Maybe they were able to access your router because the password was still password1 ?
Yeah, now try that one out in court, mate. "But 'e left his front door open, yeronner, that's practically an invitation for anybody to go in and steal somefink".
As I am sure all the advocates of privacy will point out, the basic assumption is that you are not allowed to enter a person's private space without permission; that is the meaning of "privacy", as far as I am aware. All passwords can be cracked - the fact that it was easy is only a matter of degrees - it is still "trespassing" or "breaking and entering" or whatever. This is one of a host of "binary words" - you steal or don't steal, you kill or not; you can't "kill somebody a little bit", and you can't break in to somebody's property "just a little". It should be easy to understand.
It is unusual to meet a real coder in this day and age:-) (Note for the younger generation of programmers: before you get all emotional about this, please note the ":-)" symbol - this is called a "smiley", and it indicates that the previous statement should be received in a light-hearted spirit)
As for what languages to learn and how to go about it, I'd say C and C++ are the ones to go for. C is what Pascal and assembler should have been in a more beautiful world; if you don't already know the language, I would say you will find it easy, knowing assembler. There is nothing in C that you can't think your way out of logically, knowing the basics of the language; and the majority of modern laguages are built more or less over the C paradigm, so they will be easy to master once you know C.
C++ in many ways the encapsulates the spirit of most modern object oriented languages; this is just my view - I know it is a subject with many emotions attached, and I will probably attract a number of corrective comments. None-the-less, if you master C++, all the other oo-languages will present no difficulty, and although C++ is several orders of magnitude more complex than C, it possesses the same beauty of logical completeness as C. I have often thought something like "... logically I should be able to do so and so, but it seems rather too bold..."; but it always turns out to hold water.
Hmm, just an idea - maybe we shouldn't try to get rid of this? If we want to establish a larger presence in orbit than the existing space station, wouldn't it be worth collecting this junk and reusing it, since it is already up there? (sorry, just idling)
And despite trying to hold my tongue on opinion and just refer the reader the NOAA, that post is already moderated as Troll. Slashdot has gotten to the point where you can't even refer to the people that devote their lives to the study of climatology across the world without being called a Troll. And the real awesome thing is that I see people who haven't even read the report in question being moderated up up up up. People who have never studied climatology are deriving their own reason to disbelieve what's in this report. If it's not one thing, it's another.
Ah - I thought I was the only one who'd had this experience. Yes, it does seem that if you try to criticise the braindead nonsense that is spewed out on a regular basis under certain subjects, you are modded down. So far it seems to be when the subject has to do with "Climate Change", "Why We Should All Hate Muslims" and "The Evil Communists".
Let me propose a conspiracy theory - and I have to apologise, it isn't even a spectacularly, outrageously stupid one, as far as I can see. But, this is what I think may be going on: There are something in excess of 500,000 Slashdotters; from my own experience, you are given mod points rather often - I seem to have new ones every week. Imagine that you get together in a group of equally minded - say, people who feel strongly about denying climate change. it should be relatively easy to find perhaps 1000 in a group as big as those reading Slashdot. How many mod points is a group of 1000 people likely to have on average every day? 50? 500? ou could do a lot in terms of coordinated modding down comments you don't like with that many mod points.
Perhaps it isn't likely that it is going on - but on the other hand, a lot of things far crazier than this are going on, so why not?
China's growth has only started when and to the extent to it opened it's economy to capitalism
Not quite - China has not "opened to Capitalism", they have merely allowed a free(-r) market to develop under Communism. Whether you believe it or not, China's economy is still tightly controlled by the central government - which is precisely why they haven't succumbed to the woes that hit Russia, where a few got obscenely rich and most of the rest fell on hard times - because Yeltsin, in his drunken stupor, just let go. Happily for the Chinese, their government have chosen a far more restrained and disciplined route, and their success is obvious.
Btw, sure you can accomplish a specific goal in the short term if you turn a nation of 100 million into 100 million slave laborers dedicated to that goal, and sacrifice a few million lives in the process, but that strategy ain't gonna work for long. Can't believe there are still Stalin apologists around today.
Let's not start this stupid mudslinging again; you know perfectly well that it has no truth in it. An just for your information: There is still a significant number of people in former USSR that see Stalin and Lenin as great heroes, and who feel that what they did was necessary for the greater good. I can't say that I agree, but I can understand it - Russia before Communism was a backwater with huge inequalities; Stalin et al introduced universal education and social security, at in least in the same sense that he persecuted opponents and sent them to Siberia.
And so on. You know, I don't have a problem with people criticising China and/or Russia - there are many real and serious problems, and there are many on different levels of government that are trying to block progress; but I really can't abide this sort of uninformed black-painting. Not only is it unfair and unreasonable on so many levels, but it also puts your own smug idiocy on display, and it quite frankly makes me cringe.
Here's a couple of definitions: Ignorant - that's when you don't know. Stupid - that's when you go out of your way to avoid learning.
How about going public? For better effect, find a number - the more the better - of people in the same situation as you, get together, and publish the names of the perpetrators LOUDLY. No one likes to be called a thief in public, especially if it is true.
