I'm betting that those that are good for the Navy's Submarine Service would also have a good chance. Being locked in one metal tube for months on-end versus being locked in another metal tube for months on-end, plus having an elevated amount of responsibility and the ever-present risk that an otherwise-small problem having drastic consequences.
The problem about having gone through military training is that it focuses so strongly on rigid discipline. Discipline is no doubt vitally important in any sort of army, but the downside is that it tends to be a sort of canned pattern of behaviour that you are supposed to follow unthinkingly, and what you need in an emergency, where external help is impossible, is probably a good deal of ability to improvise and not follow discipline, unless it makes good sense. Also, lonelyness is perhaps not so much an issue as being crammed in with the same, small group all the time - maybe people from the high arctic (inuit, nenets,...) have better skills than most for coping with that.
I have to imagine there are a bunch of existing laws that make this a serious offense. Just find the people that do this and come down hard on them. Then you can leave everyone else alone.
Well, it is obviously a crime to bring down an airplane with ~300 passengers aboard, just like it is a crime to kill somebody with a sledgehammer. The problem is, that this is a reactive legislation: you can only arrest somebody after the crime. Making it illegal to own a powerful laser without a license means that the police can prosecute for possession of one, which is proactive. Just like gun control, it won't stop the hardened criminals or terrorists, but it will make it easier to stop the much larger group of mindless idiots who think it is somehow 'cool' to play this game, but who don't have a specific, criminal intent.
Isn't this what backups are for? Wipe the infected computers and restore from backup. A few days of lost data seems less disruptive than weeks of no computers at all.
Speaking as somebody who has worked for far too long with this kind of issues: backups can be a help, but rarely if we're talking a complete wipeout of all systems. For that, you need to have prepared a disaster recovery plan, and if you have done it properly, you can be back in business in a matter of anything down to minutes, depending on how much you invested in this.
But apart from that - we are talking about serious crime here. On one hand there is the obvious crime of endangering the lives of patients for whatever reason, which in my personal view amounts to something more like terrorism; but there is also the question of whether there is (or ought to be) criminal responsibility on the part of the hospital management for not being prepared for a situation like this, when the danger is as well known as it is, and the solution is well understood.
A counter-revolution, to be more precise. Preferably, one that outlaws Islam - in the same way Communism was outlawed in Russia after 1991.
Don't be stupid. First of all, outlawing something - anything - will only galvanize those to whom the something is important. There are many people in the world, not least in Iran, who see Islam as important, you may be surprised to hear. It is not possible to bring peace and freedom by forcing Western prejudices on them; that is what led to much of the terrorism in the first place. It will only work if people actually want it.
Secondly, revolution can easily go wrong. The revolution happened in Russia for all the right reasons, one could argue: the Czar was a despot completely out of touch with his people, and the people suffered severely - revolution seemed the only way. But it didn't work out all that well, I think. Even the French and American revolutions didn't bring instant bliss, in fact history seems to suggest that they did little to change things in a real way. After all, what is the point of rounding up the leaders and execute them, if people immediately revert to the same miserable way of doing things?
Education of the rulers as well as the ruled has always been and will always be the only real way forward. Revolution and war will rarely do anything other than set that process back.
My experience is that those who are interested in looking at porn are old enough to look at it.
Could be, although you haven't told us what your experiences are. If you mean, when you were interested in porn, you were old enough to look at it, then maybe; on the other hand, if you are a pedophile (not suggesting that you in particular are, but some are), then I think there is reason to question your judgement.
The potential harm - or perceived harm - can come in several forms, and no doubt there are many more than I can think of.
- If your peer group is putting you under pressure to do things that you don't want, that will obviously cause harm. It may be that you are exposed to grooming by criminals - something that has come into focus in recent years in UK, but no doubt it goes on all the time, everywhere.
- You may be interested enough in pornography, but it gives you a distorted idea of what sex, love and relationships are about - even in my youth, when pornography had just been legalised, it was very much centered around ideas and concepts that in hindsight seem eyewateringly stupid; and some actually end up believing, for a while at least, that this is the way such things are meant to be. Others end up being put off sex, for the same reasons.
Whatever the case may be, I can see nothing wrong in this being brought up in public debate; that is what democracy and free speech is for: gauging the will of the people.
So if the U.S signed a treaty that banned all guns from citizens,
Is that realistically likely to happen, do you think? Nobody in the world is in any doubt that gun ownership is important to the Americans, so wouldn't expect the States to sign up to such a thing.
