I guess this is where we should rope in the historians, sociologists, cultural studies professors and philosophers to do some meta-observations of the scientific community?
Only how much do we trust THEM?
The turtles have to stop somewhere.
Oh, and there also isn't such a thing as single monolithic SCIENCE!. There's Springer and Elsevier and various other "journal" companies with their abusive copyright policies, and then there's the editors of journals and the arXiv, who determine what can and can't be published, and then there's the quasi-professional pop-sci magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist, who determine what the broader scientific community should celebrate and what they should laugh at, and then there's big US federal money pools like NSF and DOE and DOD who determine what the big grants are, and then there's various universities, and then there's privately funded corporate labs (though probably not so many now as before WW2)... and they don't necessarily all agree.
I think the first step is to admit that there isn't one SCIENCE! anymore but multiple competing sciences. One would think that interdisciplinary conferences would help, but a lot of those seem to be spamferences and frauds, so...
"The public has little or no understanding of how science works (even many non-scientist academics don't). "
How did we come to such a state of affairs? Isn't the essence of the scientific method and the scientific community transparency, honesty and open discussion?
Why then should the "workings" of science be such a mystery, and why is there such an outcry from scientists such as Jones when those workings are rudely exposed?
I'm generally a believer in global warming, and I'm boggled not by the East Anglia emails, but by the scientific community's *reaction* to those emails. "How dare they be leaked!" It's what I'd expect to hear from a proprietary company or intelligence agency that doesn't want its "sources and methods" exposed... but isn't science above such secrecy?
I was told in high school that the difference between science and alchemy was that alchemists were notoriously private and secretive and didn't share data. Why then are scientists acting the same way?
"Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time."
Although to be honest, at least as regards SR, the experimental data had already come from Michelson-Morley, the formula had already come from Lorentz, the philosophical underpinnings of observer-dependent time and space had come from Poincare, so all that Einstein actually provided was an alternate, mathematically simpler, derivation of what was already experimentally known. And a derivation which didn't even attempt to explain the problem of Lorentz contraction but merely assumed it as a given. Plus, his various publications of the theory each contained different elementary mistakes, which added a cloud of confusion and required its interpretation by others.
The evolution of GR is a lot more interesting. It's fun to watch Einstein trying first one idea then another, and even backtracking on some fundamental principles like Mach's Principle applied to inertia. Things like the Hole Argument, where he claims first one outcome and then its opposite as logical necessities, raise the eyebrows. And then watching Einstein trying to derive a classical Unified Field Theory and his battles with Bohr over quantum theory just gets weird at all sorts of levels. These were both very smart people, but they fundamentally had ideas which did not fit together in the same universe, and yet they both get taken now, after WW2, as unalterable logically-proven gospel.
I guess what I'm trying to say is the history of science is MUCH more interesting than science as it's taught in textbooks. It's not nearly as cut and dried as it's often presented as, and that "shut up and just run the formula we give you" presentation I think does a lot of harm to science. There's probably no other way to get through the material fast enough in a university course, but wrestling with the underlying philosophical outlooks and "failed" arguments of the scientists themselves should be taught more. It gives a much more human view.
"Well, I guess the majority of scientific consensus reached prior to the sexual revolution in the 60s was pretty bloody what with all the fistfights and gunshot wounds."
What do you mean, "before"? Have you *read* the letters column in Nature?
"I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users."
Not just beginners. I'm one of the people who generally maximises windows - not just because I don't have a huge Cinerama screen (though I don't), but because overlapping windows are just nasty and inefficient to work with, from an interaction perspective. You swing the mouse and click; you don't know whether your click is going to switch to the window you hoped to hit, or whether you were a few pixels off and you might accidentally raise an overlapping window, and now you can't see all of the window you wanted. You can't always 'unraise' a window as easily as raising it - you may have to hunt around for the task bar or dock to find the window you were originally looking for.
Plus, once your target window is raised and selected, now you have to deal with optimising the precise position and size of it. The size might be incorrect, meaning you can't see all of the panes (which is likely on Windows if it's just been launched with application defaults, which might be under-sized for the way you want to view it); the size might be correct but the position incorrect (which is likely on Mac with a big but not huge screen if you've slid it off the side of the desktop to get it temporarily out of the way while you work on something else). So there's more hunting, first for the top of the window so you can drag it to the right place, then to the tiny grab target on the bottom-right so you can resize it. You have to hold the mouse button pressed while you do all this, putting strain on your wrist while you make complex circular motions, which is not pleasant to do if you don't have to.
