Well, obviously, that particular dude spoke English pretty well--it's hard to get an 800 on the SAT verbal section when you're all "I come to America, long way. Speak English good!"
And the studies can't possible show that every Asian is smarter than every white, or something along those lines--that would be trying to prove a negative. So anecdotal evidence isn't all that useful.
I don't think so. Such a study shows that there are significant differences in performance between ethnicities on some specific, arbitrary intelligence test. The source of the disparity could lie within the test, not the people taking it.
This is a common misconception about the state of intelligence testing. It's understandable, though, because it's a perfectly valid objection to the basic statement "We had a bunch of people take this test that measures intelligence". The reality of the tests is a lot more sophisticated.
The standard IQ tests aren't perfect, but they're okay for people who speak the same language fluently. You have to be careful not to confuse "cultural values" with "cultural understanding". When a person learns a new language (and is exposed to the concepts of a culture that speaks/writes in that language), they don't lose their original values, but they do gain an appreciation for the new culture's way of understanding the world. So if you assume that an Indian Hindi speaker learns American English fluently, they have almost certainly been exposed to Americans and their media, and so they possess some cultural understanding of how Americans think and view the world even if they don't agree with it. It's not a perfect relationship, but it's quite strong--enough that the test scores are similar as long as the language requirement is satisfied and the test-makers have eliminated any obvious "trick questions".
Also, there are other tests, like the Ravens, that remove all language and cultural aspects from the test, which is basically an abstract pattern-recognition game with utterly simple instructions that can be translated clearly into virtually any language.
There are also statistical methods that can help distinguish the effects of different factors BESIDES ethnicity on a test and control for those. For instance, any good intelligence survey will examine the effects of language, income, social status, and other demographic factors on people WITHIN THE SAME ETHNIC GROUP, in order to establish how much of an effect each factor has on its own. Then it becomes more possible to subtract the effects of these extraneous factors from the final result. The math is a little more complex than I'm giving it credit for, here, but it's all in a 1st-semester Statistics class.
The point is, though, that many, many researchers approached early results that said "intelligence distributions differ amongst different ethnic groups" with a grain of salt, and applied these kinds of methods in attempts to either invalidate or confirm the results. And the results have been repeatedly confirmed in ways that satisfy the objection you raised in your comment.
(As a side-note, this is the precise problem that I and others have with "The Bell Curve"--it's not nearly rigorous enough in how it approaches these questions. But the conclusions have been mostly validated by other, better research.)
That's fair enough--and honestly, I remember the "Nvidia versus VooDoo" graphics card competition enough to know how fucking annoying people can be when they're being that way.
Loving a product because its made by a certain manufacturer is a problem.
That's what we call "branding", and it's not stupid. It's a decision-making heuristic that manufacturers and consumers use jointly so that people can buy what they think they want without having to do as much product research on their own.
People who like Macs have reasons for it. The Mac OSX experience is slick, fast, and very user-friendly. It's charming and easy to work with. The learning curve is extremely low, too. On top of that, the entire Mac platform strategy is geared toward providing an integrated, bug-free user experience that lets people get done what they want to get done with a minimum of fuss.
These are perfectly reasonable consumer desires. Apple has made a name for the Mac brand as a line of products that consistently satisfies those desires.
This isn't to say that Macs are perfect. They're more expensive, for one. The range of consumer software isn't nearly as large as what's available for Windows, and the range of OSS software isn't as big as you'd get on Linux. And you have very little choice in the way the user experience gets rendered, so tough shit if you want things to work differently.
I, personally, don't like them as much as Linux on off-the-shelf cheapie hardware, mostly for the above-mentioned reasons. But Mac is a powerful brand because it's consistent and it satisfies its user base.
And what's so wrong about that? It's not perfectly rational, highly-informed decision making, but it's still pretty damn good. And anyone that thinks modern consumers in the first-world market place are capable of making perfectly rational buying decisions is smoking crack.
Yes, brand loyalty can get pretty silly, as exemplified in your "fan-boys" comment. I honestly can't tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, or between New Balance and Nike, and I'm suspicious of anyone who tells me they can.
But brand loyalty is just a way of controlling the costs associated with gathering information. I buy the same brand of laundry detergent every week--not because I'm sure it's the best stuff out there, but because I'm satisfied with what I get for the price I pay, and I don't think it would be worth the effort to go doing market research every time I have to do the laundry. Maybe I'm missing out on some great deal somewhere, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.
Sometimes courses of action that aren't specifically rational can still be a very good practical strategy, on a large scale.
I don't wanna start a political tussle, but harping on the Bush administration for this leaves out the fact that liberals do this kind of thing, too.
Take a look at the various reactions to studies that show different ethnic groups, nationalities, and other genetically-similar categories of people (including men vs. women) have different intelligence distributions. The less-controversial results are the ones that say "Men are better at this type of abstract task, women are better at this other type of brain use," and even these get attacked by people who simply don't want to believe that their could be built-in differences.
And then you have "The Bell Curve" and similar studies. That specific study is questionable (not wrong, but it has issues), but other studies have repeatedly confirmed that different ethnicities can have markedly differing average IQs. The differences are statistically significant (meaning that they're not attributable to mere chance), though they're probably not practically all that significant. And it's not like saying "I'm Chinese, you're African, therefore I'm smarter than you," it's just saying that Chinese people tend to be smarter.
