"For those who would try and turn this around to point at the current administration, Let us all keep in mind that everything going on with the NSA is perfectly LEGAL. NO laws have been broken in the process here. Now, we may not LIKE what is going on, but not liking it doesn't make it illegal."
The AT&T case at issue is believed to relate to the warrentless surveillance of the content of phone calls between people within the US and people overseas. This is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It states:
"(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that--
...
(B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party;"
A "United States person" is a citizen or resident alien. It goes on to state other conditions. There is no evidence that any of these conditions (either excluding US persons or submitting of the oath of certification) have been followed in this case; therefore, the program is in violation of the law. Usually people call this "illegal".
Now, you could say it's "perfectly legal" in the sense that this seemingly clear violation of the law may be construed to be an exception under a radical interpretation of law held by a few appointees of the administration. Usually, though, a few people with vested interests offering a controversial argument that an action may be legal would not be termed, "perfectly LEGAL."
Attorney General Gonzales has argued that either a) Congress gave the executive the extra authority for this program under the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan or b) FISA is unconstitutional. (a) seems like a strange argument given that Gonzales has said elsewhere that they did not ask Congress for permission specifically becuase they feared they would be denied. (b) requires a very extreme interpretation of presidential power (essentially that the executive can break any law passed by Congress as long as they say it's for the war on terror). Anyway, if you're really interested in why Gonzales arguements are bogus, don't take my word for it, check out what this collection of eminent legal and constitutional scholars had to say.
"I know we tried that with 2 circuits. we were sold 3Mbit DSL at each end, real performance was max 512K... MAX in the middle of the night."
Perhaps you just had the wrong ISP. I've heard many complaints like that about DSL with many ISPs, but with my ISP, Speakeasy, I have consistently gotten at or above the rated speed. Of course, mine is just a 1.5Mb/768kb consumer grade service, so YMMV, but I don't have any reason to expect that it will. Whenever I have download large files (e.g. Linux distros or video) I get something at least comparable to the rated speed, day or night. I would only expect the busines class connections to be better.
Actually I think this underscores a lot of the problem with this whole issue. Some ISPs make deceptive or downright false claims about their service or fail to live up to their obligations, but as a result of the poor service, they can offer dirt cheap prices. Then there are ISPs like mine that are honest, live up to their obligations, and offer good service, but as a result they can't offer the cheapest prices. As long as many consumers are complacent or ill-informed, the bad behavior of many ISPs will be rewarded, and I fear the good and honest ones will be driven out of business. It may be a race to the bottom, so to speak.
If more ISPs would be honest about what they're really selling, good service would be rewarded, and prices could actually correspond to service offered. Any costs for increased bandwidth on the net would just come from those prices, exactly as it should. Short of a lot of fraud or false advertising lawsuits, I'm not sure that will ever happen.
I'm also curious about where these new "big bangs" occur, since the big bang in normal cosmology (i.e. the Friedman-Robertson-Walker based on General Relativity) happens everywhere, not in one particular place. It's not clear that that is the picture in this new theory. This actually sounds less like F-R-W cosmology and more like a steady state model that Fred Hoyle was pushing a while back.
On to the point about providing an absolute reference frame, that might not be such a big issue. The difference here is between what's called weak lorentz symmetry breaking and strong lorentz symmetry breaking (if I'm not mistaken). Relativity says the laws of physics are the same in all frames, but it could be that one frame ends up being easily recognized, even though it doesn't have special laws (this is the weak sort of symmetry breaking). In fact, we already have this because of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). The CMBR defines the average rest frame of the observable Universe. On Earth, the CMBR looks blue shifted in one direction and redshifted in the opposite direction, because we're moving with respect to the CMBR rest frame. So, you could argue that if you get in your spaceship and turn on the thrusters until this redshift effect goes away, you'll really be "at rest" (that is, you'll be at rest in the average rest frame of matter in the universe). So there is a sort of sign post (for a particular velocity, not a particular position), but the laws of physics aren't any different in that frame, so this doesn't break relativity.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
—Patrick Henry
There was a time when some Americans thought freedom was worth risking their safety for. In fact, many people who sign up to serve their country still think that. It's a pity that so many people at home seem to have forgotten and would so easily cast aside hard won liberties. Have the courage to stand up for your freedoms and keep it "the land of the free and the home of the brave" rather than giving in to fear and cowardice.
