... but I wonder if people will adjust to it eventually?
I doubt it. I think it is a misunderstanding to think that what people want is total immersion in a story - personally, I prefer books to movies, exactly because they seem less real; a book allows you to concentrate your attention at the level that suits you, and you can read it at your own pace. Watching a movie is, in a sense, more stressful, and deeper immersion will only make it worse.
Compare this to pictures: a photo can be brilliant, rich in beautiful detail and stunning colour, but somehow the cruder, less realistic paintings of Monet or Picasso appeal more to people in general. I think this is the same thing: a photo ties to in, paintings give you the freedom to use you own imagination.
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank. " - Barack Obama, October 27, 2007
I am confident that I don't have to explain to you that this sort of thing is what every politician says to get elected; you have to keep the message simple, direct and appealing, especially in a political climate like the American. So, did he lie? Of course he did; personally, I don't blame him for it - I knew, as everybody did, that this was not realistic, and I like him for more substantial qualities than which good-sounding promises he made during the election campaign. And I think that one can argue that he is true to the spirit of the promise; GWB would have been all over Libya long ago, pretending to be "The Leader of the Free World" and making an oaf of himself.
I think America and the rest of the world should count themselves lucky that Obama is such a pragmatic realist.
Look, this is not about whether we have an exact analogy between water use and internet use; otherwise we would be back in the "tubes" scenario, right? I'm just saying, it is hard to argue against paying in proportion to how you use, be it bandwidth or not.
It isn't all that difficult to find a reasonable model - here, meaning one that most people would find agreable, rather than "the most objectively fair" (whatever that means). Assume there is something like a price per minute on the total bandwidth on the internet, leaving out local variations etc since this is only a sketch anyway. So, you pay for the percentage of the bandwidth you use per minute, measured by counting the number of packets with your name on per minute as a percentage of the total capacity. This is not even mildly difficult; it is trivial.
This is like all the "no artificial..." nonsense you see on food labels, which is designed to fool you into thinking this actually "natural" or even "good quality".
If you read the label carefully, you will see that "No artificial colour" means they have used things like carrot- or beetroot juice (or annatto extract); it never means that your strawberry jam is made entirely from strawberries.
And of course, bottles "made from plant materials" only means they have found an economically viable way to make poly-whatever from plant-based organics rather than petrochemical ones. In a word: Bogus.
"Ethics" means different things to different people; what is ethical to us in the FOSS end of the world may not be entirely the same as what is ethical to a business. Businesses are predators at best (or parasites at worst), so perhaps behaving like a predator doesn't count as un-ethical; but to be fair, Microsoft (and Bill Gates) have put a good deal of effort into being seen as ethical. One can of course with some right be sceptical about the depth of their sentiment, but there is no doubt about the effort, and apparently that has paid off.
I think we are talking about "business ethics", not necessarily what normal people perceive as ethics. Stuff like honouring business agreements (or not getting caught breaking them).
Gullible? Perhaps that is what you would call it; personally I think it is about being friends - friends don't ask for guarantees cast in iron, they trust each other. We in Europe have tended to see America as friends at least sine WWII.
"Gullible" implies that we should have known better; that America is not a friend, but at best a predator with a false smile, and at worst an enemy. Is that really the case?
I can see where they are coming from, in a sense: you should pay for how much you use, which is hard to argue against. After all, that's how we pay for other resources we use - I don't use the internet for watching movies or other high-bandwith things, so why should I pay more to support those that do?
However, what they propose is almost exactly the opposite of paying for what you use; it's like being billed for water by measuring the size of your garden or the number of taps in the home. And just as for water, it is perfectly easy to measure the actual consumption; if they don't know how, I am sure there is a large proportion of/. readers who can help them figure it out.
I am utterly shocked that a facility with a large concentration of people exposed to deadline pressures might be found to contain an alertness-enhancing recreational alkaloid stronger than caffeine...
The problem with cocaine is that it can have some rather devastating effects of your body - which isn't a good idea when you are out there, where not only you, but others depend with their lives on you.