Strangely enough, the Left attacks these results bulldog-style. And most of the attacks aren't about the methodology, or the validity of the results. Most of the attacks seem to be "How could you possibly say such a thing?" It's like the reactions to Kinsey's sexuality studies: people base their values on assumed truths about the world, and when careful study reveals that the assumptions are false, people don't want to discard the basis of their value systems.
The point is, ANYbody, regardless of politics, can fall victim to resisting the truth because it's intellectually convenient to do so. Don't just blame the Bushies.
There are several ways to dump a tech that hurts your bottom line, this is just one...
As far as your buyout theory goes, it's hard to buy out a company that doesn't want to be bought out. It's not like the Simpsons, with Homer's "Internet King" business, where Bill Gates just says "Buy him out, boys!" and thugs start trashing the place. You have to AGREE to be bought out.
Why would the owners of a company agree to be bought out? Because they've been offered enough money. But the potential return-on-investment for an electric engine technology like this is so large that it would probably take a huge purchase offer to persuade the current owners to sell. And this would be unlike a normal buyout, where you get something valuable for your money. If the Evil Oil Company shuts down its new acquisition and scuttles the engine technology, it's essentially throwing its money down a hole. This is usually termed an "idiotic business practice".
You can actually think of this like an equation: if a new company's tech can take $1 billion out of an existing company's bottom line, then the existing company would be willing to pay UP TO $1 billion to kill that company. But a new company that can take $1 billion in revenues away from an old company is worth at least $1 billion to its current owners, who stand to make that money if they decide not to sell.
WHY ON EARTH would the new company's current owners sell something that's worth MORE than a billion for the LESS than a billion that the old company is willing to pay? Simple: They wouldn't do it. Unless the old company knows something that the new company doesn't that severely skews their respective valuations of the new company, there's no way that they'll come to a mutually-agreeable price. (NB: it's even less likely that this would happen, because the information advantage is much more likely to be had by the new company--it will probably value its impact much more than the old company predicts, if anything.)
Here's a more logical scenario: If an oil company could afford to buy the engine company out, they might decide to continue developing the engine and get into the business of selling electric vehicle technology AND oil technology.
This rarely-seen "dump a tech that hurts your bottom line" strategy can only be enforced if you have a pre-existing patent that prevents competitors from entering the market (see H. Ford's early battles with the non-mass market auto industry), or by using some other monopoly to lever other companies into the party line (a la Microsoft and its provisions that prevent manufacturers from shipping non-MS PCs).
You like to call others paranoid, but you are either astroturfing for an oil company, or are massively naieve about the real world.
Maybe so, but at least I know how to spell "naive". I wish more people understood that shitty spelling and grammer can really undercut an argument.
Car makers are producing token electric cars like the GEMs to pretend that they are trying. In the past, they've produced entirely practical electric cars...
Actually, VERY few manufacturers are producing any significant numbers of pure-electric cars (though several models exist). There's a simple reason for this that has nothing to do with bullshit paranoia: THERE'S NO ELECTRIC-VEHICLE INFRASTRUCTURE YET. You need filling-station equivalents, primarily--and considering how range-limited most pure-electric solutions are at the moment, it's a big investment problem to get enough charging stations in place.
This is what we call a chicken-and-egg problem--no need for assumptions of vast corporate evil and greed, here. Eventually, as gas prices get higher, the market opportunities will become more and more appealing. One interesting bridge possibility is hybrids that can charge their batteries off home wall current, to provide a charge from the get-go. Existing gas stations might then have an incentive to start providing charging services alongside gas pumps... eventually, you might see gas pumps largely replaced by chargers, if EV technology seriously supplants gas engines.
Of course, standardizing different charging methods will be a whole 'nother ball game. And charging might become moot if hydrogen fuel-cells or nanotechnology supercapacitors get off the ground soon enough.
Either patents, or a company buyout.
First of all, look back the article: The company that makes this new engine invented it in-house, right? So HOW THE FUCK is an oil company going to use patents to stop them from licensing it however they want?
Do you even understand what patents are? I'm going to assume you do, and that you're just an idiot. Saves time.
As far as your buyout theory goes, it's hard to buy out a company that doesn't want to be bought out. It's not like the Simpsons, with Homer's "Internet King" business, where Bill Gates just says "Buy him out, boys!" and thugs start trashing the place. You have to AGREE to be bought out.
Why would the owners of a company agree to be bought out? Because they've been offered enough money. But the potential return-on-investment for an electric engine technology like this is so large that it would probably take a huge purchase offer to persuade the current owners to sell. Maybe a hell of a lot more than "millions". Even an oil company may not be able to do something like that without blinking.
And this would be unlike a normal buyout, where you get something valuable for your money. If the Evil Oil Company shuts down its new acquisition and scuttles the engine technology, it's essentially throwing its money down a hole. This is usually termed an "idiotic business practice". No wonder you thought of it!
Here's a more logical scenario: If an oil company could afford to buy the engine company out, they might decide to continue developing the engine and get into the business of selling electric vehicle technology AND oil technology! WHOA! They might even put up some of those EV charging stations, and make money off that, too!
Oh, wait! Oil companies are ALREADY doing that. They invest a heavily in research into all kinds of energy technologies, because they know energy markets incredibly well and can exploit new energy stuff better than many other companies would.