Many other countries may not have that issue, but a treaty can only go so far and a country can only go so far or it risks revolt by its citizens and exiting the treaty any way.
Personally, I wouldn't be so sure of that. My impression is that a majority, or at least a very largeminority, of Americans are very sick of the situation with gun violence and the fact that it is impossible to begin to even talk about limiting gun ownership, because it drowns in hysteria. If both sides in a conflict are interested in finding a reasonable compromise and willing to talk, then you can find a solution, but otherwise the situation may well escalate to the point where it becomes a real conflict. I have no doubt, if it comes to that at some point, then it will end with a complete ban on all gun ownership. That is of course my private opinion, so I may be wrong, but see if you can counter my arguments intelligently, not with the sort of silly posturing and declarations of unalienable rights and constitution that is all to often the only kind of answer I get.
The cost of enacting laws is a high one, much higher than you seem to imagine.
Everything in life has a cost - even freedom. I'm not advocating one choice over another, but everything has a cost. History seems to show us that the cost of agreeing on a set of laws and enforcing them is a lot less than the costs involved in anarchy; I imagine it is going to be the same for international laws in the end. But we are really in new territory here - when I grew up, international law and -treaties were something remote that people on the ground didn't need to be aware of, whereas now, in step with the increased globalisation it is becoming an ever more pressing issue, even down to grassroots level.
Restrictions on nuclear warheads, ships, etc. make sense because they can be verified. Restrictions on software have no means of verification, so any ban on autonomous robots is wishful thinking.
Justifiable restrictions make sense, because putting rules into law means that those tasked with enforcing them are then allowed to take action - it clears away a hurdle. Bans are often like that - their intent is reactive, no proactive. It may not be possible to stop malicious software and hardware being developed or deployed, but at some point there may well be a reckoning, and then it becomes possible to determine whether a banned technology has been used, and the penalty can be adjusted accordingly.
The other important point to make is that when nations sign up to a treaty that bans something, then they will be very reluctant to ignore the ban (openly, at least), and of course, if they don't sign up to it, that tells us something as well. These things can have significant repercussions for the reputation of those countries.
Well, it is being taught by teachers who don't actually understand it all that well, so that is the way it has to be.
Now, I don't actually know what goes for "advanced maths" in primary and secondar education in the States, but I hope it is something that tries to dive into the actual, intuitive foundations of the subject and tries to impart real understanding of mathematical reasoning. Take elementary set theory as an example; when I learned about it in primary school, it was rather vague and hard to find interesting; compare that to Halmos' famous book: Naive Set Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Set_Theory_%28book%29), which is the same thing, but with loads of insight into why it is the way it is - how the intuition results in mathematical concepts.
At any rate, WTF are you going to actually *do* with a citation? This is Slashdot, not Wikipedia, and you're not a scientist - I know because this is endemic across the entire board of studies, you'd know about it if you were a scientist or even just an enthusiast. Either way, there's a whole shit-ton more articles (and actual published research) on China's reputation in all things science.
As you can already see from somebody else's reply to your comment, there is in fact controversy, when it comes to China's status in science. In my opinion the fact that you would not even have thought it necessary to do a search is a symptom of intellectual laziness; and when you did, it was only for "chinese scientific fraud" - try substituting "chinese" with, say "american" and so on, it isn't hard. But the results don't prove your point, which is to say "Look, China is Bad".
I know applying your intellect in arguments isn't the popular style on/. - but that doesn't mean that it is bad style trying to do so; and if you had bothered with trying to understand what I was talking about, maybe you would have found that I didn't actually say that I don't know about fraud in Chinese research. I was simply hoping to raise the level of discourse to one where you don't just spew out the same old, tired prejudices, but instead bring something new to the table - something worth reading. But never mind - you can't win them all.
Finally, as for being a scientist: what do you know about that, actually? Not a lot, it would appear - you argue like a teenager: start with your conclusion, then find the "facts" that match.
There have been some "big announcements" in other hard science fields from China in the past decade or two that have turned out to be bogus.
Examples, quotations, please. There continues to be a lot of ill will against China and too much preparedness to accept stories that claim everything coming from there is crap. The same used to be said about Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and in fact all emerging economies, so to rule out the suspicion of bias, quotation is needed, IMO.
Can someone comment on the likelihood of this being real?
