But none of that info relates to why the ERAST programme was terminated in 2003.
Obviously a single failure of a single prototype wouldn't be enough to cancel an entire programme that was intended to lead the way toward a new type of long-term sustainable aerial platforms. If that were the case then Apollo would have never come close to getting off the ground! We all know that governments are needed to fund this kind of enterprise because only they have the long time horizons and staying power to get the job done.
Furthermore, since there is obviously a huge amount of money to be made the free market would never let this technological opportunity languish, but would invest prudently in innovation and create "atmospheric satellites" that would be flying high above our cities today. Given the enormous creative potential of the free market seven years is more than enough time for this to have happened.
So it is fundamentally mysterious why the long-term prudent investment by governments and aggressive innovation by the free market hasn't already produced a technological revolution based on these ideas.
It's pretty sad that someone had to write a whole story surrounding the mystery behind this md5 hash sum, when it is plainly written in black and white on wiki, hence your link.
There's a whole school of modern journalism built around ignoring easily accessible answers to relatively trivial questions. If you've followed any of the recent economic debates you'll find that it's full of "but they never say anything about what they mean by XYZ" claims regarding their opposition, only to have the opposition respond with links to where they explain clearly what they mean by XYZ.
I used to think that the Web would make it harder for people to play this sort of stupid Straw Person type of argument, either postively--by imputing to your opponent an argument they are not making--or negatively--by ignoring explanations and justifications your opponent has clearly made. I thought the Web would improve human communication and engagement in argument. But what it has done is simply reveal the depths to which stupid people will dive to preserve their faith-based beliefs against any and all opposition.
I'm pretty sure that almost all the argument on the Web is one big game of "let's pretend we don't know anything because the world is more 'provocative' and 'exciting' that way."
It is increasingly clear that the average person lives their life entirely within the epistemological limits of Humpty Dumpty, to whom words meant what he wanted them to, and nothing else. In the present case, "mystery" apparently means "something that I can't be bothered to google."
BP was drilling in the Gulf in the quest for profit. It made the choices it made because it felt at the time that they had the best return on investment...
...given the protection the people who constitute BP get from the nanny state under the Companies Act and its descendents from personal liability for their actions.
This is the thing libertarians don't get: corporations only exist due to the special status they get by dint of government interference in the free market.
This is the same conclusion you'll come to with anybody who opposes GM crops
Yeah, it's just like arguing with anyone who is pro-GM crops, who insists despite all the evidence to the contrary that everyone who is anti-GM is that way solely because of the purported health effects, and not for any plausibly rational reasons like economic or ecological issues.
That's kind of like saying that consumers are underinformed because there are no autism warning labels on vaccines.
Except for the part where it isn't.
For an analogy that isn't simply wrong, try: "That's a bit like saying consumers are underinformed because there are no contains mercury compounds labels on vaccines." By all means tell people what stuff contains and allow them to make (ill) informed choices about it.
But don't tell me I don't have a right to know what is in the stuff I put in my body.
Corporations are a pure product of state intervention the the free market: they were created in their modern form by the various Companies Acts passed in the mid-1800's. They have demonstrated repeatedly that as a creation of state power they need to be regulated by state power, including requiring labelling of the stuff they sell.
People have many reasons for avoiding GM foods, some of them more plausible than others, and it is not for your or anyone else to decide for them what or why they want to put things (or not) in their body.
Personally, I avoid GM foods because of what I percieve to be both the economic and ecological effects of synthetic monocultures. We can debate whether that is rational. What is not up for debate is my right to know what I'm eating, and without labelling there is absoluely no way for me to ascertain that in practical contexts.
As much as I dislike having my cookie cutter home, there are other factors to consider.
But wait, everyone else replying is pointing out how every home has to be a unique and special little snowflake or the building inspector won't pass it based on the byzanine local regulations that have to vary 1000% from one county to the next!
So how can you have a "cookie cutter" home, and describe it in those terms in the certain knowledge that absolutely everyone here--at least in North America--will understand exactly what you mean?
Only models that show a good correlation are used to predict the future
Other than proving your ignorance of computational physics, this claim demonstrates very little. I can show you any number of unphysical, highly-parameterized models that can be made to correlate well with the past, but do very badly at predicting the future.
It is an unfortunate truth that climate models are unphysical and highly parameterized. This combination is very, very bad. An unphysical model with few parameters is not so bad, because it is unlikely to be able to fit real data and so is met with a proper degree of skepticism. A physical model with many parameters is not so bad because at least basic conservation laws will be respected.
So let me ask: in the model you are running is energy strictly conserved at all levels of the simulation? And are sea-surface and other boundary conditions plausibly physical? These are the two biggies I've found in the models I've examined, and neither of them bode well for the ability of the models to predict the future no matter how well they can be tuned to match the past.
It is the denial of this fact that distinguishes climate modellers from computational physicists. Computational physicists know--because we have explored a wide range of simple systems with unphysical models in the course of our education--that systems as simple as an orbiting spacecraft or swinging pendulum can be given the appearance of wildly impossible behaviour with apparently trivial unphysical "fixes" that accumulate over time.