Really? If they want a reasonable price, why are they taking record profits? They could easily take slightly less profit, still be making significantly more pure profits than previous years, but significantly lower oil prices.
You apparantly don't know anything about how commodities mark
Exactly what technology do car manufacturers license today? OEMs are notorious for refusing to license anything. Unless this technology is offered license free, it wont be available.
Sorry, what? My friend just bought a car with GPS, A/V, Bluetooth audio integration, and a bunch of other snazzy shit. All came from the factory, and NONE of it is branded by the car maker--it's all 3rd-party stuff. Added about $4K to the sticker price, too, so it's not a small deal. Right now it's mostly high-end makes with this kind of gear, but it's growing.
Even better--GOOGLE IT--"hybrid engine licensing" gives, in just the first page of results, several examples of major manufacturers licensing critical powertrain components. Here's a couple, dealing the the Ford-Toyota and GM-DaimlerChrysler deals:
Looks like you don't know WTF you're talking about, smart guy. And think, the right answer was just a Google search away!
OPEC only wants to up production so they don't piss everyone off and then people look elsewhere for oil. OPEC is not the only producer.
Did you even read my OP? OPEC CAN'T INCREASE PRODUCTION! Not much more, anyway, with serious consequences. They're trying like hell right now, and it's proving very difficult to increase the flow of oil. There's a lot of reasons for this: production capacity isn't flexible enough (not enough refineries/tankers/etc. to deal with more oil), as well as possible damage to oil-producing formations if they try to pump more than they already are. I seem to remember the Russians severely limiting the useful lives of oil deposits in the 70s by force-pumping them with water--it upped immediate production substantially, but took years off the lives of the oil fields. Kind of like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
OEMs are building hybrids barely and half-heartidly. Mostly through coops and shared technology. They are not competiting in the electric market as of today.
First, "shared technology" kind of kicks the shit out of your first point, doesn't it? Yeah, that's right, you just contradicted yourself.
And I don't know about "half-heartedly". At the NY Auto Show this year, virtually every major mid-level manufacturer, American, Asian, and Euro, had at least some kind of hybrid vehicle in production and were loudly marketing those strains. There were even a couple of pure electrics, with the same buzz. Sounds pretty hearted, to me.
But how about some numbers? If you look at production quantities of hybrids AND electrics over the past three years, every single quarter has been showing substantial increases. Most observers agree on continuing strong future increases in market share, though different predictions exist about how strong and how fast. Here's a great survey of some of the models (sources linked, too!):
You want more data, just fucking Google it: "hybrid vehicle production growth". Getting the hang of this "data" thing, yet? Works wonders in arguments!
Insightful? WTF? I think we need a "-1, tinfoil hat club" modifer. Either this is an idiotic comment, or it's an attempt to be funny that kind of fell flat.
WHY would the car industry want to shut this down? EVERY SINGLE MAJOR CAR MAKER IS BUILDING ELECTRICS as we speak, and most have something on the market at the moment. So far, hybrids that are only somewhat more fuel-efficient than pure gas engines have been a necessary concession, mostly because of performance, range, and infrastructure (fueling) issues.
If this technology gets off the drawing board and actually works, the car makers will shit themselves to get their hands on licenses because this seems to solve the performance issues, hands down. They'll still have to cope with range and fueling problems, but those have their own solutions coming, sometime.
And what, exactly, do you expect the oil industry to do to "close this down"? Where on earth would they get the power to do something like that, in a country like the UK?
Look, oil producers realize that hyper-aggravated prices don't help them, in the long run. That's why OPEC is struggling right now to increase the world supply by upping production, with mixed results. Big Oil wants a stable price, and not too high, either, because it makes the market nervous and causes people to buy less oil in the long run! (It's more complicated than that, but basically that's the story with any commodity.)
But their inability to increase the supply to meet the higher demand, thereby lowering the price of oil, shows that they CAN'T increase supplies much more. They would probably breathe a sigh of relief if production could go up (which it probably never will), so the only credible scenario to decreasing prices is to decrease demand.
Big Oil would benefit, in the long run, from a demand for oil that slacks off a bit and then stabilizes (below its current level) for the future. They know this, and aren't going to stand in the way of anything that keeps it from happening.
You're only considering one angle on the issue, though... I think you're missing one of the big implications of the GP's post.
Corporate sponsored blogs tend to end up being a focal point for interaction related to specialized (corporate related) topics.
What about astroturfing? We see it on Slashdot from time to time--somebody who's on a company's payroll but trying to look independent will submit links to articles or blog posts that are entirely self-serving. I run across blogs every day that seem to be solely corporate shills.
This isn't a problem of blogging in particular, sure--but the point is that not all bloggers are honest about their motives and sponsorship.
For the first time in the history of the world, we now have a direct channel for hyper-specialization.
No offense, really, but the rest of this is kind of just a screed about how great blogs are, how they'll change the world, and usher in a new era of human consciousness, a distributed Monolith by which we shall advance to a hyperHuman state...
I swear, anybody modding the parent "Interesting" or "Informative" is gonna hear from me.
The only problem with that is persuading the copyright holders to permit their use in training computer translation systems.
As long as the translations have been created in advance, and you can obtain copies of the works in question, it should be fine, legally. I cannot see a way that a court could find the machine-state of a translation machine to be a "derived work" in the copyright sense, and it's certainly not making any literal copies.