The point of fiber is to be transparent to light with little dissipation. That's not the same thing as being conductive. Actually, the amount of dissipation grows with the conductivity of the medium, so being electrically conductive is bad if you want to pass light with little dissipation. This is because light is an electromagnetic wave, so in a conductive medium it drives currents that heat the medium, taking energy away from the wave itself. Optical fibers are typically made of some sort of glass (perhaps some are made of plastics) and air, both of which are good electrical insulators.
There may be fibers with, say, a conducting sheath or something. I'm not saying lightning might not be a problem for some reason, I'm only saying that a material that's good at passing light is generally not good at passing electricity.
Yes, there's that and also the fact that it seems like the probability that a comment will be modded up decreased exponentially with a half-life of about 30 minutes after a story is posted. But for each one of the ignorant loud-mouths there are probably a lot of people who are quitely reading your posts and learning from them. And many have probably done what I just did and marked you as a "friend" so they will see your comments in the future.
That's maybe a little more than was necessary. My point was mostly that Slashdot (like many places) has plenty of people who claim to know about something but actually know little. So, if you do know something, it's good to back up your claims a bit so readers can distinguish signal from noise. I guess in the end it's little different from why we use references in scientific journals.
And a much better reply would have pointed to some authoritative source or would have stated why one should believe you know what you're talking about. Even as a physicist (who works outside of elementary particle theory) I've never heard of the Virasoro algebra.
That's right, the parent post is exactly what's wrong with slashdot. Why? It's well thought out, well articulated, seems to contain lots of useful information, and it currently has a score of 1 and is likely to say there. Meanwhile, posts heavy on opinion and light on both fact and thought are modded to +5, probably mostly because they showed up faster (not having to think saves precious minutes).
Well, here's one person at least who read the parent post and appreciated it anyway.
"'Science' and 'Nature' are hack journals nowadays."
I can't speak for atmospheric science or climatology, but in Physics, both of those journals are quite presigious places to publish, and many good, very important articles are published there. It's my understanding that this is the case for most areas of science. So, I'm really very skeptical of your claim.
Now, the articles in these journals are characteristically fairly brief. Are you confusing brevity with lack of quality?
If people would pay attention to whether the connection is a secure SSL connection, wouldn't that alleviate most of the problem? As I understand it the browser would show "secure" if the site has a valid SSL cert signed by one of the root certification authorities installed in your browser that was registered to the domain of the site you were looking at. I suppose it's possible that a phisher could get a valid SSL cert for their phishing domain, but isn't that pretty unlikely?
Of course, training people to pay attention to whether it's an secure connection before giving important private information is a different issue, but it seems like you might be able to make some progress through education and adding features to the browser to make it a bit more obvious. You could make the secure icon more obvious, and you might even be able to get more clever and guess which pages are bank pages and ask "are you sure" when people try to send info unencrypted to those pages.
Meanwhile, my bank and some of my credit cards have a login prompt on the front page that is not https. Sure, it starts an SSL connection after you hit login, but, at that point, if you've been spoofed it would already be too late.
After reading your post, I'm convinced. I'm glad you didn't get weighed down by presenting any evidence or explaining why anyone should take your word as authoritative.
When I worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center I saw Linux in use for desktops, fileservers, web servers, you name, it. There was some Solaris thrown in too, of course, and I think there was even a DEC machine (not a web server), but all the newer *nix machines seemed to be Linux. On the desktop there were also a fair number of Macs running OS X, and Windows probably had the smallest minority in the building I worked in. The only time most of them used Windows was when they had to make a powerpoint presentation. With the development of OO.org Presenter, I'm not even sure how much they'd use Windows for that these days.