Wikileaks is doing great work for the world. It sickens me that the country that is supposedly so open and about democracy abuses rest of the world like this and tries to hide it
While it is true that Wikileaks do some good by exposing dirty secrets, I don't think they act responsibly when they, as in this case, publish the names of Afghani civilians who in some sense or other help us against people like the Taliban. Whether they have committed a treasonable offence I can't say, but they have certainly betrayed those Afghanis that thought we were their friends and put their lives at risk to help us.
Trying to sweep in under the carpet with words like "freedom" and "truth" just makes their recklessness all the more shameful. I would have expected responsible persons to at least consider these things before they blurt things out.
On the other hand, I think it is a fairly reasonable guess that a planet the size of Earth is going to be more or less Earth-like. I haven't done the calculations, but I think a gas-planet has to be heavier to stay together, so it would have to be rock or ice. To my mind, a blob of water in the habitable zone of a star would count as Earth-like enough for most purposes.
I think it takes a certain mind-set to see pornography as anything but a non-issue, these days. The fact that references to the subject seem to be regarded as a mark of sophistication here on slashdot probably tells a lot about the prevalent state of mind of people here; you guys should try, once, to step back a bit and look at the thing critically: as literature, movie or pictorial arts go, this is pretty poor stuff, to say the least - and as for the sexual content, it is like watching Ken and Barbie squeeking through the mechanical motions.
Prudishness is a universal feature of most societies, but I have found that the less prudish the culture, the less interesting is pornography to people. And AFAIK, Christianity is the only religion in the world that so specifically seems to single sex out - or indeed any form of natural joy - as "sinful", so it is hardly surprising that people in the west are up on their marks whenever there is something about pornography. On the other hand, it is my impression that the main thing people have against porn in China is that is so damned braindead, and you must be something of an idiot to spend money and time on it.
As another illustration of just how narrow minded we are in the west when it comes to sexual matters and the depiction thereof, have a look at certain elements of Indian, religious architecture. They have temples covered in beautifully crafted, if somewhat explicit frieses.
Cheap energy is mandatory for western society to function. Well, cheap energy and massive debt accumulation.
Well, you have just summed up why western society must come to an end, then. I am not quite so pessimistic; though. I believe we can live well - better, in fact - if our lifestyles were far more modest and circumspect. The idea that the economy can and must grow indefinitely, is simply meaningless - and it is actually exactly equivalent to the idea of massive debt accumulation. Natural resources are the planet's "savings", and when we simply spend them like we do, we are simply borrowing without any hope of repaying our debt. It has to end, obviously.
But I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that you haven't actually considered the amount of cheap energy that it took for you be able to post on slashdot about how cheap energy is a problem. You know there's a problem intellectually, but you don't even take the single step of using less of it by not wasting it on idle internet forums.
Well, you'd better pay up, then, 'cause I have.
This is the classical problem that has faced everybody with some sort of social conscience - you have to work within the given framework; if I want to get a message across about not wasting energy like this, I have to "waste energy" in the process, if I want to have any chance getting heard. As John Lennon once said, I believe, when he was asked why he didn't give all his money to those in need, since he was so much against rich people and capitalism: "What would that help?" - the problem of poverty wouldn't go away just because he chose to be poor, and without money you can't even do anything to work against it - because who wants to listen a beggar?
But it is a false dichotomy when you say that we have to either live in complete misery or waste resources without thinking. Just look around in an average supermartket - the fruit and vegetables have probably been driven around in lorries from one end of the country to the other and back, more or less, things have been wrapped in unncesary plastic trays and covers that will go directly in a landfill, and some 90% of the stuff on sale is luxury items you don't have any need for, and which clog up your veins and rot your brain.
The simple truth is that we don't need the huge overproduction of food etc that is going on; this represents a staggering amount of wasted energy and other resources. I am of course not suggesting that we should cut back till we live in permanent austerity, but it illustrates just how much room there is for improvement; we could go a long way in terms of saving resources before we would even notice.
The court of public opinion has decided that oil = bad
Which may not be such a bad thing, in a sense. The world really, seriously needs to get off its oil-addiction, and I don't think people will be willing to give up the convenience of cheap energy unless it somehow becomes a massively uncool things to use oil in the public imagination.
Yes, I am fully aware that this is not "fair" - since when has that mattered? Fairness has never been the watch word in the world of business before, so why should it be now?
Though on a more serious note, this is a little bit worrying. OK, ICANN is allowing Chinese domain names, this is no huge problem to me, since I can read and write Chinese anyway. But the Chinese will be pissed off when Japanese start using Kana and they are no longer able to enter the correct domain names to look up porn. I think this just screws the world all over in the long run, at least EVERYONE knows ascii.
Don't you think that the intended target audience of domains with mational character names is likely to be just those that are able to read and write the language concerned? I can't see it screws anybody - no one forces you to make your domain name in any particular language.
When explaining science to the public my aim is not so much to "dumb it down" as to not use technical jargon and to avoid worrying about unnecessary details.
Hmm, sort of - but I think what we as scientists often forget is that the public are not stupid, only ignorant. Very often they want to know "Why" about a lot of things we take granted. As an example, I read one of Roger Penrose's books about popular science recently - and although he really tries to explain things in layman's terms, there are just enormous, gaping holes where you are left without any real feeling for what the essential "intuition" of the matter is. It is of course very difficult, and one can only praise the man for making the attempt, but it is a serious problem that has been neglected throughout the history of modern science, and it may well be one of the main reasons why science studies are losing ground in the West.