Now, someone could distribute a text under a license agreement that forbid this type of usage, but a court decision may well find that it's a protected "fair" use. And I can't think of many texts that have license agreements that would restrict something like that.
People are highly overrated. Especially random strangers in a place that serves food.
Get laid a lot, do ya?
I know I'm going to get creamed for saying this on slashdot, but you're on CRACK! Get out of your house/dorm room, exercise those in-person social skills (oh-so-much more complex than verbal or text-based social skills), and meet some girls. For gods' sake, meet some girls--it'll change your whole perspective on how much fun it is to go meet random people.
I was thinking along similar lines while I read the article. The point of doing research is to confirm OR deny a hypothesis. This article seems to assume that scientists should be able to know in advance what's true and what's false... Guess what, WSJ, THAT'S THE POINT OF THE EXPERIMENTS.
And like the parent poster says, you can't just go around saying "Why research that? It's obvious?" We get proved wrong on "obvious" shit all the time.
Half-Life 2 is the most complex game you can this of, right now. Shit, I remember people saying the exact same thing about the ATI Rage 128 and the original GeForce, right about the time the first Half-Life game came out.
3D game animation is one of the few areas in which ordinary PC consumers run programs that routinely push the limits of their machines. Your machine might be enough to run HL2 perfectly well, but just give it a year or two. Game designers WILL push the envelope of technology, and your machine will eventually struggle to play the newest games.
Remember, Gigabyte isn't shipping this Quad-GPU motherboard, yet. This might not hit shelves until next year. At which point it still might be overkill, but it'll be ready for the next-gen games.
The law is smarter than you. It's already thought of this, centuries before the Internet. It's called "conspiracy". Even if what each individual does is innocent, or at least not as serious of a crime as the combination of their actions, you can prosecute them all together as a conspiracy to commit the larger act. Conspiracy has other neat uses, too, that help fill in gaps like this in criminal laws.
Of course, for that to work you'd have to be talking about criminal copyright violation. I don't remember offhand what the standard for that is, but it's probably too high for this kind of thing.
But that doesn't matter, either, because tort law provides means to sue a group of people for collective actions of that group, in the same fashion as conspiracy laws apply to criminal law. Although how one would go about filing a lawsuit against 500,000 people, is beyond me.
I'm amazed that the article didn't include any references to "Homeland Security" or "fighting terrorism". Doesn't it seem like every single goddamned new idea, or retread of an old one, gets stretched in the marketing to push the security applications for terrorism?
We back up data onto tapes (or external drives) to ensure that any loss is minor; we have backup hard drives to make our data safer; we even have backup machines so a blown PSU or similar won't seriously affect downtime. Put simply, through redundancy we achieve reliability.
I really hope you don't think this is enough to guarantee uptime. What happens when your first set of machines get hits with a worm that you haven't patched to, yet? Re-imaging won't help you, there--the worm will probably be back on the new images in a matter of minutes, if it's the height of propagation.
The constant-uptime thing is very much a product of HOW you achieve reliability--kind of like the difference betwee RAID 0/1, or RAID1/0.
If you really need think this is based on a story about an obscure for a fairly obscure magazine, then you clearly haven't been on Planet Earth lately.
Come on, seriously--give me a little credit, huh? I know what Wired magazine is, and all that.
My problem with the GGP post is that it's too easy to assume that bad behavior is pandemic and out-of-control, because that's the only time you notice it. Think about how many tens of thousands of professional journalists are writing for how many tens of publications, just in the USA, right now.
How in the hell does one guy's bad behavior translate into "It seems we just can't trust most of the mainstream media today." Even if you throw in Jason Blair of NYT fame, Dan Rather, and another dozen people who made stuff up or failed some kind of ethical standard, you're still talking about A DROP IN THE BUCKET compared to the number out there who seem to be doing their jobs properly!
Do you work in IT? Because the GGP's statement, and yours, are kind of like people reading about Kevin Mitnick of the Lowes CC thieves and saying "You just can't trust most of these computer people today, they don't seem to have any ethical standards with all this hacking going on." It's an attack on the integrity of a lot of people who haven't done anything wrong.
Seriously, it's an intellectually lazy statement that accuses an entire profession of corruption. That's a shitty thing to say.
It seems we just can't trust most of the mainstream media today.
So... are you basing that unsubstantiated allegation on the anecdotal evidence of this one event, or would you care to actually back up such an irresponsible, inflammatory accusation with some facts?
Maybe you're right, though... I loved Groklaw's coverage of the Iraq war, the election, the Tsunami, North Korean nukes, and all those other things that actually matter.
Good thing we don't have to worry about Slashdot retracting anything, on account of carrying those stories--it hasn't got any editorial credibility to lose!
Good job, Zonk! Can you post some Roland Pippqupqpqpqpaiillellepzaille today, please?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, obviously, that particular dude spoke English pretty well--it's hard to get an 800 on the SAT verbal section when you're all "I come to America, long way. Speak English good!"
And the studies can't possible show that every Asian is smarter than every white, or something along those lines--that would be trying to prove a negative. So anecdotal evidence isn't all that useful.
I don't think so. Such a study shows that there are significant differences in performance between ethnicities on some specific, arbitrary intelligence test. The source of the disparity could lie within the test, not the people taking it.