So why not have the system automatically post a new "Slashdot story discussion page for MM/DD/YYYY" (or something) every day. The discussion "stories" could sit in a discussion section, and presumably would not appear on the main page. Editors could cruise it once in a while to see what concerns have been modded up, or even if they don't, at least it would provide a release valve for users to blow off steam. Then all of us can mark posts about submitters or bad moderation in other story discussion as "offtopic" in good conscience.
I agree that the system mostly works. Most of the conspiracy theories are just unreasonable, and the complaints are often unwarrented. If you really wanted to quiet complaints for good, I think the only system that would really please people uniformly would be some sort of story moderation or metamoderation system. One suggestion has been to allow subscribers to moderate stories to see if they ever see the light of day for non-subscribers. I have to say that I believe this probably would improve the quality of stories (and take some burden of the editors), but I'm not sure if it is feasable in the near term.
Every once in a while there is a problem with story selection. One which annoyed me was a series of "science" articles from Sterling D Allan with science that was questionable at best, often linking back to the clearly crackpot oriented opensourceenergy.org. Perhaps the most egregeous of these was
Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator. That one certainly shouldn't have gotten through, but more generally I would have liked to have seen the many complaints from users on his stories have some effect on whether the future ones would be accepted.
Maybe a middle ground would just be to allow people to rate stories after they've been posted and then keep a tally for each submitter. Then at least editors can check this rating for the submitter to warn them if there's a person whose submissions they should check over extra carefully. It could be, though, that submitters would just start switching identities to get around this.
The McCain-Feingold bill (a.k.a. Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001) did impose some limitations that might be fairly said to be limitations on political speech. Specifically, there is a provision that prevents other political groups (e.g. 527 committees) from airing "issue ads" around election time. From the Brookings institution analysis:
Electioneering Communication: Restrictions on Corporations and Labor Unions (sec. 203)
Corporations and labor unions are prohibited from running or indirectly financing electioneering communications identifying or targeting a federal candidate within 60 days of a general election. Only a corporation or labor union's registered PAC may fund such activities with hard dollars.
Now, of course, it doesn't actually prevent people from voicing their views, but it does in theory make it harder for citizens to have their voices heard during the most crucial time (usually FEC restrictions are put on candidates, not all citizens). It's debatable whether this is limiting money or limiting speech, but it sure looks uncomfortably close to effectively limiting political speech to those of us concerned with protecting the 1st amendment. One instance in which this came up was in 2004, when the conservative group Citizens United tried to get the FEC to stop Michael Moore from running adds for his movie Fahrenheit 9/11, claiming it was clearly political content covered under McCain-Feingold.
All that being said, Russ Feingold was the only person in the U.S. Senate to have the balls to vote against the USA PATRIOT act. In a time when other politicians were pandering to hystaria and rushing to take what they knew would be (at least in the near term) a popular position, he stood up for principle; he stood for liberty. So, yeah, I don't think I agree with that part of McCain-Feingold, but it's just foolishness to suggest that Feingold has not been a defender of liberty.
But this submission is from the same Sterling D. Allan who gave us such other fine stories as Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator and often submits links to the Open Source Energy Network, a site that covers such reputable and proven technologies as cold fusion and extracting the zero point energy*. Are you suggesting that he may be a less than reliable source of information? I am shocked, simply shocked.
Why on Earth do they keep taking submissions from this guy? There are a lot of good articles about real science and technology out there, so there's no reason to waste time with BS.
* For those less familiar with quantum field theory, this means getting energy out of thin air. While things like the Casimir effect exist, then can't be used as a source of energy. This is a fact that essentially every physicist who uses quantum field theory in their research would agree on.
First of all, in the "modern age of terrorism" there have been non-Arab terrorist groups, like the IRA or organizations that bomb abortion clinics. Also, note that persians in Iran are not arabs either, but I'm guessing you mean to include them in your generalization. Secondly, arab terrorists don't only target non-arabs. But the main problem with the argument you present is that you've more or less randomly chosen one group of people in to which many terrorists fit. You also could have chosen Muslims (Muslim != arab), religious fundementalists, or simply religious people. Indeed, if you chose religious fundementalists, then you could probably throw in the abortion clinic bombers too, and that would exclude a lot of the more moderate elements of the muslim world who disagree with terrorist tactics. Only a small proportion of arabs are terrorists, and most arabs don't support terrorism. There have been major non-arab terrorist organizations. To pick out being arab as the important characteristic is irrational.