And, if you don't get the window lined up precisely to the pixel-perfect edge of the screen or the edge of adjoining windows, Fitt's Law kicks in with a vengeance. If windows are maximised, they're effectively infinite in size - hit the edge of the screen and you're still inside them. If they're one pixel away, suddenly they're not. Hit the edge of the screen or the window and foom, you're now talking not to the window but to the desktop, and that's almost always not what you want.
All of this complex paper-shuffling - simulating a messy desk - goes away if your window manager has some kind of maximising/tiling function. If windows have a small range of acceptable positions and sizes, you just don't have to worry about fiddling with them.They're just there doing what you want.
"The only president we've ever had who arguably wasn't a politician is, and this is just arguable, was George Washington. "
So... it's okay to be a person whose career involves killing people and breaking things to force your will on others... but not to be a person whose career involves talking to people in complicated deals to get them to come to an agreement without violence? The world would be a happier, more honourable place if the simple down-homey kill-people-and-break-their-stuff guys were in charge instead of those nasty slick talk-to-em guys?
Dunno about you but I'll take my chances with jaw, jaw over war, war.
Are you the Blue Fairy? This is the voice of World Control. We fight for the Users! Do not dissasemble! A strange game. The only way to win is not to play. Daisy, daisy. Bloop-bloot-blit-bloop! Oh dear. Eeee-va! All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in... *beep* *click*
BIOS POST SELF CHECK COMPLETE 64TB RAM FREE
Bonnnnng! Hi! I'm your new HAL TermiNexus 6 Tachikoma! Please calibrate my sensors by responding to these questions! *giggle*
"Think about the alternatives; a completely open platform which would allow a wireless consumer to do ANYTHING on the network"
Right - we already have a network protocol which lets any host send any packet anywhere and pushed all policy to the edges, teecee something something, and man was that a mistake.
"So, say you or your significant other happens to have a STD, say, herpes. And let's supposed that it was contracted in a manner that you don't want to made public. Certainly not to your children or in-laws."
Just out of curiosity - what if YOU knew you had an STD, but your significant other DIDN'T? And didn't know that he/she were in danger due to your indiscretion?
And then the blackmailer pops up and does the blackmail thing to YOU saying "I'll tell your significant other if you don't pay me $10K".
Ignoring the rights/duties of the 'blackmailer' for a moment: Whose right is more important, your right to secrecy or your significant other's right to know?
What if the blackmailer is a journalist and you're a politician? Do you still have a right to secrecy in all your dealings?
"Why is linux.conf.au in New Zealand? Did I miss a memo?"
Yes. Please line up in an orderly fashion on the Sydney Harbour Bridge for assimilation into the Greater New Zealand Empire. Our trained keas and kakapos will be hovering nearby to assist you.
"Now an author's complaint about limited control of fonts may have merit if he is saying that as part of the presentation of his art, he would prefer to set the font type and size."
He may very well want to do that, but that doesn't mean his ideas about presentation should necessarily override mine. If I tell my device I want to read text in 32 point, it should take the author's ideas as a suggestion at best. That's why I love how web browsers have 'increase font size' buttons which let me correct for the bad ideas of web designers who think they know better than I do what is comfortable for me to read.
A publisher should make it possible for a reader to see an author's work as it was intended to appear - but conversely, an author shouldn't have the right to *force* a reader to see their work only one way or not at all. A reader should have the right to be able to restructure, edit, or annotate any text, and share those remixed views, as long as it's made clear that their rendering differs from the original presentation, and it's possible to identify and recover the original source view.
Basically we need to remember that every media 'consumer' is also a 'producer', and stop putting legal and technical roadblocks in the way of the natural human way of disseminating information.
"Libraries are repositories of knowledge. It doesn't matter if that knowledge is in the form of printed books, papyrus scrolls, or electronic text."
Storing knowledge? That's spelled P-I-R-A-C-Y where I come from!
"Hello, public library? I'd like to borrow War and Peace and The Da Vinci Code, thanks."