On the other hand, isn't it becoming more and more clear that using recreational drugs is something people in general want to do? IMO, it would be a lot better if those in power recognised this and decided to allow the development and marketing of a set of drugs that offer what peolpe want with the lowest possible risk - and with clear, well thought-out guidelines about how to use them. It might even be possible to develop drugs that you could "switch off" quickly if you got into a situation where this was necessary.
That's silly. They're trying to build a supercomputer out of MIPS chips. That'll never work...
Silly? Perhaps, for a given value of "silly". But "never work"? Of course it can work - it isn't even going to be hard, all the technology and code already exists.
A genuine answer, then: basic research has proven its worth many times in the past. Most if not all mathematics that is now fundamentally important originates from what was once thought of as idle speculation - interesting, but basically useless. Science was once one of the arts on par with painting and music; there is a story (about Platon, I believe): A young man once asked him, "What is the use (of maths)?" and Platon turned to one of his servants, saying "Give that man an abacus and send him away".
And so on - the point is that people who don't understand sicience often want science to concentrate only on what is useful, not realising that we don't actually know what will be useful until we know more. All great discoveries are based on first observing without the bias of having a purpose, then speculating about what the observations mean; it is only when you have some sort of meaningful hypothesis that you can begin to make use of your observations.
In many ways, the worst scenario will be if we confirm the theories, because then we lose one of the big unknowns - the theory will be complete, and we will have less opportunity to make completely new discoveries.
While nobody's proven that the current extraordinary warming trend is man-made, scientists have been very successful in ruling out the other causes you mention (even in combination). The current warming is not caused by volcanism, changes in solar radiation levels, etc. Which means that it's either (a) man-made (a theory for which there is good evidence) or (b) it's due to some completely different force that we don't know about (aliens, the earth's core going out of alignment, mutating neutrinos, ok, I kid).
It has been proven for all practical purposes - it has been proven with far more certainty than employed in other places in society; and we will never be able to prove this well enough to shut up those that just don't want to be convinced. It's proven - full stop. It's been time to move on for a long, long time.
Possibly - there are some theories which suggest that the solar wind might have blown our atmosphere away were it not for the magnetic field, Mars' thin atmosphere is supposed to be an example of this because its magnetic field is weaker than Earth's.
What makes linux a bad match for the German Foreign Office? Or what are they doing wrong?
Switching from something everybody knows and some even like will always be difficult. At the very least a lot of user education has to happen before the switch to address the pitfalls. It would probably also be wise to try to influence people's attitudes before the event, otherwise you'll find that there is a large group of malcontents that will try to sabotage the whole thing.
I have seen this type of problems many times and not just when it comes to switching technology; you have to win people's hearts and mind if you want to succeed.
The controversial if monotone message of the "Love Crusade" seems to be to blame everything that is wrong in the world on homosexuality
When a guy is so eager to demonstrate to the world that he is not at all gay, whatever people say, then perhaps he has some personal issues he should work with; such as deciding to come out of the cupboard.
The solution when your chosen religion conflicts with your lifestyle and biology is not to try and reinterpret and redefine that religion's beliefs to align with yours, it's to stop believing in that religion and choose another (or none at all).
Wrong. The solution is to realise that religions - and gods - are created by humans, not the other way round, and that they have to evolve with society to remain relevant. Personally, I don;t feel the need for religion, but I can't condemn those that do.
The world has been out of control since the beginning of the industrial revolution, so it's a bit late for that. "Out of control" is what laissez-faire capitalism is all about - that's what people like Rupert Murdoch mean when they talk about "freedom": complete lack of control and restraint.
There's a lot of unclear and contentious issues at work here, I think; and unfortunately I don't know enough to gve an informed opinion on it all, but...
Was space created by the Big Bang, or did the Big Bang happen inside of space that already existed?
Observe something that is more distant in space-time than the big bang, and settle the matter!
"Space" is only a convenient mathematical model of reality - mathematically a space is loosely speaking a set with some topological structure. In all our current models "space" is assumed to be a pseudo-Riemannian manifold - more or less - and as far as I know, any such thing can be embedded in an Euclidean space of higher dimension; don't ask me about details, I am on thin ice here.