Also, in response to your statement, "we owe it to the thousands of people who have been randomly murdered by the adherents of a specific culture that there is the possiblity that certain cultures may be disfunctional" I might point out that going on sheer number of people killed, people of European decent would probably claim the prize for the most number of people killed in recent history. The Germans alone could claim the more than 10 million Russian casualties during WWII plus the 6 million people killed in the Holocaust. The Americans would have a reasonable toll from bombings in Europe and Japan during WWII, not to mention other wars of the 20th century. If you add in the civil war, then the American death toll goes even higher. Is American/European culture similarly (or more) disfunctional?
Terrorists are people who follow a certain idiology or range of idiologies. Blame the terrorists themselves, blame the idiology, but don't pigeonhole an entire culture.
The thing that seperates science and pseudoscience is the methodology, the way you go after gaining knowledge. A scientist does experiments to get data about how the world really is. When he find something he can't explain, he first looks at what's known about that sort of system and systematically rules out all the known explanations. He and his collegues then perform other experiments to check that the effect is real and not just a systematic error. For example, in particle physics the standard when you're claiming to have observed a new particle is to check whether the data can be explained without the existance of that particle and show that the probability of getting that data if the particle does not exist is smaller than 1 in 1,000,000. Only then does a scientist make a claim that he has discovered a new phenomenon. Then he and his collegues immediately looks for an experiment that will disprove his new hypothesis and try it.
Pseudoscience mimicks the outward appearance of science, but abandons the scientific methodology. I call something pseudoscience when someone sees an effect he doesn't understand and immediately jumps to the conclusion it's a new physical phenomenon. He doesn't make an attempt to understand the existing ideas about that system or systematically rule out all the mundane explanations. He doesn't alter his experiments or do new ones to ensure it's not just a systematic error. And usually he provides no clear idea about how one would disprove the theory. Instead, he jumps to the conclusion that he has discovered a new phenomenon, makes up a new explanations, and tries to sell it to people before others can try to see if the effect is real and if the reason is as claimed.
I've explained more here why I think posting crackpot theories on Slashdot is pretty useless. My point is, if these guys have legitimate discoveries, Slashdot it not the place that legimacy will be discovered, and the vast majority of it will be a complete waste of time. If they really think they've found something new, they should publish in a peer-reviewed journal where people who really know about those systems can look the work over. Either way, in the end if they're really right, eventually they'll pile up enough evidence that it's obvious for all to see, but for now they don't have that. As for this wind power story, I'm not necessarily saying it's pseudoscience (or even wrong), just that the source is suspect.
The first in that list featured complete crackpot pseudoscience. The second seems to be of dubious scientific merit. A quick look at Mr. Allan's website shows they are involved with a number of other areas of pseudoscience (or to put it less kindly, scientific hoaxes) such as "magnet motors" and "zero point energy" (as an energy source). That together with the two other submissions he's made leads me to doubt the validity of the information in these "stories". The main problem, however, is that these are not balanced informative articles, but rather they seem to be little more than ads seeking venture capital. Furthermore, it looks like Slashdot is soon to become little more than a mouthpiece for opensourceenergy.org at this rate.
The generalized uncertainty principle relates the product of uncertainties in two measurable quantities to the commutator of the operators representing the two quantities. If the two quantities are cannonically conjugate (like position and momentum), then it takes the simple form (Delta x)*(Delta p) >= hbar/2. You can think of the commutation relation that leads to that ([x,p] = i*hbar) sort of as the assumption imposing debroglie's relation in a more mathematically abstract way. If you want more detail about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, see my explanation here.
Correction: I said, "Appreciating why Bell's inequalities must be true requires some knowledge of quantum mechanics," but what I should have said is that appreciating why quantum mechanics can violate Bell's inequalities while classical mechanics can't takes some knowledge of quantum mechanics (specifically quantum entanglement). To understand just Bell's inequalities themselves you only need to understand mathematics, as it's merely a result about the limitations of classical physics.