It doesn't just hurt the general public either; when I was at university, I had, for example, a course in quantum mechanics and a course in algebra, after which I had to take a crash course concerning the QM of chemistry; I didn't understand a word of it. Apparently "characters of linear representations" of certain groups were important, but why? I could go through the motions of calucalting molecular orbitals, but to this day I have no idea why it makes any sense; as a result, I am now an appallingly bad chemist - who knows, I might have gone on to solve the mystery of life's beginning on Earth if I understood the subject.
I think subjects are too often presented as something mysterious; this may in part be because certain prominent quantum mechanists have traditionally tried to depect themselves as the priesthood of a new, "deep, very deep" understanding of reality instead of trying impart make some everyday sense on the subject. Like, instead of going on about "Oooh, it is Heisenberg, and nothing exists below the Heisenberg Limit...", why not try something like "Well, we don't know what reality is like at so small a scale, because we can't make measurements that fine - and that is because we can only measure things by bouncing waves off them - shorter waves gives us better resolution, but it also involves more energy, which disturbs the thing we look at more,...." and so on. It's not actually all that difficult to understand, when you put it that way, but it is admittedly less mysteriuos and grand.
After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac
Ah, yes, there we have the whole mistake - what you mean, obviously is:
After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed himself to me in latex, and I sobered up instantly...
Jokes aside, though, you are right. The arguments are pretty much along the same lines as the arguments why some prefer vi or C: you want to spend your time on the core job rather than trying to figure out what the fancy bits actually mean and how to use them; most jobs don't require advanced editing, syntax high-lighting or garbage collection, just common sense and sufficient understanding of the task at hand.
From my own experience with Word (and, for that matter, Openoffice) I know that in order to use the tool efficiently and to get a consistent result, you have to master a large number of not really very intuitive techniques, such as templates and styles. It looks prettyish on the screen, but all the time I see less skilled users getting lost in formatting problems they can't get out of. And sometimes you just can't seem to find where the hell the bloody formatting, that causes you a headache, should be found - at least in TeX and other markup languages you can see the markups directly.
And finally, there is the issue of document size: With TeX, you can produce documents with 1000s of pages, which I did in the past at a time when Word would die from exhaustion around 300+ pages. You can see the logic in this - TeX basically compiles a simple ASCII file, holding very little in memory at any time, but Word et al have to keep much more of the document and its formatting in RAM, which is riskier.
This is very interesting; I'd like to know more details about it. However:
This, however, is actually pretty much sufficient for the whole theory to be CPT invariant...
It is worth noting, though, that CPT invariance is more fundamental to the standard model than to SR, where it is simply an interesting aside. My point in my original post was that this symmetry breakdown does not so much seem to be a problem for SR; or perhaps, the reason why we can't lay the blame squarely on SR is, that we can directly observe the invariance of c (which implies the Lorenz transformation), but the interpretation of observations in QM is much less direct, and hence more open to potential pitfalls. Thus it seems more reasonable to look for flaws in that theory.
Indeed, how can they morally justify taking away the wood chips, citrus peel, and straw puree from the poor?
While it is certainly better, in some ways, to produce bio-fuel from the things we don't actually eat, it is not the same as "now we have solved the problem" - there is still a lot to be said against this.
Just for one thing, it does not solve the fundamental problem of consumerism, the idea that "it is everybody's right, nay, duty, to own several cars and to generally waste as many resources as possible". No amount of recycling will ever be able to neutralise what this lifestyle does to our environment, so we still have the same problem.
The basic idea, that our economy must grow for all future, is a very dangerous one; it will on one hand make our population grow, and it will on the other hand accelerate the depletion of our resources. IOW, it is the direct way to disaster; we all know that in our hearts, and fantasising about how fusion or the next big discovery will solve all problems is only fantasy.
I am all for optimism about the future, but it has to make sense; I am optimistic enough to believe that we can solve these problems, perhaps even without any major disaster to force us, but I refuse to be a blind idiot dancing on the edge of the abyss.
Re:intelligence doesn't matter, communication does
on
Empathy Is For the Birds
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What you express so boldly (and rather floridly as well) is perhaps what you learn from the more popular part of the scientific press; it is, however, not entirely correct.
what elevates humankind over other animals is not grey matter, it's our vocal dexterity
No, on two counts: Humans are not "elevated" over other animals, or "more highly evolved" or anything like that; and there is no single capability that sets us apart. The idea that we are somehow "the crown of creation" is simply a superstition from the past - we are animals, simply, and what sets us apart is that we have a set of traits that favour abstract intelligence, tool use and verbal communication. It is not that our voices are particularly flexible - most birds are able to generate a far wider range of sounds than humans (but our ears are not able follow them); in many ways, the difference is more a matter of "degrees" or "dimensions", since we don't have any trait that is unique.
thoughts don't matter. the ability to COMMUNICATE thoughts matters. that's what puts humanity in a genuine level orders of magnitude over other creatures on this planet
This is a rather naive assumption - and don't most TV shows prove on a daily basis, that communication is not what matters, since it is perfectly possible to communicate excessively without ever expressing a single, worthwhile thought?