This is a common misconception about the state of intelligence testing. It's understandable, though, because it's a perfectly valid objection to the basic statement "We had a bunch of people take this test that measures intelligence". The reality of the tests is a lot more sophisticated.
The standard IQ tests aren't perfect, but they're okay for people who speak the same language fluently. You have to be careful not to confuse "cultural values" with "cultural understanding". When a person learns a new language (and is exposed to the concepts of a culture that speaks/writes in that language), they don't lose their original values, but they do gain an appreciation for the new culture's way of understanding the world. So if you assume that an Indian Hindi speaker learns American English fluently, they have almost certainly been exposed to Americans and their media, and so they possess some cultural understanding of how Americans think and view the world even if they don't agree with it. It's not a perfect relationship, but it's quite strong--enough that the test scores are similar as long as the language requirement is satisfied and the test-makers have eliminated any obvious "trick questions".
Also, there are other tests, like the Ravens, that remove all language and cultural aspects from the test, which is basically an abstract pattern-recognition game with utterly simple instructions that can be translated clearly into virtually any language.
There are also statistical methods that can help distinguish the effects of different factors BESIDES ethnicity on a test and control for those. For instance, any good intelligence survey will examine the effects of language, income, social status, and other demographic factors on people WITHIN THE SAME ETHNIC GROUP, in order to establish how much of an effect each factor has on its own. Then it becomes more possible to subtract the effects of these extraneous factors from the final result. The math is a little more complex than I'm giving it credit for, here, but it's all in a 1st-semester Statistics class.
The point is, though, that many, many researchers approached early results that said "intelligence distributions differ amongst different ethnic groups" with a grain of salt, and applied these kinds of methods in attempts to either invalidate or confirm the results. And the results have been repeatedly confirmed in ways that satisfy the objection you raised in your comment.
(As a side-note, this is the precise problem that I and others have with "The Bell Curve"--it's not nearly rigorous enough in how it approaches these questions. But the conclusions have been mostly validated by other, better research.)
That's fair enough--and honestly, I remember the "Nvidia versus VooDoo" graphics card competition enough to know how fucking annoying people can be when they're being that way.
Loving a product because its made by a certain manufacturer is a problem .
That's what we call "branding", and it's not stupid. It's a decision-making heuristic that manufacturers and consumers use jointly so that people can buy what they think they want without having to do as much product research on their own.
People who like Macs have reasons for it. The Mac OSX experience is slick, fast, and very user-friendly. It's charming and easy to work with. The learning curve is extremely low, too. On top of that, the entire Mac platform strategy is geared toward providing an integrated, bug-free user experience that lets people get done what they want to get done with a minimum of fuss.
These are perfectly reasonable consumer desires. Apple has made a name for the Mac brand as a line of products that consistently satisfies those desires.
This isn't to say that Macs are perfect. They're more expensive, for one. The range of consumer software isn't nearly as large as what's available for Windows, and the range of OSS software isn't as big as you'd get on Linux. And you have very little choice in the way the user experience gets rendered, so tough shit if you want things to work differently.
I, personally, don't like them as much as Linux on off-the-shelf cheapie hardware, mostly for the above-mentioned reasons. But Mac is a powerful brand because it's consistent and it satisfies its user base.
And what's so wrong about that? It's not perfectly rational, highly-informed decision making, but it's still pretty damn good. And anyone that thinks modern consumers in the first-world market place are capable of making perfectly rational buying decisions is smoking crack.
Yes, brand loyalty can get pretty silly, as exemplified in your "fan-boys" comment. I honestly can't tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, or between New Balance and Nike, and I'm suspicious of anyone who tells me they can.
But brand loyalty is just a way of controlling the costs associated with gathering information. I buy the same brand of laundry detergent every week--not because I'm sure it's the best stuff out there, but because I'm satisfied with what I get for the price I pay, and I don't think it would be worth the effort to go doing market research every time I have to do the laundry. Maybe I'm missing out on some great deal somewhere, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.
Sometimes courses of action that aren't specifically rational can still be a very good practical strategy, on a large scale.
I don't wanna start a political tussle, but harping on the Bush administration for this leaves out the fact that liberals do this kind of thing, too.
Take a look at the various reactions to studies that show different ethnic groups, nationalities, and other genetically-similar categories of people (including men vs. women) have different intelligence distributions. The less-controversial results are the ones that say "Men are better at this type of abstract task, women are better at this other type of brain use," and even these get attacked by people who simply don't want to believe that their could be built-in differences.
And then you have "The Bell Curve" and similar studies. That specific study is questionable (not wrong, but it has issues), but other studies have repeatedly confirmed that different ethnicities can have markedly differing average IQs. The differences are statistically significant (meaning that they're not attributable to mere chance), though they're probably not practically all that significant. And it's not like saying "I'm Chinese, you're African, therefore I'm smarter than you," it's just saying that Chinese people tend to be smarter.
Strangely enough, the Left attacks these results bulldog-style. And most of the attacks aren't about the methodology, or the validity of the results. Most of the attacks seem to be "How could you possibly say such a thing?" It's like the reactions to Kinsey's sexuality studies: people base their values on assumed truths about the world, and when careful study reveals that the assumptions are false, people don't want to discard the basis of their value systems.
The point is, ANYbody, regardless of politics, can fall victim to resisting the truth because it's intellectually convenient to do so. Don't just blame the Bushies.