Slashdot Mirror
The AT&T case at issue is believed to relate to the warrentless surveillance of the content of phone calls between people within the US and people overseas. This is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It states:
A "United States person" is a citizen or resident alien. It goes on to state other conditions. There is no evidence that any of these conditions (either excluding US persons or submitting of the oath of certification) have been followed in this case; therefore, the program is in violation of the law. Usually people call this "illegal".
Now, you could say it's "perfectly legal" in the sense that this seemingly clear violation of the law may be construed to be an exception under a radical interpretation of law held by a few appointees of the administration. Usually, though, a few people with vested interests offering a controversial argument that an action may be legal would not be termed, "perfectly LEGAL."
Attorney General Gonzales has argued that either a) Congress gave the executive the extra authority for this program under the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan or b) FISA is unconstitutional. (a) seems like a strange argument given that Gonzales has said elsewhere that they did not ask Congress for permission specifically becuase they feared they would be denied. (b) requires a very extreme interpretation of presidential power (essentially that the executive can break any law passed by Congress as long as they say it's for the war on terror). Anyway, if you're really interested in why Gonzales arguements are bogus, don't take my word for it, check out what this collection of eminent legal and constitutional scholars had to say.
Perhaps you just had the wrong ISP. I've heard many complaints like that about DSL with many ISPs, but with my ISP, Speakeasy, I have consistently gotten at or above the rated speed. Of course, mine is just a 1.5Mb/768kb consumer grade service, so YMMV, but I don't have any reason to expect that it will. Whenever I have download large files (e.g. Linux distros or video) I get something at least comparable to the rated speed, day or night. I would only expect the busines class connections to be better.
Actually I think this underscores a lot of the problem with this whole issue. Some ISPs make deceptive or downright false claims about their service or fail to live up to their obligations, but as a result of the poor service, they can offer dirt cheap prices. Then there are ISPs like mine that are honest, live up to their obligations, and offer good service, but as a result they can't offer the cheapest prices. As long as many consumers are complacent or ill-informed, the bad behavior of many ISPs will be rewarded, and I fear the good and honest ones will be driven out of business. It may be a race to the bottom, so to speak.
If more ISPs would be honest about what they're really selling, good service would be rewarded, and prices could actually correspond to service offered. Any costs for increased bandwidth on the net would just come from those prices, exactly as it should. Short of a lot of fraud or false advertising lawsuits, I'm not sure that will ever happen.
I'm also curious about where these new "big bangs" occur, since the big bang in normal cosmology (i.e. the Friedman-Robertson-Walker based on General Relativity) happens everywhere, not in one particular place. It's not clear that that is the picture in this new theory. This actually sounds less like F-R-W cosmology and more like a steady state model that Fred Hoyle was pushing a while back.
On to the point about providing an absolute reference frame, that might not be such a big issue. The difference here is between what's called weak lorentz symmetry breaking and strong lorentz symmetry breaking (if I'm not mistaken). Relativity says the laws of physics are the same in all frames, but it could be that one frame ends up being easily recognized, even though it doesn't have special laws (this is the weak sort of symmetry breaking). In fact, we already have this because of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). The CMBR defines the average rest frame of the observable Universe. On Earth, the CMBR looks blue shifted in one direction and redshifted in the opposite direction, because we're moving with respect to the CMBR rest frame. So, you could argue that if you get in your spaceship and turn on the thrusters until this redshift effect goes away, you'll really be "at rest" (that is, you'll be at rest in the average rest frame of matter in the universe). So there is a sort of sign post (for a particular velocity, not a particular position), but the laws of physics aren't any different in that frame, so this doesn't break relativity.
Bill Clinton was impeached by the house of representatives, but he was not convicted by the Senate. See here and here.
—Patrick Henry
There was a time when some Americans thought freedom was worth risking their safety for. In fact, many people who sign up to serve their country still think that. It's a pity that so many people at home seem to have forgotten and would so easily cast aside hard won liberties. Have the courage to stand up for your freedoms and keep it "the land of the free and the home of the brave" rather than giving in to fear and cowardice.