It sounds real enough to me - it is progress on the kind of scale that you would expect, I think. 'Progress', to the extent that one can define and measure it, seems to tend to happen on an exponential scale, at least in the beginning - at first, the steps are very small, but for a while they tend to double in size over constant time intervals; just think of integrated circuits, or gene technology. It isn't that long ago that they idea of having what is essentially a 80es supercomputer in your pocket was beyong science fiction, or the idea that you could read whole genomes and edit them was ludicrous at best. If this rate of progress holds for fusion research, we may think of it as something trvially obvious in less than 50 years' time.
I have found that all too often what holds us back from making the best of what we could potentially have is simply lack of courage and vision. I have absolutely no doubt that we can, quite easily, overcome all the troubles that lie ahead - if only we don't cower down in the face of having to make changes to the way we do things.
Can I assume that you don't use INTERCAL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL#Details) much? To quote:
INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented
I think you would be taken more serious if you didn't simply issue this kind of dogmatic crap. Basically, you only have a 'right' to something if you are able to hold on to it; if you want to live in a society - or any group - your right are limited by what that group allows you. You can leave the group if that doesn't suit you; but to be part of the group and enjoy the benefits of it, you have to accept the limits imposed by the relationship with the group. You may think that picking up arms is a way to take more rights from the group, but I don't think it is a fruitful strategy in the long run, since you will have to be on your guard 24x7; and your actual freedom will less than what you would have had otherwise.
But you are right - governments don't give rights - society does. You can call it 'infringement' if you like, but it isn't, really, it is simply part of the price you pay for being in a given group. It is of course very reasonable to argue for changes to the rules - it has obvious benefits for the group that its members do so, but dogmatic arguments are weak. It would be better to argue in a way that people can relate to intelligently.
- The lack of critical thinking in analyzing the merit in complaints.
I'm sure you can do better than trying to imply that I don't think critically. And I note you havn't addressed my criticism: that people have feelings, and that it is relevant to show consideration simply for that reason. It is always possible, in my experience, to criticise without going out of your way to hurt people's feelings; not even trying is at best mental lazyness, and at worst deliberate aggression.
So do I - when I am looking for something and want to find the best deal. But I don't want sharks circling me in the hope of an easy kill. Which means, I don't want to be tracked and probed by smarmy gits in a suit, hiding behind false smiles (wow, that sounded almost poetic). I am perfectly capable of deciding when I need or want things without 'help'. These people are not "friends" who want to provide "the best value for money" - they are predators, simply.
The decline of Yahoo, to me least, looks like a symptom of an ailing internet; we have seen the explosion of WWW fueled by advertising from nearly nothing just a decade ago. I don't think it is sustainable; one things is that there is far too much advertising, and it will, by necessity, decline, and it may collapse suddenly. But even if there is a reasonable amount of advertising, it still rests on an unsustainable amount of credit fueled consumerism, which will have to come to an end, obviously (since it is unsustainable). Basically, credit is really only sustainable, if it leads to investment with a sufficient return to the debtor - credit for consumption doesn't, in general. So, consumerism driven by credit must come to an end, and the WWW as we have it now, fueled by advertising, cannot continue. Convince me that I'm wrong, but be warned - I'm don't fall for references to higher authority.
There is some involuntary comedy in the fact that people here seem to be complaining loudly about how they have to tolerate all this intolerance...
When someone complains about hurt feelings,...
Well, the right to criticise is of fundamental importance to society, democracy and all that, of course. But we have to remember that complaining about hurt feeling is also a form of criticism, and having to tolerate criticism applies to everbody. The right to offend comes with a duty to be considerate; a good comedian is able to find that balance, sometimes even to the extent that the 'victim' joins in the laugh.
Well, the basic problem is that there is too much advertising - far too much. When you reach a certain degree of saturation, it no longer makes any difference - people just ignore it, and I suspect adding more after that point actually leads to a decrease in effect, when people start to react negatively to it. Hence the widespread use of ad-blocking, script blocking, tracker blocking etc. We have had enough, simply. I don't know of anybody who actually wants to see adverts.
So, with this being the case, it seems obvious that companies whose only way to generate revenue is advertising, will get into trouble, sooner or later. I think it is quite likely that Google too, as well as Facebook, Twitter, etc will end up feeling the squeeze. The problem isn't that these services don't attract users, but that companies will begin to realise that this form of advertising isn't worth the money.
In fact, we could do with a more nuanced scoring system - who not an array of counters, so we can see how many in each category a comment receives? And perhaps give out more mod points and allow the modder to use several on a comment.
Another in a long list of moronic solutions that will never work against an intelligent attack, or even a large number of idiots.
