticize others (especially when it's millions of people you've never met) for not wanting to change their core beliefs based on the opinions of random strangers shows a lack of humility, self-consciousness, and reason. Furthermore, such critics rarely have well-grounded beliefs themselves. These are the supposed characteristics of true believers, hence my paradoxical joke that only true believers believe in true believers.
No, it's not inaccurate, unless you're claiming that protons don't have a charge. The ions here are nothing like wires. In a wire, the atoms (nuclei and nonconductive electrons) are fixed in position while the conduction band electrons are free to move from atom to atom. But in this desalinization process, the nuclei themselves actually move -- that's what makes it desalinization. The sodium and chlorine ions are true charge carriers. Ion conduction is not uncommon. Here's some more info on that:
http://amasci.com/amateur/elecdir.html
What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Yeah, cause creativity and communications skills contribute nothing to technical accomplishments, right? I've worked with people who think this way. The smallest issue takes three emails and a face to face meeting to resolve because it never occurs to them that how they write actually matters. Having skills and interests outside of your field makes you smarter within your field, and easier to work with too.
I think these fringe people are being focused on because it's easy to try to claim they represent a much larger portion of people than they really do
Depending on how you count, 30-60% of Republicans are birthers. That's hardly a trivial number. DailyKos has sponsored a lot of polls showing this, but since you probably won't trust their results here's a different pollster:
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_National_9231210.pdf
It's also worth noting that, unlike the 9/11 truthers or the 2004 election conspiracists (who were rightly derided as lunatics), the birthers and deathers have a major media network and high-profile Republicans supporting them.
I also note that your link shows people protesting "socialism", waving a sign that says "save our seniors", waving a confederate flag, etc., and that you're using the same sort of rhetoric (Americans "awakening" as if to some vast conspiracy). Are those the serious issues you want to discuss? If so, you ought to be reading some history books, not debating in public. The reality is that there is no conspiracy. There is no socialist revolution, certainly not from a centrist like Obama. Your party lost the last election rather badly and now you're angry about it. The sooner your side grows up and starts taking that seriously, the sooner you can get reelected. We know -- we had to do it too.
It's important to take inflation into account when looking at price increases over a 10-20 year time span. According to MeasuringWorth, $60 today was ~$55 in 2005, ~$45-48 in 2000, ~$38-42 in 1995, and ~$35 in 1990. So prices might have gone up, but not that much.
Ignoring inflation is a very common error in stories about spending, probably because it's an error that makes the story more exciting.
fMRI measures blood flow/oxygenation, not "flows of energy". The idea is that the parts of the brain that are being used more will draw more blood. However, the measurement process has some noise. According to the article, the scientists were showing how using bad statistics to try to filter out the noise can result in false positives.
But of course, as the physicist noted, you were more interesting in scoring cheap philosophical points than contributing to the discussion. It's sad that almost every time there's a science story on Slashdot the people talking out of their asses drown out the few who actually understand what's going on.
Or women.
But the same thing is happening with milk and other food producers seeking to change the definition of "organic" so they can sell more food without actually being organic.
That's probably not the best example given that "organic" has several much older definitions which happen to include almost all food, while the newer marketing term has given us such gross violations of language as "organic table salt".
Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance
Nobody's going to use an annoyingly cutesy word like "gibibyte", which seems just as silly now as it did ten years ago. Using the abbreviated prefixes might be a good idea, though.
Just for reference (since some people are freaking out about how much space they're "losing") here's the percentage difference between the SI and binary sizes:
Kilobyte: 2.3%
Megabyte: 4.6%
Gigabyte: 6.9%
Terabyte: 9.1%
Petabyte: 11.2%
Exabyte: 13.3%
So for the foreseeable future your hard drive will be about 10% smaller than advertised. Not a big deal, IMHO (it's not like you're paying for the missing bits), but still worth pointing out.
More importantly, there was never a clear distinction made between arrays and pointers.
That's because at a low level there isn't one. If you write assembly code, you refer to arrays using a base address (aka a pointer) and an offset (aka an index). This is not so great for applications but is excellent for systems/embedded programming, which C was designed for. In those domains, an array may not represent a fixed-size buffer in SRAM. You can use array notation to address memory-mapped hardware registers, for instance. Many of C's features didn't really make sense to me until I started doing embedded programming.