The point of fiber is to be transparent to light with little dissipation. That's not the same thing as being conductive. Actually, the amount of dissipation grows with the conductivity of the medium, so being electrically conductive is bad if you want to pass light with little dissipation. This is because light is an electromagnetic wave, so in a conductive medium it drives currents that heat the medium, taking energy away from the wave itself. Optical fibers are typically made of some sort of glass (perhaps some are made of plastics) and air, both of which are good electrical insulators.
There may be fibers with, say, a conducting sheath or something. I'm not saying lightning might not be a problem for some reason, I'm only saying that a material that's good at passing light is generally not good at passing electricity.
Yes, there's that and also the fact that it seems like the probability that a comment will be modded up decreased exponentially with a half-life of about 30 minutes after a story is posted. But for each one of the ignorant loud-mouths there are probably a lot of people who are quitely reading your posts and learning from them. And many have probably done what I just did and marked you as a "friend" so they will see your comments in the future.
Thanks.
That's maybe a little more than was necessary. My point was mostly that Slashdot (like many places) has plenty of people who claim to know about something but actually know little. So, if you do know something, it's good to back up your claims a bit so readers can distinguish signal from noise. I guess in the end it's little different from why we use references in scientific journals.
And a much better reply would have pointed to some authoritative source or would have stated why one should believe you know what you're talking about. Even as a physicist (who works outside of elementary particle theory) I've never heard of the Virasoro algebra.
That's right, the parent post is exactly what's wrong with slashdot. Why? It's well thought out, well articulated, seems to contain lots of useful information, and it currently has a score of 1 and is likely to say there. Meanwhile, posts heavy on opinion and light on both fact and thought are modded to +5, probably mostly because they showed up faster (not having to think saves precious minutes).
Well, here's one person at least who read the parent post and appreciated it anyway.
"'Science' and 'Nature' are hack journals nowadays."
I can't speak for atmospheric science or climatology, but in Physics, both of those journals are quite presigious places to publish, and many good, very important articles are published there. It's my understanding that this is the case for most areas of science. So, I'm really very skeptical of your claim.
Now, the articles in these journals are characteristically fairly brief. Are you confusing brevity with lack of quality?
If people would pay attention to whether the connection is a secure SSL connection, wouldn't that alleviate most of the problem? As I understand it the browser would show "secure" if the site has a valid SSL cert signed by one of the root certification authorities installed in your browser that was registered to the domain of the site you were looking at. I suppose it's possible that a phisher could get a valid SSL cert for their phishing domain, but isn't that pretty unlikely?
Of course, training people to pay attention to whether it's an secure connection before giving important private information is a different issue, but it seems like you might be able to make some progress through education and adding features to the browser to make it a bit more obvious. You could make the secure icon more obvious, and you might even be able to get more clever and guess which pages are bank pages and ask "are you sure" when people try to send info unencrypted to those pages.
Meanwhile, my bank and some of my credit cards have a login prompt on the front page that is not https. Sure, it starts an SSL connection after you hit login, but, at that point, if you've been spoofed it would already be too late.
I agree that Wikipedia isn't such a great analog to the Hitchhiker's Guide, but sites like Everything2 and (perhaps not surprisingly) the Hitchhiker's Guide (H2G2) site are.
After reading your post, I'm convinced. I'm glad you didn't get weighed down by presenting any evidence or explaining why anyone should take your word as authoritative.
When I worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center I saw Linux in use for desktops, fileservers, web servers, you name, it. There was some Solaris thrown in too, of course, and I think there was even a DEC machine (not a web server), but all the newer *nix machines seemed to be Linux. On the desktop there were also a fair number of Macs running OS X, and Windows probably had the smallest minority in the building I worked in. The only time most of them used Windows was when they had to make a powerpoint presentation. With the development of OO.org Presenter, I'm not even sure how much they'd use Windows for that these days.