Firstly, this is research; so, they are saying "could this work?" Research is what you do when you don't know, but want to find out. Secondly, they are not talking about large, sustained attacks - hopefully there will better ways of handling this, but there is a need to protect certain areas, like airports, from the occasional, stray drone.
One reason it seems attractive to use a trained animal is that animals are already fully autonomous. If you can train large birds of prey to attack drones, you can pretty much leave it to patrol the area. Birds are territorial, so they will tend to stay within an area, if there is enough food available, and it is already well known that these birds can be trained to always come back to their handlers for food. All in all, it might not be a stupid idea to try to get it to work.
What really made me decide to comment on this was the never-ending contraryness that always meets news about things people don't understand or don't feel fits in to their own, narrow field of interest. Looking back, it seems to me like most of the best things innovations started as something that people didn't understand and couldn't see the point in. If it had been obvious to most, it wouldn't have been much of an innovation, really.
But what if everything was optimized to fail all at once?
The only ones to benefit from this are the ones selling the crap - and they don't see any incentive either. What difference does it make whether people discard their old HW because 1 compnent is broken or because all of them fail? A far better concept, for the consumer at least, would be if all gadgets were repairable and upgradeable. It is perfectly doable from tachnical point of view; it is not really a big challenge, whether is is phones, tablets or computers - or even cars. The only reason we don't have it is that producers don't like it, as it would cut into their profit margins. Just imagine a world where all parts for all cars were standardized, so you could find any spare part for any car from a large number of producers - and even better: you would be able to gradually upgrade from you smallish, cheap set of wheels to a flash superbeast. Suddenly car manufacturers wouldn't have a virtual monopoly on certain things. Same thing with everything else. The technology needed to make a small computer like a smartphone repairable and upgradeable is well understood, and again the only reason we are not already heading down that way is that manufacturers don't want to. Well, that and historical reasons: concepts like modular computer systems, clustering etc have evolved alongside the hardware, but we could actually do it now.
Apparently one of the gases is "probably not carcinogenic" and the other is only classed as a "possible human carcinogen" so really the title should read "Desktop 3D Printers Shown to Emit Gases some of which might be hazardous". Not to mention that if the safe exposure level is 50g/m^3 that's almost 5% by weight of air so either someone messed up the units or one of the gases emitted are safer than carbon dioxide and nobody suggests that we ban candles.
The good old "it won't happen to me"? Unfortunately, reality isn't as kind as that, as I'm sure you know. The purpose of this research is not to get 3D printing banned, or even to "discover" that it is hazardous; we already knew that there are hazards connected with working with hot, melted plastic. We just hadn't quantified the hazards well enough, yet. It makes sense to figure this out, so we can make informed decisions about how to mitigate the problem.
I think I can answer some of those (obviously, I'm not part of the/. team):
Is Slashdot going to stop those ridiculous paid links to forbes.com?
No. 'Anything for money' seems to be at the core of the ethos in online media. I would encourage/. to do us hardcore engineers a favour and flag up any article with links to the glossy magazines, so we can ignore them. There are, believe it or not, people who actually want to read that stuff.
What about the relentless left-wing social justice stories that blame nerds for everything wrong in the world?
You have completely lost me there - to anybody other than an American, there seems to bo nothing in American news that can be called 'left-wing'. As for reports on activism - I don't recall seeing many reports on that; certainly not enough to call it relentless. But unlike the glossies, these are actual news: actual stories about things some people actually do. News are not necessarily something we like to hear about - I certainly don't like to hear about Daesh, but it is necessary to keep in the loop to some extent. And I don't see nerds being blamed for everything in the world; I see discussions about spammers, hackers, scams and other abuses of technology. Are nerds involved in this? Some are, no doubt, but nobody claims that every nerd is a criminal.
What about constant news-today-gone-tomorrow political stories that are general news, at best?
I like those - as a nerd, I am in fact intensely interested in politics, philosophy, religion, science etc - anything that requires deep thinking. If you don't like it, don't waste your time on it. Politics has its own category, so it should be easy. Technology doesn't exist in isolation - if there is an anti-science trend in politics, then it is likely to have a bearing on what we are doing, if the States doesn't invest in education while China invests massivly, we will end up lagging behind, and that will have a bearing on what we are doing,... I think it is important, and the political stories are one of the main reasons why I haven't left/. a long time ago. That in itself may be a good or a bad thing, depending on your view, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm betting that those that are good for the Navy's Submarine Service would also have a good chance. Being locked in one metal tube for months on-end versus being locked in another metal tube for months on-end, plus having an elevated amount of responsibility and the ever-present risk that an otherwise-small problem having drastic consequences.