I missed this earlier because it was 0-modded.
There are several ways to dump a tech that hurts your bottom line, this is just one...
As far as your buyout theory goes, it's hard to buy out a company that doesn't want to be bought out. It's not like the Simpsons, with Homer's "Internet King" business, where Bill Gates just says "Buy him out, boys!" and thugs start trashing the place. You have to AGREE to be bought out.
Why would the owners of a company agree to be bought out? Because they've been offered enough money. But the potential return-on-investment for an electric engine technology like this is so large that it would probably take a huge purchase offer to persuade the current owners to sell.
And this would be unlike a normal buyout, where you get something valuable for your money. If the Evil Oil Company shuts down its new acquisition and scuttles the engine technology, it's essentially throwing its money down a hole. This is usually termed an "idiotic business practice".
You can actually think of this like an equation: if a new company's tech can take $1 billion out of an existing company's bottom line, then the existing company would be willing to pay UP TO $1 billion to kill that company. But a new company that can take $1 billion in revenues away from an old company is worth at least $1 billion to its current owners, who stand to make that money if they decide not to sell.
WHY ON EARTH would the new company's current owners sell something that's worth MORE than a billion for the LESS than a billion that the old company is willing to pay? Simple: They wouldn't do it. Unless the old company knows something that the new company doesn't that severely skews their respective valuations of the new company, there's no way that they'll come to a mutually-agreeable price. (NB: it's even less likely that this would happen, because the information advantage is much more likely to be had by the new company--it will probably value its impact much more than the old company predicts, if anything.)
Here's a more logical scenario: If an oil company could afford to buy the engine company out, they might decide to continue developing the engine and get into the business of selling electric vehicle technology AND oil technology.
This rarely-seen "dump a tech that hurts your bottom line" strategy can only be enforced if you have a pre-existing patent that prevents competitors from entering the market (see H. Ford's early battles with the non-mass market auto industry), or by using some other monopoly to lever other companies into the party line (a la Microsoft and its provisions that prevent manufacturers from shipping non-MS PCs).
You like to call others paranoid, but you are either astroturfing for an oil company, or are massively naieve about the real world.
Maybe so, but at least I know how to spell "naive". I wish more people understood that shitty spelling and grammer can really undercut an argument.
Car makers are producing token electric cars like the GEMs to pretend that they are trying. In the past, they've produced entirely practical electric cars...
Actually, VERY few manufacturers are producing any significant numbers of pure-electric cars (though several models exist). There's a simple reason for this that has nothing to do with bullshit paranoia: THERE'S NO ELECTRIC-VEHICLE INFRASTRUCTURE YET. You need filling-station equivalents, primarily--and considering how range-limited most pure-electric solutions are at the moment, it's a big investment problem to get enough charging stations in place.
This is what we call a chicken-and-egg problem--no need for assumptions of vast corporate evil and greed, here. Eventually, as gas prices get higher, the market opportunities will become more and more appealing. One interesting bridge possibility is hybrids that can charge their batteries off home wall current, to provide a charge from the get-go. Existing gas stations might then have an incentive to start providing charging services alongside gas pumps... eventually, you might see gas pumps largely replaced by chargers, if EV technology seriously supplants gas engines.
Of course, standardizing different charging methods will be a whole 'nother ball game. And charging might become moot if hydrogen fuel-cells or nanotechnology supercapacitors get off the ground soon enough.
Either patents, or a company buyout.
First of all, look back the article: The company that makes this new engine invented it in-house, right? So HOW THE FUCK is an oil company going to use patents to stop them from licensing it however they want?
Do you even understand what patents are? I'm going to assume you do, and that you're just an idiot. Saves time.
As far as your buyout theory goes, it's hard to buy out a company that doesn't want to be bought out. It's not like the Simpsons, with Homer's "Internet King" business, where Bill Gates just says "Buy him out, boys!" and thugs start trashing the place. You have to AGREE to be bought out.
Why would the owners of a company agree to be bought out? Because they've been offered enough money. But the potential return-on-investment for an electric engine technology like this is so large that it would probably take a huge purchase offer to persuade the current owners to sell. Maybe a hell of a lot more than "millions". Even an oil company may not be able to do something like that without blinking.
And this would be unlike a normal buyout, where you get something valuable for your money. If the Evil Oil Company shuts down its new acquisition and scuttles the engine technology, it's essentially throwing its money down a hole. This is usually termed an "idiotic business practice". No wonder you thought of it!
Here's a more logical scenario: If an oil company could afford to buy the engine company out, they might decide to continue developing the engine and get into the business of selling electric vehicle technology AND oil technology! WHOA! They might even put up some of those EV charging stations, and make money off that, too!
Oh, wait! Oil companies are ALREADY doing that. They invest a heavily in research into all kinds of energy technologies, because they know energy markets incredibly well and can exploit new energy stuff better than many other companies would.
Really? If they want a reasonable price, why are they taking record profits? They could easily take slightly less profit, still be making significantly more pure profits than previous years, but significantly lower oil prices.