So, I think in a sense the answer depends on which viewpoint is convenient. I recently read some articles about this, in Scientific American or possibly New Scientist, which suggest that there may be evidence that there is something beyond the boundaires of our universe. Again, thin ice - very thin:-)
It is fine to speculate, but if you want coherent scientific models of the universe, you need to either assume the 13.7 billion light-year horizon or else show by observation or by theory that the horizon does not exist.
This horizon is a consequence of the speed of light and the age of the universe - light from further away simply hasn't reached us yet. This doesn't mean that there isn't more of the same out there. The real question here is whether there is a finite amount of space - ie whether there is a maximum to the set of all distances between pairs of points in the universe. we just don't know; also, what definition of distance are we talking about? The Euclidean distance between two points in the 3D part we call space, as measured from an Euclidean space in which out universe is embedded? Or the lengths of 4-vectors? Or...?
It's not just a difficult question to answer, it is actually quite hard to ask as well.
Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!
Did anybody say it will be available for foreigners at all?
Apart from that, why would a Chinese business be more or less likely than, say, an American business to look into your data? Or do as you suggest: blackmail you? If they make this available to people outside China, it will be because they want to make business, and you can't run a business that way.
And why would they want to look at anybody's data? I mean, would anybody seriously consider putting highly sensitive business secrets out in a cloud?
Being paranoid is all very well, but try to take yourself serious.
As an educator you have a special duty to teach established knowledge and valuable skills; I find it highly dubious that a teacher's personal opinions, political or religious, fall in to that category.
And, while it is arguably true that you should teach the children a healthy scepticism and critical thinking, I suspect this principle is only applied to the so-called "controversial" sciences, not to the Biblical myths or the right-wing agenda of that sort of teacher. If this was really about critical thinking, then they should teach the children why the Christian mythologies are implausible.
Slashdot Mirror
... but I wonder if people will adjust to it eventually?
I doubt it. I think it is a misunderstanding to think that what people want is total immersion in a story - personally, I prefer books to movies, exactly because they seem less real; a book allows you to concentrate your attention at the level that suits you, and you can read it at your own pace. Watching a movie is, in a sense, more stressful, and deeper immersion will only make it worse.
Compare this to pictures: a photo can be brilliant, rich in beautiful detail and stunning colour, but somehow the cruder, less realistic paintings of Monet or Picasso appeal more to people in general. I think this is the same thing: a photo ties to in, paintings give you the freedom to use you own imagination.
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank. " - Barack Obama, October 27, 2007
I am confident that I don't have to explain to you that this sort of thing is what every politician says to get elected; you have to keep the message simple, direct and appealing, especially in a political climate like the American. So, did he lie? Of course he did; personally, I don't blame him for it - I knew, as everybody did, that this was not realistic, and I like him for more substantial qualities than which good-sounding promises he made during the election campaign. And I think that one can argue that he is true to the spirit of the promise; GWB would have been all over Libya long ago, pretending to be "The Leader of the Free World" and making an oaf of himself.
I think America and the rest of the world should count themselves lucky that Obama is such a pragmatic realist.
Look, this is not about whether we have an exact analogy between water use and internet use; otherwise we would be back in the "tubes" scenario, right? I'm just saying, it is hard to argue against paying in proportion to how you use, be it bandwidth or not.
It isn't all that difficult to find a reasonable model - here, meaning one that most people would find agreable, rather than "the most objectively fair" (whatever that means). Assume there is something like a price per minute on the total bandwidth on the internet, leaving out local variations etc since this is only a sketch anyway. So, you pay for the percentage of the bandwidth you use per minute, measured by counting the number of packets with your name on per minute as a percentage of the total capacity. This is not even mildly difficult; it is trivial.
This is like all the "no artificial ..." nonsense you see on food labels, which is designed to fool you into thinking this actually "natural" or even "good quality".
If you read the label carefully, you will see that "No artificial colour" means they have used things like carrot- or beetroot juice (or annatto extract); it never means that your strawberry jam is made entirely from strawberries.
And of course, bottles "made from plant materials" only means they have found an economically viable way to make poly-whatever from plant-based organics rather than petrochemical ones. In a word: Bogus.