The problem about having gone through military training is that it focuses so strongly on rigid discipline. Discipline is no doubt vitally important in any sort of army, but the downside is that it tends to be a sort of canned pattern of behaviour that you are supposed to follow unthinkingly, and what you need in an emergency, where external help is impossible, is probably a good deal of ability to improvise and not follow discipline, unless it makes good sense. Also, lonelyness is perhaps not so much an issue as being crammed in with the same, small group all the time - maybe people from the high arctic (inuit, nenets,...) have better skills than most for coping with that.
I have to imagine there are a bunch of existing laws that make this a serious offense. Just find the people that do this and come down hard on them. Then you can leave everyone else alone.
Well, it is obviously a crime to bring down an airplane with ~300 passengers aboard, just like it is a crime to kill somebody with a sledgehammer. The problem is, that this is a reactive legislation: you can only arrest somebody after the crime. Making it illegal to own a powerful laser without a license means that the police can prosecute for possession of one, which is proactive. Just like gun control, it won't stop the hardened criminals or terrorists, but it will make it easier to stop the much larger group of mindless idiots who think it is somehow 'cool' to play this game, but who don't have a specific, criminal intent.
Isn't this what backups are for? Wipe the infected computers and restore from backup. A few days of lost data seems less disruptive than weeks of no computers at all.
Speaking as somebody who has worked for far too long with this kind of issues: backups can be a help, but rarely if we're talking a complete wipeout of all systems. For that, you need to have prepared a disaster recovery plan, and if you have done it properly, you can be back in business in a matter of anything down to minutes, depending on how much you invested in this.
But apart from that - we are talking about serious crime here. On one hand there is the obvious crime of endangering the lives of patients for whatever reason, which in my personal view amounts to something more like terrorism; but there is also the question of whether there is (or ought to be) criminal responsibility on the part of the hospital management for not being prepared for a situation like this, when the danger is as well known as it is, and the solution is well understood.
A counter-revolution, to be more precise. Preferably, one that outlaws Islam - in the same way Communism was outlawed in Russia after 1991.
Don't be stupid. First of all, outlawing something - anything - will only galvanize those to whom the something is important. There are many people in the world, not least in Iran, who see Islam as important, you may be surprised to hear. It is not possible to bring peace and freedom by forcing Western prejudices on them; that is what led to much of the terrorism in the first place. It will only work if people actually want it.
Secondly, revolution can easily go wrong. The revolution happened in Russia for all the right reasons, one could argue: the Czar was a despot completely out of touch with his people, and the people suffered severely - revolution seemed the only way. But it didn't work out all that well, I think. Even the French and American revolutions didn't bring instant bliss, in fact history seems to suggest that they did little to change things in a real way. After all, what is the point of rounding up the leaders and execute them, if people immediately revert to the same miserable way of doing things?
Education of the rulers as well as the ruled has always been and will always be the only real way forward. Revolution and war will rarely do anything other than set that process back.
My experience is that those who are interested in looking at porn are old enough to look at it.
Could be, although you haven't told us what your experiences are. If you mean, when you were interested in porn, you were old enough to look at it, then maybe; on the other hand, if you are a pedophile (not suggesting that you in particular are, but some are), then I think there is reason to question your judgement.
The potential harm - or perceived harm - can come in several forms, and no doubt there are many more than I can think of.
- If your peer group is putting you under pressure to do things that you don't want, that will obviously cause harm. It may be that you are exposed to grooming by criminals - something that has come into focus in recent years in UK, but no doubt it goes on all the time, everywhere.
- You may be interested enough in pornography, but it gives you a distorted idea of what sex, love and relationships are about - even in my youth, when pornography had just been legalised, it was very much centered around ideas and concepts that in hindsight seem eyewateringly stupid; and some actually end up believing, for a while at least, that this is the way such things are meant to be. Others end up being put off sex, for the same reasons.
Whatever the case may be, I can see nothing wrong in this being brought up in public debate; that is what democracy and free speech is for: gauging the will of the people.
So if the U.S signed a treaty that banned all guns from citizens,
Is that realistically likely to happen, do you think? Nobody in the world is in any doubt that gun ownership is important to the Americans, so wouldn't expect the States to sign up to such a thing.
Many other countries may not have that issue, but a treaty can only go so far and a country can only go so far or it risks revolt by its citizens and exiting the treaty any way.