You apparantly don't know anything about how commodities mark
Exactly what technology do car manufacturers license today? OEMs are notorious for refusing to license anything. Unless this technology is offered license free, it wont be available.
l sarticle.aspx?article=200403_fordhybrid
Sorry, what? My friend just bought a car with GPS, A/V, Bluetooth audio integration, and a bunch of other snazzy shit. All came from the factory, and NONE of it is branded by the car maker--it's all 3rd-party stuff. Added about $4K to the sticker price, too, so it's not a small deal. Right now it's mostly high-end makes with this kind of gear, but it's growing.
Even better--GOOGLE IT--"hybrid engine licensing" gives, in just the first page of results, several examples of major manufacturers licensing critical powertrain components. Here's a couple, dealing the the Ford-Toyota and GM-DaimlerChrysler deals:
http://motormouth.com.au/myresources/alternatefue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6705895/
Looks like you don't know WTF you're talking about, smart guy. And think, the right answer was just a Google search away!
OPEC only wants to up production so they don't piss everyone off and then people look elsewhere for oil. OPEC is not the only producer.
Did you even read my OP? OPEC CAN'T INCREASE PRODUCTION! Not much more, anyway, with serious consequences. They're trying like hell right now, and it's proving very difficult to increase the flow of oil. There's a lot of reasons for this: production capacity isn't flexible enough (not enough refineries/tankers/etc. to deal with more oil), as well as possible damage to oil-producing formations if they try to pump more than they already are. I seem to remember the Russians severely limiting the useful lives of oil deposits in the 70s by force-pumping them with water--it upped immediate production substantially, but took years off the lives of the oil fields. Kind of like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
OEMs are building hybrids barely and half-heartidly. Mostly through coops and shared technology. They are not competiting in the electric market as of today.
First, "shared technology" kind of kicks the shit out of your first point, doesn't it? Yeah, that's right, you just contradicted yourself.
And I don't know about "half-heartedly". At the NY Auto Show this year, virtually every major mid-level manufacturer, American, Asian, and Euro, had at least some kind of hybrid vehicle in production and were loudly marketing those strains. There were even a couple of pure electrics, with the same buzz. Sounds pretty hearted, to me.
But how about some numbers? If you look at production quantities of hybrids AND electrics over the past three years, every single quarter has been showing substantial increases. Most observers agree on continuing strong future increases in market share, though different predictions exist about how strong and how fast. Here's a great survey of some of the models (sources linked, too!):
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002783.html
You want more data, just fucking Google it: "hybrid vehicle production growth". Getting the hang of this "data" thing, yet? Works wonders in arguments!
(God, I needed that! What a fucking day!)
Insightful? WTF? I think we need a "-1, tinfoil hat club" modifer. Either this is an idiotic comment, or it's an attempt to be funny that kind of fell flat.
WHY would the car industry want to shut this down? EVERY SINGLE MAJOR CAR MAKER IS BUILDING ELECTRICS as we speak, and most have something on the market at the moment. So far, hybrids that are only somewhat more fuel-efficient than pure gas engines have been a necessary concession, mostly because of performance, range, and infrastructure (fueling) issues.
If this technology gets off the drawing board and actually works, the car makers will shit themselves to get their hands on licenses because this seems to solve the performance issues, hands down. They'll still have to cope with range and fueling problems, but those have their own solutions coming, sometime.
And what, exactly, do you expect the oil industry to do to "close this down"? Where on earth would they get the power to do something like that, in a country like the UK?
Look, oil producers realize that hyper-aggravated prices don't help them, in the long run. That's why OPEC is struggling right now to increase the world supply by upping production, with mixed results. Big Oil wants a stable price, and not too high, either, because it makes the market nervous and causes people to buy less oil in the long run! (It's more complicated than that, but basically that's the story with any commodity.)
But their inability to increase the supply to meet the higher demand, thereby lowering the price of oil, shows that they CAN'T increase supplies much more. They would probably breathe a sigh of relief if production could go up (which it probably never will), so the only credible scenario to decreasing prices is to decrease demand.
Big Oil would benefit, in the long run, from a demand for oil that slacks off a bit and then stabilizes (below its current level) for the future. They know this, and aren't going to stand in the way of anything that keeps it from happening.
I remember one Nun in 1st class who got very "agatated' and started to foam around the mouth 'cause I woun't do my homework for her.
And look how great you turned out!
Jesus, I hope you're kidding.
You're only considering one angle on the issue, though... I think you're missing one of the big implications of the GP's post.
Corporate sponsored blogs tend to end up being a focal point for interaction related to specialized (corporate related) topics.
What about astroturfing? We see it on Slashdot from time to time--somebody who's on a company's payroll but trying to look independent will submit links to articles or blog posts that are entirely self-serving. I run across blogs every day that seem to be solely corporate shills.
This isn't a problem of blogging in particular, sure--but the point is that not all bloggers are honest about their motives and sponsorship.
For the first time in the history of the world, we now have a direct channel for hyper-specialization.
No offense, really, but the rest of this is kind of just a screed about how great blogs are, how they'll change the world, and usher in a new era of human consciousness, a distributed Monolith by which we shall advance to a hyperHuman state...
I swear, anybody modding the parent "Interesting" or "Informative" is gonna hear from me.
The only problem with that is persuading the copyright holders to permit their use in training computer translation systems.
As long as the translations have been created in advance, and you can obtain copies of the works in question, it should be fine, legally. I cannot see a way that a court could find the machine-state of a translation machine to be a "derived work" in the copyright sense, and it's certainly not making any literal copies.