So why not have the system automatically post a new "Slashdot story discussion page for MM/DD/YYYY" (or something) every day. The discussion "stories" could sit in a discussion section, and presumably would not appear on the main page. Editors could cruise it once in a while to see what concerns have been modded up, or even if they don't, at least it would provide a release valve for users to blow off steam. Then all of us can mark posts about submitters or bad moderation in other story discussion as "offtopic" in good conscience.
I agree that the system mostly works. Most of the conspiracy theories are just unreasonable, and the complaints are often unwarrented. If you really wanted to quiet complaints for good, I think the only system that would really please people uniformly would be some sort of story moderation or metamoderation system. One suggestion has been to allow subscribers to moderate stories to see if they ever see the light of day for non-subscribers. I have to say that I believe this probably would improve the quality of stories (and take some burden of the editors), but I'm not sure if it is feasable in the near term.
Every once in a while there is a problem with story selection. One which annoyed me was a series of "science" articles from Sterling D Allan with science that was questionable at best, often linking back to the clearly crackpot oriented opensourceenergy.org. Perhaps the most egregeous of these was Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator. That one certainly shouldn't have gotten through, but more generally I would have liked to have seen the many complaints from users on his stories have some effect on whether the future ones would be accepted.
Maybe a middle ground would just be to allow people to rate stories after they've been posted and then keep a tally for each submitter. Then at least editors can check this rating for the submitter to warn them if there's a person whose submissions they should check over extra carefully. It could be, though, that submitters would just start switching identities to get around this.
The McCain-Feingold bill (a.k.a. Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001) did impose some limitations that might be fairly said to be limitations on political speech. Specifically, there is a provision that prevents other political groups (e.g. 527 committees) from airing "issue ads" around election time. From the Brookings institution analysis:
Now, of course, it doesn't actually prevent people from voicing their views, but it does in theory make it harder for citizens to have their voices heard during the most crucial time (usually FEC restrictions are put on candidates, not all citizens). It's debatable whether this is limiting money or limiting speech, but it sure looks uncomfortably close to effectively limiting political speech to those of us concerned with protecting the 1st amendment. One instance in which this came up was in 2004, when the conservative group Citizens United tried to get the FEC to stop Michael Moore from running adds for his movie Fahrenheit 9/11, claiming it was clearly political content covered under McCain-Feingold.
All that being said, Russ Feingold was the only person in the U.S. Senate to have the balls to vote against the USA PATRIOT act. In a time when other politicians were pandering to hystaria and rushing to take what they knew would be (at least in the near term) a popular position, he stood up for principle; he stood for liberty. So, yeah, I don't think I agree with that part of McCain-Feingold, but it's just foolishness to suggest that Feingold has not been a defender of liberty.
But this submission is from the same Sterling D. Allan who gave us such other fine stories as Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator and often submits links to the Open Source Energy Network, a site that covers such reputable and proven technologies as cold fusion and extracting the zero point energy*. Are you suggesting that he may be a less than reliable source of information? I am shocked, simply shocked.
Why on Earth do they keep taking submissions from this guy? There are a lot of good articles about real science and technology out there, so there's no reason to waste time with BS.
* For those less familiar with quantum field theory, this means getting energy out of thin air. While things like the Casimir effect exist, then can't be used as a source of energy. This is a fact that essentially every physicist who uses quantum field theory in their research would agree on.
First of all, in the "modern age of terrorism" there have been non-Arab terrorist groups, like the IRA or organizations that bomb abortion clinics. Also, note that persians in Iran are not arabs either, but I'm guessing you mean to include them in your generalization. Secondly, arab terrorists don't only target non-arabs. But the main problem with the argument you present is that you've more or less randomly chosen one group of people in to which many terrorists fit. You also could have chosen Muslims (Muslim != arab), religious fundementalists, or simply religious people. Indeed, if you chose religious fundementalists, then you could probably throw in the abortion clinic bombers too, and that would exclude a lot of the more moderate elements of the muslim world who disagree with terrorist tactics. Only a small proportion of arabs are terrorists, and most arabs don't support terrorism. There have been major non-arab terrorist organizations. To pick out being arab as the important characteristic is irrational.