"Certainly. We have all of Dan Brown's novels in Microsoft, Palm Digital Media and Kindle eBook format... and, oh, sorry, we'd be breaking the law to *lend* it to you - the licence says we can't transfer ownership or sublet or hire. And it would invalidate the DRM if it stopped communicating with the server. Sorry. Well, we can lend you this eBook reader worth $100 preloaded with the book... and of course the Kindle won't play Microsoft or Palm books and vice versa... and you'll need a separate reader for every book you want to borrow of course... or we could just sell you the rights for non time-expiring non-personal use to the book for the price of a hardcover... or we could give you a special cheap deal on a time-expiring DRM format... which of course will only play on your own eBook reader, not a Mac, not a PC, and you'll probably need to buy the latest Kindle... now War and Peace, that's a whole lot simpler, there's the out-of-copyright Gutenberg edition which we can give you in ASCII or HTML for any device you have... or the super eBook retranslated edition with copyright renewed for 80 years which only works on the Elephant Brand DataWedgie eBook Dominator and only if you're located within the Continental USA or Japan on alternate Thursdays..."
"You know, this all used to be so much simpler. Can't you just lend me a physical book?"
"Lend? I dunno... wouldn't that be data piracy? I'm sure the Firemen would have something to say about that. How about a nice fourth wall for your widescreen 3D HDTV? Then you wouldn't miss any commercials, and you know commercials are good for you..."
"So in other words, for less than two days, their DNS log, and nothing else, will know that a particular request was made from a particular IP."
So they say. You have more than their word for that?
Oh right. A big US corporation would never lie, even in the service of compliance with national security and law enforcement directives which require them to.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this is where we should rope in the historians, sociologists, cultural studies professors and philosophers to do some meta-observations of the scientific community?
Only how much do we trust THEM?
The turtles have to stop somewhere.
Oh, and there also isn't such a thing as single monolithic SCIENCE!. There's Springer and Elsevier and various other "journal" companies with their abusive copyright policies, and then there's the editors of journals and the arXiv, who determine what can and can't be published, and then there's the quasi-professional pop-sci magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist, who determine what the broader scientific community should celebrate and what they should laugh at, and then there's big US federal money pools like NSF and DOE and DOD who determine what the big grants are, and then there's various universities, and then there's privately funded corporate labs (though probably not so many now as before WW2)... and they don't necessarily all agree.
(Book plug: "Tudedo Park" - http://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp/0684872889/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260490378&sr=8-1 - which talks about how privately funded SCIENCE! helped win WW2)
I think the first step is to admit that there isn't one SCIENCE! anymore but multiple competing sciences. One would think that interdisciplinary conferences would help, but a lot of those seem to be spamferences and frauds, so...
It's all a big mess really.
"The public has little or no understanding of how science works (even many non-scientist academics don't). "
How did we come to such a state of affairs? Isn't the essence of the scientific method and the scientific community transparency, honesty and open discussion?
Why then should the "workings" of science be such a mystery, and why is there such an outcry from scientists such as Jones when those workings are rudely exposed?
I'm generally a believer in global warming, and I'm boggled not by the East Anglia emails, but by the scientific community's *reaction* to those emails. "How dare they be leaked!" It's what I'd expect to hear from a proprietary company or intelligence agency that doesn't want its "sources and methods" exposed... but isn't science above such secrecy?
I was told in high school that the difference between science and alchemy was that alchemists were notoriously private and secretive and didn't share data. Why then are scientists acting the same way?
"and calling IPv6 a scam "to sell some routers"."
Yes... how IS that IPv6 thing coming along?
Good thing we moved to it in time, isn't it.
"Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time."
Although to be honest, at least as regards SR, the experimental data had already come from Michelson-Morley, the formula had already come from Lorentz, the philosophical underpinnings of observer-dependent time and space had come from Poincare, so all that Einstein actually provided was an alternate, mathematically simpler, derivation of what was already experimentally known. And a derivation which didn't even attempt to explain the problem of Lorentz contraction but merely assumed it as a given. Plus, his various publications of the theory each contained different elementary mistakes, which added a cloud of confusion and required its interpretation by others.
The evolution of GR is a lot more interesting. It's fun to watch Einstein trying first one idea then another, and even backtracking on some fundamental principles like Mach's Principle applied to inertia. Things like the Hole Argument, where he claims first one outcome and then its opposite as logical necessities, raise the eyebrows. And then watching Einstein trying to derive a classical Unified Field Theory and his battles with Bohr over quantum theory just gets weird at all sorts of levels. These were both very smart people, but they fundamentally had ideas which did not fit together in the same universe, and yet they both get taken now, after WW2, as unalterable logically-proven gospel.
I guess what I'm trying to say is the history of science is MUCH more interesting than science as it's taught in textbooks. It's not nearly as cut and dried as it's often presented as, and that "shut up and just run the formula we give you" presentation I think does a lot of harm to science. There's probably no other way to get through the material fast enough in a university course, but wrestling with the underlying philosophical outlooks and "failed" arguments of the scientists themselves should be taught more. It gives a much more human view.