"Ethics" means different things to different people; what is ethical to us in the FOSS end of the world may not be entirely the same as what is ethical to a business. Businesses are predators at best (or parasites at worst), so perhaps behaving like a predator doesn't count as un-ethical; but to be fair, Microsoft (and Bill Gates) have put a good deal of effort into being seen as ethical. One can of course with some right be sceptical about the depth of their sentiment, but there is no doubt about the effort, and apparently that has paid off.
I think we are talking about "business ethics", not necessarily what normal people perceive as ethics. Stuff like honouring business agreements (or not getting caught breaking them).
Gullible? Perhaps that is what you would call it; personally I think it is about being friends - friends don't ask for guarantees cast in iron, they trust each other. We in Europe have tended to see America as friends at least sine WWII.
"Gullible" implies that we should have known better; that America is not a friend, but at best a predator with a false smile, and at worst an enemy. Is that really the case?
I can see where they are coming from, in a sense: you should pay for how much you use, which is hard to argue against. After all, that's how we pay for other resources we use - I don't use the internet for watching movies or other high-bandwith things, so why should I pay more to support those that do?
However, what they propose is almost exactly the opposite of paying for what you use; it's like being billed for water by measuring the size of your garden or the number of taps in the home. And just as for water, it is perfectly easy to measure the actual consumption; if they don't know how, I am sure there is a large proportion of /. readers who can help them figure it out.
I am utterly shocked that a facility with a large concentration of people exposed to deadline pressures might be found to contain an alertness-enhancing recreational alkaloid stronger than caffeine...
The problem with cocaine is that it can have some rather devastating effects of your body - which isn't a good idea when you are out there, where not only you, but others depend with their lives on you.
On the other hand, isn't it becoming more and more clear that using recreational drugs is something people in general want to do? IMO, it would be a lot better if those in power recognised this and decided to allow the development and marketing of a set of drugs that offer what peolpe want with the lowest possible risk - and with clear, well thought-out guidelines about how to use them. It might even be possible to develop drugs that you could "switch off" quickly if you got into a situation where this was necessary.
That's silly. They're trying to build a supercomputer out of MIPS chips. That'll never work...
Silly? Perhaps, for a given value of "silly". But "never work"? Of course it can work - it isn't even going to be hard, all the technology and code already exists.
Another neat recent addition was the introduction of Recipe View, which adds depth to food preparation searches.
I wonder what it would make of:
Bukkake udon: Cold udon served with various toppings liberally sprinkled on top
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udon#Cold
Wow, that is so deep! It blows my mind, it really does. I mean, wow...
Genuine question, physics isn't my forté.
A genuine answer, then: basic research has proven its worth many times in the past. Most if not all mathematics that is now fundamentally important originates from what was once thought of as idle speculation - interesting, but basically useless. Science was once one of the arts on par with painting and music; there is a story (about Platon, I believe): A young man once asked him, "What is the use (of maths)?" and Platon turned to one of his servants, saying "Give that man an abacus and send him away".
And so on - the point is that people who don't understand sicience often want science to concentrate only on what is useful, not realising that we don't actually know what will be useful until we know more. All great discoveries are based on first observing without the bias of having a purpose, then speculating about what the observations mean; it is only when you have some sort of meaningful hypothesis that you can begin to make use of your observations.
In many ways, the worst scenario will be if we confirm the theories, because then we lose one of the big unknowns - the theory will be complete, and we will have less opportunity to make completely new discoveries.
While nobody's proven that the current extraordinary warming trend is man-made, scientists have been very successful in ruling out the other causes you mention (even in combination). The current warming is not caused by volcanism, changes in solar radiation levels, etc. Which means that it's either (a) man-made (a theory for which there is good evidence) or (b) it's due to some completely different force that we don't know about (aliens, the earth's core going out of alignment, mutating neutrinos, ok, I kid).
It has been proven for all practical purposes - it has been proven with far more certainty than employed in other places in society; and we will never be able to prove this well enough to shut up those that just don't want to be convinced. It's proven - full stop. It's been time to move on for a long, long time.