Apart from that - do we know for certain that other animals don't communicate? Of course not - all living organisms communicate (even bacteria, by producing and reacting to chemical clues), and many communicate a good deal more than most would imagine. It is perfectly possible that some communicate thoughts of comparable complexity to ours, but that just haven't learnt their language.
As for writing, yeah, that was of major importance, since it allowed us to store verbal communications in a more durable and reliable form. We have yet to discover another animal that employs writing, although one can speculate that when animals leave marks in the landscape - eg to mark their territory or or the best route to food - this could be what later lead to painting pictures in a cave and evetually writing.
eventually, the memes will shed these silly biological shells entirely
Really? I suspect not; there is a very close connection between what you think of as "me" and the physical body. There has been many psychological experiments that show this - one of the more interesting IMO was one where they used VR to give people another body; eg. a man got the body of a young girl - when he lifted his arm, it would be the arm of a girl etc. It had a surprisingly strong effect on people's identity. Even if it became possible to record a human personality and imprint it on some other autonomous entity, it I don't think it would be the same person any more.
So, the question is not "regulation?" but "how much regulation?".
I can't see that porn is a problem as such; child pornography and bestiality are crimes, not because they involve artificial and mechanical displays of sexual acts, but because they involve hurting the defenceless.
I can see more point in regulating hate speech, because it something that very easily gets very close to inciting violence and discrimination against minorities, and that is something that will in the end, hurt everybody. The argument, that "nobody is going to listen to those nut-jobs anyway" just doesn't hold water - history has shown us over and over that hate speech is too often very successful at creating violence and starting wars, especially when times are hard.
However, regulation isn't just about making things illegal, it is also about creating the legal basis for whatever intervention is deemed sensible, which is, alas, something authorities far too often don't realise. Making a law that seeks to punish you for saying the wrong thing is at best silly; making a law that requires schools to teach openness and tolerance is probably more likely to work. Well, providing that teachers know what that means, of course.
It seems to me that there is a sort of - dare one say conspiracy? No, lets call it a collusion - it seems to me that there has been certain elements in the SW industry that have silently propagated the idea that "innovation" is really the same as "invention", which is actually nonsense, as far as I can see.
Invention, that's when somebody takes a carbon fibre, sends a current through it and gets the idea for the light-bulb. Innovation, by comparison, is when somebody takes the same light-bulb, paints it pink, and calls it "The Romantic Ambience Lamp"; not something I feel merits a patent.
As it turns out, back then Sega uncovered serious health risks involved with children consuming 3D and quickly buried the reports,
This seems to me to highlight exactly why private and privately funded research are perhaps not such a good idea; we can only speculate how much other valuable knowledge has been buried over the years because it didn't serve to enhance the profit margin of some company. This not merely another stab in the tired debate over whether "private sector" is better than "public sector" - it is about the free exchange of research, something that is crucially important to science.
Another thing this made me think of is something I saw in China; it may have been a holographic movie - it certainly looked that way. It was in a museum exhibition, contained in a big glass-box and in full daylight as far as I recall. It showed a fairly short (10 min) piece about the Chinese resistance against the Japanese, and the interesting thing was that you could walk around it and watch it from behind. That is what I would like to see - these stereoscopic performances are never entirely convincing.
This article confuses things a bit, I think, in saying that this represents a problem for SR (or even GR).
SR say that the speed of light is the same in all frames of reference; that, in fact, is all it says, when you get right down to it. The principles of relativity, homogeneity and isotrpoy are assumed in both classical mechamics and QM as well, mostly, I suspect, because we can't really see why it should not be the case.
Where the problem is, really, is in QM - things like anti-particles are QM constructs, and so is the assumption that they weigh the same as their counterparts; the apparent observation, that anti-neutrinos have another mass than the neutrino, is very surprising for quantum mechanics and does not fit very well into the currently accepted theory.
Perhaps it is not so strange that QM may begin to show some cracks; SR and GR make very few assumptions about anything compared to QM. It is very hard indeed to see where one could sensibly make some changes, whereas is QM, there are so many little nooks and crannies where something murky could be hiding.
Because, presumably, you'd not opt in? As far as I know, if any company want to send you electronic adverts, you have to have opted in first - possibly when you signed the contract - or you must certainly be presented with the chance to opt out. At least that is how it works in UK, where this sort of scheme will no doubt be introduced too.
There is a stark difference between a parent setting such rules for their children and a state doing it on their behalf
There is a difference, but I can't see that it is "stark"; I take it you are American, right? Americans tend to see government, and especially American government, as The Enemy - in many, if not most other countries, we don't. Chinese culture has always regarded the ruler (and by extension his government) as the father of the whole people - the son of Heaven and all that - and it not alien to the Chinese to expect the government to take parental responsibility. You may not feel comfortable with it, but then of course, you don't live there anyway. My guess is that Chinese themselves want it that way.
On that same note, I think a lot of Americans would like to see their ruling classes take much more responsibility and be much more caring; there is of course a certain degree of mutuality here - if you expect somebody to be selfish, useless parasites, chances are that they will turn out to be exactly that.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they were able to access your router because the password was still password1 ?