Personally, I wouldn't be so sure of that. My impression is that a majority, or at least a very largeminority, of Americans are very sick of the situation with gun violence and the fact that it is impossible to begin to even talk about limiting gun ownership, because it drowns in hysteria. If both sides in a conflict are interested in finding a reasonable compromise and willing to talk, then you can find a solution, but otherwise the situation may well escalate to the point where it becomes a real conflict. I have no doubt, if it comes to that at some point, then it will end with a complete ban on all gun ownership. That is of course my private opinion, so I may be wrong, but see if you can counter my arguments intelligently, not with the sort of silly posturing and declarations of unalienable rights and constitution that is all to often the only kind of answer I get.
The cost of enacting laws is a high one, much higher than you seem to imagine.
Everything in life has a cost - even freedom. I'm not advocating one choice over another, but everything has a cost. History seems to show us that the cost of agreeing on a set of laws and enforcing them is a lot less than the costs involved in anarchy; I imagine it is going to be the same for international laws in the end. But we are really in new territory here - when I grew up, international law and -treaties were something remote that people on the ground didn't need to be aware of, whereas now, in step with the increased globalisation it is becoming an ever more pressing issue, even down to grassroots level.
Restrictions on nuclear warheads, ships, etc. make sense because they can be verified. Restrictions on software have no means of verification, so any ban on autonomous robots is wishful thinking.
Justifiable restrictions make sense, because putting rules into law means that those tasked with enforcing them are then allowed to take action - it clears away a hurdle. Bans are often like that - their intent is reactive, no proactive. It may not be possible to stop malicious software and hardware being developed or deployed, but at some point there may well be a reckoning, and then it becomes possible to determine whether a banned technology has been used, and the penalty can be adjusted accordingly.
The other important point to make is that when nations sign up to a treaty that bans something, then they will be very reluctant to ignore the ban (openly, at least), and of course, if they don't sign up to it, that tells us something as well. These things can have significant repercussions for the reputation of those countries.
Hey, no worries :-) We all get carried away sometimes when we believe strongly in what we are discussing. It means we are human.
Opela
That might have been vaguely funny, if it has been about a Japanese company. The 'R'-sound is quite commonly used in Chinese.
The way math is taught, Math is a chore
Well, it is being taught by teachers who don't actually understand it all that well, so that is the way it has to be.
Now, I don't actually know what goes for "advanced maths" in primary and secondar education in the States, but I hope it is something that tries to dive into the actual, intuitive foundations of the subject and tries to impart real understanding of mathematical reasoning. Take elementary set theory as an example; when I learned about it in primary school, it was rather vague and hard to find interesting; compare that to Halmos' famous book: Naive Set Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Set_Theory_%28book%29), which is the same thing, but with loads of insight into why it is the way it is - how the intuition results in mathematical concepts.
At any rate, WTF are you going to actually *do* with a citation? This is Slashdot, not Wikipedia, and you're not a scientist - I know because this is endemic across the entire board of studies, you'd know about it if you were a scientist or even just an enthusiast. Either way, there's a whole shit-ton more articles (and actual published research) on China's reputation in all things science.
As you can already see from somebody else's reply to your comment, there is in fact controversy, when it comes to China's status in science. In my opinion the fact that you would not even have thought it necessary to do a search is a symptom of intellectual laziness; and when you did, it was only for "chinese scientific fraud" - try substituting "chinese" with, say "american" and so on, it isn't hard. But the results don't prove your point, which is to say "Look, China is Bad".
I know applying your intellect in arguments isn't the popular style on /. - but that doesn't mean that it is bad style trying to do so; and if you had bothered with trying to understand what I was talking about, maybe you would have found that I didn't actually say that I don't know about fraud in Chinese research. I was simply hoping to raise the level of discourse to one where you don't just spew out the same old, tired prejudices, but instead bring something new to the table - something worth reading. But never mind - you can't win them all.
Finally, as for being a scientist: what do you know about that, actually? Not a lot, it would appear - you argue like a teenager: start with your conclusion, then find the "facts" that match.
There have been some "big announcements" in other hard science fields from China in the past decade or two that have turned out to be bogus.
Examples, quotations, please. There continues to be a lot of ill will against China and too much preparedness to accept stories that claim everything coming from there is crap. The same used to be said about Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and in fact all emerging economies, so to rule out the suspicion of bias, quotation is needed, IMO.
Can someone comment on the likelihood of this being real?