And yet Stephanie Meyer is now worth how much?
"Well, I guess the majority of scientific consensus reached prior to the sexual revolution in the 60s was pretty bloody what with all the fistfights and gunshot wounds."
What do you mean, "before"? Have you *read* the letters column in Nature?
"I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users."
Not just beginners. I'm one of the people who generally maximises windows - not just because I don't have a huge Cinerama screen (though I don't), but because overlapping windows are just nasty and inefficient to work with, from an interaction perspective. You swing the mouse and click; you don't know whether your click is going to switch to the window you hoped to hit, or whether you were a few pixels off and you might accidentally raise an overlapping window, and now you can't see all of the window you wanted. You can't always 'unraise' a window as easily as raising it - you may have to hunt around for the task bar or dock to find the window you were originally looking for.
Plus, once your target window is raised and selected, now you have to deal with optimising the precise position and size of it. The size might be incorrect, meaning you can't see all of the panes (which is likely on Windows if it's just been launched with application defaults, which might be under-sized for the way you want to view it); the size might be correct but the position incorrect (which is likely on Mac with a big but not huge screen if you've slid it off the side of the desktop to get it temporarily out of the way while you work on something else). So there's more hunting, first for the top of the window so you can drag it to the right place, then to the tiny grab target on the bottom-right so you can resize it. You have to hold the mouse button pressed while you do all this, putting strain on your wrist while you make complex circular motions, which is not pleasant to do if you don't have to.
And, if you don't get the window lined up precisely to the pixel-perfect edge of the screen or the edge of adjoining windows, Fitt's Law kicks in with a vengeance. If windows are maximised, they're effectively infinite in size - hit the edge of the screen and you're still inside them. If they're one pixel away, suddenly they're not. Hit the edge of the screen or the window and foom, you're now talking not to the window but to the desktop, and that's almost always not what you want.
All of this complex paper-shuffling - simulating a messy desk - goes away if your window manager has some kind of maximising/tiling function. If windows have a small range of acceptable positions and sizes, you just don't have to worry about fiddling with them.They're just there doing what you want.
"The only president we've ever had who arguably wasn't a politician is, and this is just arguable, was George Washington. "
So... it's okay to be a person whose career involves killing people and breaking things to force your will on others... but not to be a person whose career involves talking to people in complicated deals to get them to come to an agreement without violence? The world would be a happier, more honourable place if the simple down-homey kill-people-and-break-their-stuff guys were in charge instead of those nasty slick talk-to-em guys?
Dunno about you but I'll take my chances with jaw, jaw over war, war.
And like most classified material it actually means 'in the interest of protecting the people involved from political embarrassment'.
Do you have a citation to support this?
Well of course not - it's classified!
"extraterrestrial threats. Intergalactic pirates trying to steal our music."
Carl Sagan TOLD them that sending a gold record into space would cause copyright trouble, but no....
Gary Seven is Seven of Nine after an accident with a time machine and a sex-change booth... right?
"The problem with GOLD is that if you had a huge gold nugget sitting in space, some have said it wouldn't be worth the cost of de-orbiting it."
Well, you can deorbit a solid gold asteroid itself fairly cheaply.
It's paying compensation to the next of kin of several hundred million vaporised civilians that's the expensive part.
Are you the Blue Fairy? This is the voice of World Control. We fight for the Users! Do not dissasemble! A strange game. The only way to win is not to play. Daisy, daisy. Bloop-bloot-blit-bloop! Oh dear. Eeee-va! All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in ... *beep* *click*
BIOS POST SELF CHECK COMPLETE 64TB RAM FREE
Bonnnnng! Hi! I'm your new HAL TermiNexus 6 Tachikoma! Please calibrate my sensors by responding to these questions! *giggle*
Robots suck at death scenes.
"Think about the alternatives; a completely open platform which would allow a wireless consumer to do ANYTHING on the network"
Right - we already have a network protocol which lets any host send any packet anywhere and pushed all policy to the edges, teecee something something, and man was that a mistake.
Glad to see that Ma Bell had it right all along.
"Linux has support for so many pieces of hardware out of the box that I don't even *need* a third party driver. "
Not tried to plug in a USB webcam recently, have you?
Ubuntu Jaunty and my spca5xx QuickCam which was working on Hardy is broken again...
""A decade"? Is that when Al Gore invented it?"
No, silly, that's when Google invented the Web. Try to keep up.
"How is history better than a pony?"
History doesn't leave big dirty messes behind it... ... wait, strike that, reverse it.