Yeah, now try that one out in court, mate. "But 'e left his front door open, yeronner, that's practically an invitation for anybody to go in and steal somefink".
As I am sure all the advocates of privacy will point out, the basic assumption is that you are not allowed to enter a person's private space without permission; that is the meaning of "privacy", as far as I am aware. All passwords can be cracked - the fact that it was easy is only a matter of degrees - it is still "trespassing" or "breaking and entering" or whatever. This is one of a host of "binary words" - you steal or don't steal, you kill or not; you can't "kill somebody a little bit", and you can't break in to somebody's property "just a little". It should be easy to understand.
It is unusual to meet a real coder in this day and age :-) (Note for the younger generation of programmers: before you get all emotional about this, please note the ":-)" symbol - this is called a "smiley", and it indicates that the previous statement should be received in a light-hearted spirit)
As for what languages to learn and how to go about it, I'd say C and C++ are the ones to go for. C is what Pascal and assembler should have been in a more beautiful world; if you don't already know the language, I would say you will find it easy, knowing assembler. There is nothing in C that you can't think your way out of logically, knowing the basics of the language; and the majority of modern laguages are built more or less over the C paradigm, so they will be easy to master once you know C.
C++ in many ways the encapsulates the spirit of most modern object oriented languages; this is just my view - I know it is a subject with many emotions attached, and I will probably attract a number of corrective comments. None-the-less, if you master C++, all the other oo-languages will present no difficulty, and although C++ is several orders of magnitude more complex than C, it possesses the same beauty of logical completeness as C. I have often thought something like "... logically I should be able to do so and so, but it seems rather too bold ..."; but it always turns out to hold water.
Hmm, just an idea - maybe we shouldn't try to get rid of this? If we want to establish a larger presence in orbit than the existing space station, wouldn't it be worth collecting this junk and reusing it, since it is already up there? (sorry, just idling)
And despite trying to hold my tongue on opinion and just refer the reader the NOAA, that post is already moderated as Troll. Slashdot has gotten to the point where you can't even refer to the people that devote their lives to the study of climatology across the world without being called a Troll. And the real awesome thing is that I see people who haven't even read the report in question being moderated up up up up. People who have never studied climatology are deriving their own reason to disbelieve what's in this report. If it's not one thing, it's another.
Ah - I thought I was the only one who'd had this experience. Yes, it does seem that if you try to criticise the braindead nonsense that is spewed out on a regular basis under certain subjects, you are modded down. So far it seems to be when the subject has to do with "Climate Change", "Why We Should All Hate Muslims" and "The Evil Communists".
Let me propose a conspiracy theory - and I have to apologise, it isn't even a spectacularly, outrageously stupid one, as far as I can see. But, this is what I think may be going on: There are something in excess of 500,000 Slashdotters; from my own experience, you are given mod points rather often - I seem to have new ones every week. Imagine that you get together in a group of equally minded - say, people who feel strongly about denying climate change. it should be relatively easy to find perhaps 1000 in a group as big as those reading Slashdot. How many mod points is a group of 1000 people likely to have on average every day? 50? 500? ou could do a lot in terms of coordinated modding down comments you don't like with that many mod points.
Perhaps it isn't likely that it is going on - but on the other hand, a lot of things far crazier than this are going on, so why not?
China's growth has only started when and to the extent to it opened it's economy to capitalism
Not quite - China has not "opened to Capitalism", they have merely allowed a free(-r) market to develop under Communism. Whether you believe it or not, China's economy is still tightly controlled by the central government - which is precisely why they haven't succumbed to the woes that hit Russia, where a few got obscenely rich and most of the rest fell on hard times - because Yeltsin, in his drunken stupor, just let go. Happily for the Chinese, their government have chosen a far more restrained and disciplined route, and their success is obvious.
Btw, sure you can accomplish a specific goal in the short term if you turn a nation of 100 million into 100 million slave laborers dedicated to that goal, and sacrifice a few million lives in the process, but that strategy ain't gonna work for long. Can't believe there are still Stalin apologists around today.
Let's not start this stupid mudslinging again; you know perfectly well that it has no truth in it. An just for your information: There is still a significant number of people in former USSR that see Stalin and Lenin as great heroes, and who feel that what they did was necessary for the greater good. I can't say that I agree, but I can understand it - Russia before Communism was a backwater with huge inequalities; Stalin et al introduced universal education and social security, at in least in the same sense that he persecuted opponents and sent them to Siberia.
And so on. You know, I don't have a problem with people criticising China and/or Russia - there are many real and serious problems, and there are many on different levels of government that are trying to block progress; but I really can't abide this sort of uninformed black-painting. Not only is it unfair and unreasonable on so many levels, but it also puts your own smug idiocy on display, and it quite frankly makes me cringe.
Here's a couple of definitions: Ignorant - that's when you don't know. Stupid - that's when you go out of your way to avoid learning.
How about going public? For better effect, find a number - the more the better - of people in the same situation as you, get together, and publish the names of the perpetrators LOUDLY. No one likes to be called a thief in public, especially if it is true.