Also, in response to your statement, "we owe it to the thousands of people who have been randomly murdered by the adherents of a specific culture that there is the possiblity that certain cultures may be disfunctional" I might point out that going on sheer number of people killed, people of European decent would probably claim the prize for the most number of people killed in recent history. The Germans alone could claim the more than 10 million Russian casualties during WWII plus the 6 million people killed in the Holocaust. The Americans would have a reasonable toll from bombings in Europe and Japan during WWII, not to mention other wars of the 20th century. If you add in the civil war, then the American death toll goes even higher. Is American/European culture similarly (or more) disfunctional?
Terrorists are people who follow a certain idiology or range of idiologies. Blame the terrorists themselves, blame the idiology, but don't pigeonhole an entire culture.
Well said.
The thing that seperates science and pseudoscience is the methodology, the way you go after gaining knowledge. A scientist does experiments to get data about how the world really is. When he find something he can't explain, he first looks at what's known about that sort of system and systematically rules out all the known explanations. He and his collegues then perform other experiments to check that the effect is real and not just a systematic error. For example, in particle physics the standard when you're claiming to have observed a new particle is to check whether the data can be explained without the existance of that particle and show that the probability of getting that data if the particle does not exist is smaller than 1 in 1,000,000. Only then does a scientist make a claim that he has discovered a new phenomenon. Then he and his collegues immediately looks for an experiment that will disprove his new hypothesis and try it.
Pseudoscience mimicks the outward appearance of science, but abandons the scientific methodology. I call something pseudoscience when someone sees an effect he doesn't understand and immediately jumps to the conclusion it's a new physical phenomenon. He doesn't make an attempt to understand the existing ideas about that system or systematically rule out all the mundane explanations. He doesn't alter his experiments or do new ones to ensure it's not just a systematic error. And usually he provides no clear idea about how one would disprove the theory. Instead, he jumps to the conclusion that he has discovered a new phenomenon, makes up a new explanations, and tries to sell it to people before others can try to see if the effect is real and if the reason is as claimed.
I've explained more here why I think posting crackpot theories on Slashdot is pretty useless. My point is, if these guys have legitimate discoveries, Slashdot it not the place that legimacy will be discovered, and the vast majority of it will be a complete waste of time. If they really think they've found something new, they should publish in a peer-reviewed journal where people who really know about those systems can look the work over. Either way, in the end if they're really right, eventually they'll pile up enough evidence that it's obvious for all to see, but for now they don't have that. As for this wind power story, I'm not necessarily saying it's pseudoscience (or even wrong), just that the source is suspect.
This is the third post I recall by Stirling D. Allan recently, the others being
The first in that list featured complete crackpot pseudoscience. The second seems to be of dubious scientific merit. A quick look at Mr. Allan's website shows they are involved with a number of other areas of pseudoscience (or to put it less kindly, scientific hoaxes) such as "magnet motors" and "zero point energy" (as an energy source). That together with the two other submissions he's made leads me to doubt the validity of the information in these "stories". The main problem, however, is that these are not balanced informative articles, but rather they seem to be little more than ads seeking venture capital. Furthermore, it looks like Slashdot is soon to become little more than a mouthpiece for opensourceenergy.org at this rate.
The generalized uncertainty principle relates the product of uncertainties in two measurable quantities to the commutator of the operators representing the two quantities. If the two quantities are cannonically conjugate (like position and momentum), then it takes the simple form (Delta x)*(Delta p) >= hbar/2. You can think of the commutation relation that leads to that ([x,p] = i*hbar) sort of as the assumption imposing debroglie's relation in a more mathematically abstract way. If you want more detail about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, see my explanation here.
Correction: I said, "Appreciating why Bell's inequalities must be true requires some knowledge of quantum mechanics," but what I should have said is that appreciating why quantum mechanics can violate Bell's inequalities while classical mechanics can't takes some knowledge of quantum mechanics (specifically quantum entanglement). To understand just Bell's inequalities themselves you only need to understand mathematics, as it's merely a result about the limitations of classical physics.