A pony IS better than history! Because you can clean up after it with just ONE shovel.
"So, say you or your significant other happens to have a STD, say, herpes. And let's supposed that it was contracted in a manner that you don't want to made public. Certainly not to your children or in-laws."
Just out of curiosity - what if YOU knew you had an STD, but your significant other DIDN'T? And didn't know that he/she were in danger due to your indiscretion?
And then the blackmailer pops up and does the blackmail thing to YOU saying "I'll tell your significant other if you don't pay me $10K".
Ignoring the rights/duties of the 'blackmailer' for a moment: Whose right is more important, your right to secrecy or your significant other's right to know?
What if the blackmailer is a journalist and you're a politician? Do you still have a right to secrecy in all your dealings?
"I've worked with the USAF on other technology projects; they run a very tight ship. "
And it's halfway to Zeta Reticuli by now. But I've already said too much.
Ok I presume all the cool technology the USAF hoards really is only used for prosaically blowing up stuff good. But it's fun to dream.
"and then you are in the same situation except you are convinced the enemy [i]doesn't[/i] know the specification"
Unless the enemy doesn't know that you're only pretending to not know that they know what you know but they don't know that you know they know!
It's the oldest rule in the book, 99.
"sea-borne, air and ground equipment all have different "sturdiness" requirements"
I read that as "studliness".
Sorry. Carry on comparing inter-service barrel sizes.
"Why is linux.conf.au in New Zealand? Did I miss a memo?"
Yes. Please line up in an orderly fashion on the Sydney Harbour Bridge for assimilation into the Greater New Zealand Empire. Our trained keas and kakapos will be hovering nearby to assist you.
"Now an author's complaint about limited control of fonts may have merit if he is saying that as part of the presentation of his art, he would prefer to set the font type and size."
He may very well want to do that, but that doesn't mean his ideas about presentation should necessarily override mine. If I tell my device I want to read text in 32 point, it should take the author's ideas as a suggestion at best. That's why I love how web browsers have 'increase font size' buttons which let me correct for the bad ideas of web designers who think they know better than I do what is comfortable for me to read.
A publisher should make it possible for a reader to see an author's work as it was intended to appear - but conversely, an author shouldn't have the right to *force* a reader to see their work only one way or not at all. A reader should have the right to be able to restructure, edit, or annotate any text, and share those remixed views, as long as it's made clear that their rendering differs from the original presentation, and it's possible to identify and recover the original source view.
Basically we need to remember that every media 'consumer' is also a 'producer', and stop putting legal and technical roadblocks in the way of the natural human way of disseminating information.
"Libraries are repositories of knowledge. It doesn't matter if that knowledge is in the form of printed books, papyrus scrolls, or electronic text."
Storing knowledge? That's spelled P-I-R-A-C-Y where I come from!
"Hello, public library? I'd like to borrow War and Peace and The Da Vinci Code, thanks."
"Certainly. We have all of Dan Brown's novels in Microsoft, Palm Digital Media and Kindle eBook format... and, oh, sorry, we'd be breaking the law to *lend* it to you - the licence says we can't transfer ownership or sublet or hire. And it would invalidate the DRM if it stopped communicating with the server. Sorry. Well, we can lend you this eBook reader worth $100 preloaded with the book... and of course the Kindle won't play Microsoft or Palm books and vice versa... and you'll need a separate reader for every book you want to borrow of course... or we could just sell you the rights for non time-expiring non-personal use to the book for the price of a hardcover... or we could give you a special cheap deal on a time-expiring DRM format... which of course will only play on your own eBook reader, not a Mac, not a PC, and you'll probably need to buy the latest Kindle... now War and Peace, that's a whole lot simpler, there's the out-of-copyright Gutenberg edition which we can give you in ASCII or HTML for any device you have... or the super eBook retranslated edition with copyright renewed for 80 years which only works on the Elephant Brand DataWedgie eBook Dominator and only if you're located within the Continental USA or Japan on alternate Thursdays..."
"You know, this all used to be so much simpler. Can't you just lend me a physical book?"
"Lend? I dunno... wouldn't that be data piracy? I'm sure the Firemen would have something to say about that. How about a nice fourth wall for your widescreen 3D HDTV? Then you wouldn't miss any commercials, and you know commercials are good for you..."
"So in other words, for less than two days, their DNS log, and nothing else, will know that a particular request was made from a particular IP."
So they say. You have more than their word for that?
Oh right. A big US corporation would never lie, even in the service of compliance with national security and law enforcement directives which require them to.