It sounds real enough to me - it is progress on the kind of scale that you would expect, I think. 'Progress', to the extent that one can define and measure it, seems to tend to happen on an exponential scale, at least in the beginning - at first, the steps are very small, but for a while they tend to double in size over constant time intervals; just think of integrated circuits, or gene technology. It isn't that long ago that they idea of having what is essentially a 80es supercomputer in your pocket was beyong science fiction, or the idea that you could read whole genomes and edit them was ludicrous at best. If this rate of progress holds for fusion research, we may think of it as something trvially obvious in less than 50 years' time.
I have found that all too often what holds us back from making the best of what we could potentially have is simply lack of courage and vision. I have absolutely no doubt that we can, quite easily, overcome all the troubles that lie ahead - if only we don't cower down in the face of having to make changes to the way we do things.
Can I assume that you don't use INTERCAL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL#Details) much? To quote:
INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented
Governments don't give rights...
I think you would be taken more serious if you didn't simply issue this kind of dogmatic crap. Basically, you only have a 'right' to something if you are able to hold on to it; if you want to live in a society - or any group - your right are limited by what that group allows you. You can leave the group if that doesn't suit you; but to be part of the group and enjoy the benefits of it, you have to accept the limits imposed by the relationship with the group. You may think that picking up arms is a way to take more rights from the group, but I don't think it is a fruitful strategy in the long run, since you will have to be on your guard 24x7; and your actual freedom will less than what you would have had otherwise.
But you are right - governments don't give rights - society does. You can call it 'infringement' if you like, but it isn't, really, it is simply part of the price you pay for being in a given group. It is of course very reasonable to argue for changes to the rules - it has obvious benefits for the group that its members do so, but dogmatic arguments are weak. It would be better to argue in a way that people can relate to intelligently.
- The lack of critical thinking in analyzing the merit in complaints.
I'm sure you can do better than trying to imply that I don't think critically. And I note you havn't addressed my criticism: that people have feelings, and that it is relevant to show consideration simply for that reason. It is always possible, in my experience, to criticise without going out of your way to hurt people's feelings; not even trying is at best mental lazyness, and at worst deliberate aggression.
I do want to see adverts.
So do I - when I am looking for something and want to find the best deal. But I don't want sharks circling me in the hope of an easy kill. Which means, I don't want to be tracked and probed by smarmy gits in a suit, hiding behind false smiles (wow, that sounded almost poetic). I am perfectly capable of deciding when I need or want things without 'help'. These people are not "friends" who want to provide "the best value for money" - they are predators, simply.
The decline of Yahoo, to me least, looks like a symptom of an ailing internet; we have seen the explosion of WWW fueled by advertising from nearly nothing just a decade ago. I don't think it is sustainable; one things is that there is far too much advertising, and it will, by necessity, decline, and it may collapse suddenly. But even if there is a reasonable amount of advertising, it still rests on an unsustainable amount of credit fueled consumerism, which will have to come to an end, obviously (since it is unsustainable). Basically, credit is really only sustainable, if it leads to investment with a sufficient return to the debtor - credit for consumption doesn't, in general. So, consumerism driven by credit must come to an end, and the WWW as we have it now, fueled by advertising, cannot continue. Convince me that I'm wrong, but be warned - I'm don't fall for references to higher authority.
There is some involuntary comedy in the fact that people here seem to be complaining loudly about how they have to tolerate all this intolerance ...
When someone complains about hurt feelings,...
Well, the right to criticise is of fundamental importance to society, democracy and all that, of course. But we have to remember that complaining about hurt feeling is also a form of criticism, and having to tolerate criticism applies to everbody. The right to offend comes with a duty to be considerate; a good comedian is able to find that balance, sometimes even to the extent that the 'victim' joins in the laugh.
Well, the basic problem is that there is too much advertising - far too much. When you reach a certain degree of saturation, it no longer makes any difference - people just ignore it, and I suspect adding more after that point actually leads to a decrease in effect, when people start to react negatively to it. Hence the widespread use of ad-blocking, script blocking, tracker blocking etc. We have had enough, simply. I don't know of anybody who actually wants to see adverts.
So, with this being the case, it seems obvious that companies whose only way to generate revenue is advertising, will get into trouble, sooner or later. I think it is quite likely that Google too, as well as Facebook, Twitter, etc will end up feeling the squeeze. The problem isn't that these services don't attract users, but that companies will begin to realise that this form of advertising isn't worth the money.
In fact, we could do with a more nuanced scoring system - who not an array of counters, so we can see how many in each category a comment receives? And perhaps give out more mod points and allow the modder to use several on a comment.