Now, someone could distribute a text under a license agreement that forbid this type of usage, but a court decision may well find that it's a protected "fair" use. And I can't think of many texts that have license agreements that would restrict something like that.
People are highly overrated. Especially random strangers in a place that serves food.
Get laid a lot, do ya?
I know I'm going to get creamed for saying this on slashdot, but you're on CRACK! Get out of your house/dorm room, exercise those in-person social skills (oh-so-much more complex than verbal or text-based social skills), and meet some girls. For gods' sake, meet some girls--it'll change your whole perspective on how much fun it is to go meet random people.
Okay, slam away.
I was thinking along similar lines while I read the article. The point of doing research is to confirm OR deny a hypothesis. This article seems to assume that scientists should be able to know in advance what's true and what's false... Guess what, WSJ, THAT'S THE POINT OF THE EXPERIMENTS.
And like the parent poster says, you can't just go around saying "Why research that? It's obvious?" We get proved wrong on "obvious" shit all the time.
Would four 6600GTs give you more power then two 6800 Ultra's?
Now how the heck am I supposed to know that?
Half-Life 2 is the most complex game you can this of, right now. Shit, I remember people saying the exact same thing about the ATI Rage 128 and the original GeForce, right about the time the first Half-Life game came out.
3D game animation is one of the few areas in which ordinary PC consumers run programs that routinely push the limits of their machines. Your machine might be enough to run HL2 perfectly well, but just give it a year or two. Game designers WILL push the envelope of technology, and your machine will eventually struggle to play the newest games.
Remember, Gigabyte isn't shipping this Quad-GPU motherboard, yet. This might not hit shelves until next year. At which point it still might be overkill, but it'll be ready for the next-gen games.
The law is smarter than you. It's already thought of this, centuries before the Internet. It's called "conspiracy". Even if what each individual does is innocent, or at least not as serious of a crime as the combination of their actions, you can prosecute them all together as a conspiracy to commit the larger act. Conspiracy has other neat uses, too, that help fill in gaps like this in criminal laws.
Of course, for that to work you'd have to be talking about criminal copyright violation. I don't remember offhand what the standard for that is, but it's probably too high for this kind of thing.
But that doesn't matter, either, because tort law provides means to sue a group of people for collective actions of that group, in the same fashion as conspiracy laws apply to criminal law. Although how one would go about filing a lawsuit against 500,000 people, is beyond me.
I'm amazed that the article didn't include any references to "Homeland Security" or "fighting terrorism". Doesn't it seem like every single goddamned new idea, or retread of an old one, gets stretched in the marketing to push the security applications for terrorism?
Where there's money, though...
We back up data onto tapes (or external drives) to ensure that any loss is minor; we have backup hard drives to make our data safer; we even have backup machines so a blown PSU or similar won't seriously affect downtime. Put simply, through redundancy we achieve reliability.
I really hope you don't think this is enough to guarantee uptime. What happens when your first set of machines get hits with a worm that you haven't patched to, yet? Re-imaging won't help you, there--the worm will probably be back on the new images in a matter of minutes, if it's the height of propagation.
The constant-uptime thing is very much a product of HOW you achieve reliability--kind of like the difference betwee RAID 0/1, or RAID1/0.
My hat size is a 14--do you have enough extra tinfoil to make one of those things for me?
If you really need think this is based on a story about an obscure for a fairly obscure magazine, then you clearly haven't been on Planet Earth lately.
Come on, seriously--give me a little credit, huh? I know what Wired magazine is, and all that.
My problem with the GGP post is that it's too easy to assume that bad behavior is pandemic and out-of-control, because that's the only time you notice it. Think about how many tens of thousands of professional journalists are writing for how many tens of publications, just in the USA, right now.
How in the hell does one guy's bad behavior translate into "It seems we just can't trust most of the mainstream media today." Even if you throw in Jason Blair of NYT fame, Dan Rather, and another dozen people who made stuff up or failed some kind of ethical standard, you're still talking about A DROP IN THE BUCKET compared to the number out there who seem to be doing their jobs properly!
Do you work in IT? Because the GGP's statement, and yours, are kind of like people reading about Kevin Mitnick of the Lowes CC thieves and saying "You just can't trust most of these computer people today, they don't seem to have any ethical standards with all this hacking going on." It's an attack on the integrity of a lot of people who haven't done anything wrong.
Seriously, it's an intellectually lazy statement that accuses an entire profession of corruption. That's a shitty thing to say.
Maybe Slashdot will issue a retraction?!?
Slashdot will NEVER retract its turgid, probing appendage of inquiry!
It seems we just can't trust most of the mainstream media today.
So... are you basing that unsubstantiated allegation on the anecdotal evidence of this one event, or would you care to actually back up such an irresponsible, inflammatory accusation with some facts?
Maybe you're right, though... I loved Groklaw's coverage of the Iraq war, the election, the Tsunami, North Korean nukes, and all those other things that actually matter.
GodDAMN, I'm in a snarky mood today!
Good thing we don't have to worry about Slashdot retracting anything, on account of carrying those stories--it hasn't got any editorial credibility to lose!
Good job, Zonk! Can you post some Roland Pippqupqpqpqpaiillellepzaille today, please?
I can not seem to find a piece of hardware that will generate a dial tone on 16 or 24 different ports.
How about a tape loop and an audio splitter?