Wikileaks is doing great work for the world. It sickens me that the country that is supposedly so open and about democracy abuses rest of the world like this and tries to hide it
While it is true that Wikileaks do some good by exposing dirty secrets, I don't think they act responsibly when they, as in this case, publish the names of Afghani civilians who in some sense or other help us against people like the Taliban. Whether they have committed a treasonable offence I can't say, but they have certainly betrayed those Afghanis that thought we were their friends and put their lives at risk to help us.
Trying to sweep in under the carpet with words like "freedom" and "truth" just makes their recklessness all the more shameful. I would have expected responsible persons to at least consider these things before they blurt things out.
On the other hand, I think it is a fairly reasonable guess that a planet the size of Earth is going to be more or less Earth-like. I haven't done the calculations, but I think a gas-planet has to be heavier to stay together, so it would have to be rock or ice. To my mind, a blob of water in the habitable zone of a star would count as Earth-like enough for most purposes.
I think it takes a certain mind-set to see pornography as anything but a non-issue, these days. The fact that references to the subject seem to be regarded as a mark of sophistication here on slashdot probably tells a lot about the prevalent state of mind of people here; you guys should try, once, to step back a bit and look at the thing critically: as literature, movie or pictorial arts go, this is pretty poor stuff, to say the least - and as for the sexual content, it is like watching Ken and Barbie squeeking through the mechanical motions.
Prudishness is a universal feature of most societies, but I have found that the less prudish the culture, the less interesting is pornography to people. And AFAIK, Christianity is the only religion in the world that so specifically seems to single sex out - or indeed any form of natural joy - as "sinful", so it is hardly surprising that people in the west are up on their marks whenever there is something about pornography. On the other hand, it is my impression that the main thing people have against porn in China is that is so damned braindead, and you must be something of an idiot to spend money and time on it.
As another illustration of just how narrow minded we are in the west when it comes to sexual matters and the depiction thereof, have a look at certain elements of Indian, religious architecture. They have temples covered in beautifully crafted, if somewhat explicit frieses.
Cheap energy is mandatory for western society to function. Well, cheap energy and massive debt accumulation.
Well, you have just summed up why western society must come to an end, then. I am not quite so pessimistic; though. I believe we can live well - better, in fact - if our lifestyles were far more modest and circumspect. The idea that the economy can and must grow indefinitely, is simply meaningless - and it is actually exactly equivalent to the idea of massive debt accumulation. Natural resources are the planet's "savings", and when we simply spend them like we do, we are simply borrowing without any hope of repaying our debt. It has to end, obviously.
But I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that you haven't actually considered the amount of cheap energy that it took for you be able to post on slashdot about how cheap energy is a problem. You know there's a problem intellectually, but you don't even take the single step of using less of it by not wasting it on idle internet forums.
Well, you'd better pay up, then, 'cause I have.
This is the classical problem that has faced everybody with some sort of social conscience - you have to work within the given framework; if I want to get a message across about not wasting energy like this, I have to "waste energy" in the process, if I want to have any chance getting heard. As John Lennon once said, I believe, when he was asked why he didn't give all his money to those in need, since he was so much against rich people and capitalism: "What would that help?" - the problem of poverty wouldn't go away just because he chose to be poor, and without money you can't even do anything to work against it - because who wants to listen a beggar?
But it is a false dichotomy when you say that we have to either live in complete misery or waste resources without thinking. Just look around in an average supermartket - the fruit and vegetables have probably been driven around in lorries from one end of the country to the other and back, more or less, things have been wrapped in unncesary plastic trays and covers that will go directly in a landfill, and some 90% of the stuff on sale is luxury items you don't have any need for, and which clog up your veins and rot your brain.
The simple truth is that we don't need the huge overproduction of food etc that is going on; this represents a staggering amount of wasted energy and other resources. I am of course not suggesting that we should cut back till we live in permanent austerity, but it illustrates just how much room there is for improvement; we could go a long way in terms of saving resources before we would even notice.
The court of public opinion has decided that oil = bad
Which may not be such a bad thing, in a sense. The world really, seriously needs to get off its oil-addiction, and I don't think people will be willing to give up the convenience of cheap energy unless it somehow becomes a massively uncool things to use oil in the public imagination.
Yes, I am fully aware that this is not "fair" - since when has that mattered? Fairness has never been the watch word in the world of business before, so why should it be now?
Though on a more serious note, this is a little bit worrying. OK, ICANN is allowing Chinese domain names, this is no huge problem to me, since I can read and write Chinese anyway. But the Chinese will be pissed off when Japanese start using Kana and they are no longer able to enter the correct domain names to look up porn. I think this just screws the world all over in the long run, at least EVERYONE knows ascii.
Don't you think that the intended target audience of domains with mational character names is likely to be just those that are able to read and write the language concerned? I can't see it screws anybody - no one forces you to make your domain name in any particular language.
When explaining science to the public my aim is not so much to "dumb it down" as to not use technical jargon and to avoid worrying about unnecessary details.
Hmm, sort of - but I think what we as scientists often forget is that the public are not stupid, only ignorant. Very often they want to know "Why" about a lot of things we take granted. As an example, I read one of Roger Penrose's books about popular science recently - and although he really tries to explain things in layman's terms, there are just enormous, gaping holes where you are left without any real feeling for what the essential "intuition" of the matter is. It is of course very difficult, and one can only praise the man for making the attempt, but it is a serious problem that has been neglected throughout the history of modern science, and it may well be one of the main reasons why science studies are losing ground in the West.