Another in a long list of moronic solutions that will never work against an intelligent attack, or even a large number of idiots.
Firstly, this is research; so, they are saying "could this work?" Research is what you do when you don't know, but want to find out. Secondly, they are not talking about large, sustained attacks - hopefully there will better ways of handling this, but there is a need to protect certain areas, like airports, from the occasional, stray drone.
One reason it seems attractive to use a trained animal is that animals are already fully autonomous. If you can train large birds of prey to attack drones, you can pretty much leave it to patrol the area. Birds are territorial, so they will tend to stay within an area, if there is enough food available, and it is already well known that these birds can be trained to always come back to their handlers for food. All in all, it might not be a stupid idea to try to get it to work.
What really made me decide to comment on this was the never-ending contraryness that always meets news about things people don't understand or don't feel fits in to their own, narrow field of interest. Looking back, it seems to me like most of the best things innovations started as something that people didn't understand and couldn't see the point in. If it had been obvious to most, it wouldn't have been much of an innovation, really.
But what if everything was optimized to fail all at once?
The only ones to benefit from this are the ones selling the crap - and they don't see any incentive either. What difference does it make whether people discard their old HW because 1 compnent is broken or because all of them fail? A far better concept, for the consumer at least, would be if all gadgets were repairable and upgradeable. It is perfectly doable from tachnical point of view; it is not really a big challenge, whether is is phones, tablets or computers - or even cars. The only reason we don't have it is that producers don't like it, as it would cut into their profit margins. Just imagine a world where all parts for all cars were standardized, so you could find any spare part for any car from a large number of producers - and even better: you would be able to gradually upgrade from you smallish, cheap set of wheels to a flash superbeast. Suddenly car manufacturers wouldn't have a virtual monopoly on certain things. Same thing with everything else. The technology needed to make a small computer like a smartphone repairable and upgradeable is well understood, and again the only reason we are not already heading down that way is that manufacturers don't want to. Well, that and historical reasons: concepts like modular computer systems, clustering etc have evolved alongside the hardware, but we could actually do it now.
Levels of depression are plummeting.
Apparently one of the gases is "probably not carcinogenic" and the other is only classed as a "possible human carcinogen" so really the title should read "Desktop 3D Printers Shown to Emit Gases some of which might be hazardous". Not to mention that if the safe exposure level is 50g/m^3 that's almost 5% by weight of air so either someone messed up the units or one of the gases emitted are safer than carbon dioxide and nobody suggests that we ban candles.
The good old "it won't happen to me"? Unfortunately, reality isn't as kind as that, as I'm sure you know. The purpose of this research is not to get 3D printing banned, or even to "discover" that it is hazardous; we already knew that there are hazards connected with working with hot, melted plastic. We just hadn't quantified the hazards well enough, yet. It makes sense to figure this out, so we can make informed decisions about how to mitigate the problem.
I think I can answer some of those (obviously, I'm not part of the /. team):
Is Slashdot going to stop those ridiculous paid links to forbes.com?
No. 'Anything for money' seems to be at the core of the ethos in online media. I would encourage /. to do us hardcore engineers a favour and flag up any article with links to the glossy magazines, so we can ignore them. There are, believe it or not, people who actually want to read that stuff.
What about the relentless left-wing social justice stories that blame nerds for everything wrong in the world?
You have completely lost me there - to anybody other than an American, there seems to bo nothing in American news that can be called 'left-wing'. As for reports on activism - I don't recall seeing many reports on that; certainly not enough to call it relentless. But unlike the glossies, these are actual news: actual stories about things some people actually do. News are not necessarily something we like to hear about - I certainly don't like to hear about Daesh, but it is necessary to keep in the loop to some extent. And I don't see nerds being blamed for everything in the world; I see discussions about spammers, hackers, scams and other abuses of technology. Are nerds involved in this? Some are, no doubt, but nobody claims that every nerd is a criminal.
What about constant news-today-gone-tomorrow political stories that are general news, at best?
I like those - as a nerd, I am in fact intensely interested in politics, philosophy, religion, science etc - anything that requires deep thinking. If you don't like it, don't waste your time on it. Politics has its own category, so it should be easy. Technology doesn't exist in isolation - if there is an anti-science trend in politics, then it is likely to have a bearing on what we are doing, if the States doesn't invest in education while China invests massivly, we will end up lagging behind, and that will have a bearing on what we are doing, ... I think it is important, and the political stories are one of the main reasons why I haven't left /. a long time ago. That in itself may be a good or a bad thing, depending on your view, of course.