Possibly - there are some theories which suggest that the solar wind might have blown our atmosphere away were it not for the magnetic field, Mars' thin atmosphere is supposed to be an example of this because its magnetic field is weaker than Earth's.
What makes linux a bad match for the German Foreign Office? Or what are they doing wrong?
Switching from something everybody knows and some even like will always be difficult. At the very least a lot of user education has to happen before the switch to address the pitfalls. It would probably also be wise to try to influence people's attitudes before the event, otherwise you'll find that there is a large group of malcontents that will try to sabotage the whole thing.
I have seen this type of problems many times and not just when it comes to switching technology; you have to win people's hearts and mind if you want to succeed.
The controversial if monotone message of the "Love Crusade" seems to be to blame everything that is wrong in the world on homosexuality
When a guy is so eager to demonstrate to the world that he is not at all gay, whatever people say, then perhaps he has some personal issues he should work with; such as deciding to come out of the cupboard.
The solution when your chosen religion conflicts with your lifestyle and biology is not to try and reinterpret and redefine that religion's beliefs to align with yours, it's to stop believing in that religion and choose another (or none at all).
Wrong. The solution is to realise that religions - and gods - are created by humans, not the other way round, and that they have to evolve with society to remain relevant. Personally, I don;t feel the need for religion, but I can't condemn those that do.
...the world spins out of control
The world has been out of control since the beginning of the industrial revolution, so it's a bit late for that. "Out of control" is what laissez-faire capitalism is all about - that's what people like Rupert Murdoch mean when they talk about "freedom": complete lack of control and restraint.
Seriously, can anyone honestly tell me that this guy is somehow superior to, for example, MediaWiki?
Probably not - I don't think your mind is open enough to receive such a statement, so I won't even try.
There's a lot of unclear and contentious issues at work here, I think; and unfortunately I don't know enough to gve an informed opinion on it all, but ...
Was space created by the Big Bang, or did the Big Bang happen inside of space that already existed?
Observe something that is more distant in space-time than the big bang, and settle the matter!
"Space" is only a convenient mathematical model of reality - mathematically a space is loosely speaking a set with some topological structure. In all our current models "space" is assumed to be a pseudo-Riemannian manifold - more or less - and as far as I know, any such thing can be embedded in an Euclidean space of higher dimension; don't ask me about details, I am on thin ice here.
So, I think in a sense the answer depends on which viewpoint is convenient. I recently read some articles about this, in Scientific American or possibly New Scientist, which suggest that there may be evidence that there is something beyond the boundaires of our universe. Again, thin ice - very thin :-)
It is fine to speculate, but if you want coherent scientific models of the universe, you need to either assume the 13.7 billion light-year horizon or else show by observation or by theory that the horizon does not exist.
This horizon is a consequence of the speed of light and the age of the universe - light from further away simply hasn't reached us yet. This doesn't mean that there isn't more of the same out there. The real question here is whether there is a finite amount of space - ie whether there is a maximum to the set of all distances between pairs of points in the universe. we just don't know; also, what definition of distance are we talking about? The Euclidean distance between two points in the 3D part we call space, as measured from an Euclidean space in which out universe is embedded? Or the lengths of 4-vectors? Or ...?
It's not just a difficult question to answer, it is actually quite hard to ask as well.
Oh, come now, why can't engineers have great erections too?
Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!
Did anybody say it will be available for foreigners at all?
Apart from that, why would a Chinese business be more or less likely than, say, an American business to look into your data? Or do as you suggest: blackmail you? If they make this available to people outside China, it will be because they want to make business, and you can't run a business that way.
And why would they want to look at anybody's data? I mean, would anybody seriously consider putting highly sensitive business secrets out in a cloud?
Being paranoid is all very well, but try to take yourself serious.
Ah - I see. I understand, don't worry.
As an educator you have a special duty to teach established knowledge and valuable skills; I find it highly dubious that a teacher's personal opinions, political or religious, fall in to that category.
And, while it is arguably true that you should teach the children a healthy scepticism and critical thinking, I suspect this principle is only applied to the so-called "controversial" sciences, not to the Biblical myths or the right-wing agenda of that sort of teacher. If this was really about critical thinking, then they should teach the children why the Christian mythologies are implausible.