It doesn't just hurt the general public either; when I was at university, I had, for example, a course in quantum mechanics and a course in algebra, after which I had to take a crash course concerning the QM of chemistry; I didn't understand a word of it. Apparently "characters of linear representations" of certain groups were important, but why? I could go through the motions of calucalting molecular orbitals, but to this day I have no idea why it makes any sense; as a result, I am now an appallingly bad chemist - who knows, I might have gone on to solve the mystery of life's beginning on Earth if I understood the subject.
I think subjects are too often presented as something mysterious; this may in part be because certain prominent quantum mechanists have traditionally tried to depect themselves as the priesthood of a new, "deep, very deep" understanding of reality instead of trying impart make some everyday sense on the subject. Like, instead of going on about "Oooh, it is Heisenberg, and nothing exists below the Heisenberg Limit...", why not try something like "Well, we don't know what reality is like at so small a scale, because we can't make measurements that fine - and that is because we can only measure things by bouncing waves off them - shorter waves gives us better resolution, but it also involves more energy, which disturbs the thing we look at more, ...." and so on. It's not actually all that difficult to understand, when you put it that way, but it is admittedly less mysteriuos and grand.
After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac
Ah, yes, there we have the whole mistake - what you mean, obviously is:
After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed himself to me in latex, and I sobered up instantly ...
Jokes aside, though, you are right. The arguments are pretty much along the same lines as the arguments why some prefer vi or C: you want to spend your time on the core job rather than trying to figure out what the fancy bits actually mean and how to use them; most jobs don't require advanced editing, syntax high-lighting or garbage collection, just common sense and sufficient understanding of the task at hand.
From my own experience with Word (and, for that matter, Openoffice) I know that in order to use the tool efficiently and to get a consistent result, you have to master a large number of not really very intuitive techniques, such as templates and styles. It looks prettyish on the screen, but all the time I see less skilled users getting lost in formatting problems they can't get out of. And sometimes you just can't seem to find where the hell the bloody formatting, that causes you a headache, should be found - at least in TeX and other markup languages you can see the markups directly.
And finally, there is the issue of document size: With TeX, you can produce documents with 1000s of pages, which I did in the past at a time when Word would die from exhaustion around 300+ pages. You can see the logic in this - TeX basically compiles a simple ASCII file, holding very little in memory at any time, but Word et al have to keep much more of the document and its formatting in RAM, which is riskier.
This is very interesting; I'd like to know more details about it. However:
This, however, is actually pretty much sufficient for the whole theory to be CPT invariant...
It is worth noting, though, that CPT invariance is more fundamental to the standard model than to SR, where it is simply an interesting aside. My point in my original post was that this symmetry breakdown does not so much seem to be a problem for SR; or perhaps, the reason why we can't lay the blame squarely on SR is, that we can directly observe the invariance of c (which implies the Lorenz transformation), but the interpretation of observations in QM is much less direct, and hence more open to potential pitfalls. Thus it seems more reasonable to look for flaws in that theory.
Indeed, how can they morally justify taking away the wood chips, citrus peel, and straw puree from the poor?
While it is certainly better, in some ways, to produce bio-fuel from the things we don't actually eat, it is not the same as "now we have solved the problem" - there is still a lot to be said against this.
Just for one thing, it does not solve the fundamental problem of consumerism, the idea that "it is everybody's right, nay, duty, to own several cars and to generally waste as many resources as possible". No amount of recycling will ever be able to neutralise what this lifestyle does to our environment, so we still have the same problem.
The basic idea, that our economy must grow for all future, is a very dangerous one; it will on one hand make our population grow, and it will on the other hand accelerate the depletion of our resources. IOW, it is the direct way to disaster; we all know that in our hearts, and fantasising about how fusion or the next big discovery will solve all problems is only fantasy.
I am all for optimism about the future, but it has to make sense; I am optimistic enough to believe that we can solve these problems, perhaps even without any major disaster to force us, but I refuse to be a blind idiot dancing on the edge of the abyss.
What you express so boldly (and rather floridly as well) is perhaps what you learn from the more popular part of the scientific press; it is, however, not entirely correct.
what elevates humankind over other animals is not grey matter, it's our vocal dexterity
No, on two counts: Humans are not "elevated" over other animals, or "more highly evolved" or anything like that; and there is no single capability that sets us apart. The idea that we are somehow "the crown of creation" is simply a superstition from the past - we are animals, simply, and what sets us apart is that we have a set of traits that favour abstract intelligence, tool use and verbal communication. It is not that our voices are particularly flexible - most birds are able to generate a far wider range of sounds than humans (but our ears are not able follow them); in many ways, the difference is more a matter of "degrees" or "dimensions", since we don't have any trait that is unique.
thoughts don't matter. the ability to COMMUNICATE thoughts matters. that's what puts humanity in a genuine level orders of magnitude over other creatures on this planet
This is a rather naive assumption - and don't most TV shows prove on a daily basis, that communication is not what matters, since it is perfectly possible to communicate excessively without ever expressing a single, worthwhile thought?
Apart from that - do we know for certain that other animals don't communicate? Of course not - all living organisms communicate (even bacteria, by producing and reacting to chemical clues), and many communicate a good deal more than most would imagine. It is perfectly possible that some communicate thoughts of comparable complexity to ours, but that just haven't learnt their language.
As for writing, yeah, that was of major importance, since it allowed us to store verbal communications in a more durable and reliable form. We have yet to discover another animal that employs writing, although one can speculate that when animals leave marks in the landscape - eg to mark their territory or or the best route to food - this could be what later lead to painting pictures in a cave and evetually writing.
eventually, the memes will shed these silly biological shells entirely
Really? I suspect not; there is a very close connection between what you think of as "me" and the physical body. There has been many psychological experiments that show this - one of the more interesting IMO was one where they used VR to give people another body; eg. a man got the body of a young girl - when he lifted his arm, it would be the arm of a girl etc. It had a surprisingly strong effect on people's identity. Even if it became possible to record a human personality and imprint it on some other autonomous entity, it I don't think it would be the same person any more.
That may well be the case :-) At this time of night they seems to melt together.
So, the question is not "regulation?" but "how much regulation?".
I can't see that porn is a problem as such; child pornography and bestiality are crimes, not because they involve artificial and mechanical displays of sexual acts, but because they involve hurting the defenceless.
I can see more point in regulating hate speech, because it something that very easily gets very close to inciting violence and discrimination against minorities, and that is something that will in the end, hurt everybody. The argument, that "nobody is going to listen to those nut-jobs anyway" just doesn't hold water - history has shown us over and over that hate speech is too often very successful at creating violence and starting wars, especially when times are hard.
However, regulation isn't just about making things illegal, it is also about creating the legal basis for whatever intervention is deemed sensible, which is, alas, something authorities far too often don't realise. Making a law that seeks to punish you for saying the wrong thing is at best silly; making a law that requires schools to teach openness and tolerance is probably more likely to work. Well, providing that teachers know what that means, of course.
It seems to me that there is a sort of - dare one say conspiracy? No, lets call it a collusion - it seems to me that there has been certain elements in the SW industry that have silently propagated the idea that "innovation" is really the same as "invention", which is actually nonsense, as far as I can see.
Invention, that's when somebody takes a carbon fibre, sends a current through it and gets the idea for the light-bulb. Innovation, by comparison, is when somebody takes the same light-bulb, paints it pink, and calls it "The Romantic Ambience Lamp"; not something I feel merits a patent.
Two vaguely on-topic thought:
As it turns out, back then Sega uncovered serious health risks involved with children consuming 3D and quickly buried the reports,
This seems to me to highlight exactly why private and privately funded research are perhaps not such a good idea; we can only speculate how much other valuable knowledge has been buried over the years because it didn't serve to enhance the profit margin of some company. This not merely another stab in the tired debate over whether "private sector" is better than "public sector" - it is about the free exchange of research, something that is crucially important to science.
Another thing this made me think of is something I saw in China; it may have been a holographic movie - it certainly looked that way. It was in a museum exhibition, contained in a big glass-box and in full daylight as far as I recall. It showed a fairly short (10 min) piece about the Chinese resistance against the Japanese, and the interesting thing was that you could walk around it and watch it from behind. That is what I would like to see - these stereoscopic performances are never entirely convincing.
This article confuses things a bit, I think, in saying that this represents a problem for SR (or even GR).
SR say that the speed of light is the same in all frames of reference; that, in fact, is all it says, when you get right down to it. The principles of relativity, homogeneity and isotrpoy are assumed in both classical mechamics and QM as well, mostly, I suspect, because we can't really see why it should not be the case.
Where the problem is, really, is in QM - things like anti-particles are QM constructs, and so is the assumption that they weigh the same as their counterparts; the apparent observation, that anti-neutrinos have another mass than the neutrino, is very surprising for quantum mechanics and does not fit very well into the currently accepted theory.
Perhaps it is not so strange that QM may begin to show some cracks; SR and GR make very few assumptions about anything compared to QM. It is very hard indeed to see where one could sensibly make some changes, whereas is QM, there are so many little nooks and crannies where something murky could be hiding.
Why not?
Because, presumably, you'd not opt in? As far as I know, if any company want to send you electronic adverts, you have to have opted in first - possibly when you signed the contract - or you must certainly be presented with the chance to opt out. At least that is how it works in UK, where this sort of scheme will no doubt be introduced too.
There is a stark difference between a parent setting such rules for their children and a state doing it on their behalf
There is a difference, but I can't see that it is "stark"; I take it you are American, right? Americans tend to see government, and especially American government, as The Enemy - in many, if not most other countries, we don't. Chinese culture has always regarded the ruler (and by extension his government) as the father of the whole people - the son of Heaven and all that - and it not alien to the Chinese to expect the government to take parental responsibility. You may not feel comfortable with it, but then of course, you don't live there anyway. My guess is that Chinese themselves want it that way.
On that same note, I think a lot of Americans would like to see their ruling classes take much more responsibility and be much more caring; there is of course a certain degree of mutuality here - if you expect somebody to be selfish, useless parasites, chances are that they will turn out to be exactly that.
...you can have an additional charge of 'lying' stuck on you.
Funny enough, I have always had the impression that the defendant in any criminal process had an outright or at least an assumed right to lie.