For example, it was believed until about ten years ago that the solar system was chaotic, because all our models of its long term behaviour were unstable. It turns out that extremely subtle errors were creeping into our integrations to produce this behaviour. This is just one example of how even a physical numerical model of a relatively simple system can be badly misleading.
And anyone who understands computational physics knows this, and would not ever present correlation with the past as justification for the future accuracy of unphysical, highly parameterized models.
So what's the proper response to these brain-damaged, evil cowards?
Excellent question, to which I don't have any simple answer.
First and foremost: understand that change may not happen in your lifetime and that anything you do may not produce anything resembling immediate results. The important thing to remember is that the same is true of violence. The difference is that violence makes our monkey hind-brains feel like we're accomplishing something, even when we aren't.
That said: decide what you want to change. Be specific, and be concrete. Would you like a world where Americans didn't send their young men and women off to kill and die in foreign countries for no readily discernible reason? Pick a priority, and make it your thing. Learn the history. Become an expert on the facts related to the issue you care about.
Then write about it, argue it, promote it, make art about it. Get involved politically if art and argument aren't your things. The facts of non-violence vs violence are so stark that it's really easy to make fun of people promoting violence. If you're an American you can also have fun with the positions taken by your Founders, many of whom were extremely sceptical of the utility of violence despite having used it to wrest power from England. General Washington was no friend of the military, for example.
Those are just some thoughts off the top of my head. Another is: learn some economics. The economic arguments against violence are to my mind the most powerful, because they are coldly pragmatic: it is expensive and rarely successful. There's actually a serious question in economics called "the war puzzle" which is about why people ever go to war, as it is never eonomically rational to do so. It is therefore possible to demonstrate that the only people who are ever in favour of war are people addled by tribalism, or profiteers. It's fun to ask people who are in favour of war which camp they belong to.
Why make generalizations about the people who own this device?
I'm not making generalizations about people who own this device: I'm pointing out how a well-known and empirically validated psychological phenomenon has been used by Apple to market this device, and how well that works.
I find it amusing that although I've said that the iPad is a useful device the people replying to me are all acting like I've said it's not, almost as if people's perceptions of them and the device they (presumably but not provably) have bought is as important as the utility of the device to them, which was pretty much my point.
So your argument is that it's impossible for a device to be functional if it is also beautiful?
Nope. My argument has nothing to do with that at all, and no where do I say anything anyone could reasonably use to infer that is my argument.
I wonder why you think I wrote that people like owning them "not (just) because they're useful" if you think I am arguing that a thing can't be both functional and beautiful.
Sleek aesthetics and functionality are not mutually exclusive.
Of course they aren't. That's why I specifically indicated "what a TrueGeek might think of as functionality". Reading comprehension: not just for English majors any more!
Your deep psychological insights are pretty much in line with the rest of your grasp of my thoughts on how functional the iPad is. Please feel free to go on ignoring well-known empirical phenomena.
I might make a crack here about how the kind of people who buy Apple products are just the sort to think they're "special" and not at all motivated by the things that motivate everyone else, except that would be stupid, as I have no evidence that you're someone who has purchased an Apple product.
As the entity "Slashdot" I hereby decree that the whole idea of "Professional Artist" is forever banned.
Not banned: technologically obsolete.
This is the unfortunate truth: the equilibrium market price of a good whose incremental cost of production is zero, is zero. The tendency of market prices to converge on the incremental cost of production is pretty fundamental, both theoretically and empirically.
The "Professional Artist" as we have known them in the 20th century was the result of a transient technological era in which mass production of copies was cheap but creation of a single copy was expensive.
Attempting to replace technological reality with legal opposition has never been a good bet. Holding back the tide an all that.
This is not to say that I don't feel sympathy for artists, and I don't rip music myself because it's illegal. But I also don't buy any DRM content of any kind, ever, because it's stupid and annoying and certain to fail in the relatively short term (that is, any specific DRM tech will become obsolete, requiring me to repurchase the same work in a new format...)
Once upon a time guilds operated based on legal restrictions on certain types of economic activity. Various technological and social upheavals put an end to that, and that pretty much sucked for the people who make their livings the old fashioned way.
Before Wedgewood invented the factory potters could make a pretty good living. Before Ford people made a lot of money on horse-related stuff. Various legal barricades were put in place to stop the spread of new technology that was wiping out the livelihood of established producers.
None of them worked because it was an attempt to make pi = 3, more-or-less. Economic laws are as much laws as any others, and can only be distorted for a short time by dint of great effort.
So while there is a huge amount of moral inconsistency here, the reality is that economics, not morality, is in the driver's seat, and while the composer is certainly in the right legally and possibly morally, he's in the wrong technologically and economically, and in a tag-team match between Legal/Moral on one side and Tech/Econ on the other, I know which way I'd bet.
for anyone spotting mistakes: please feel free to reveal them.
There's nothing really to correct, just an additional comment on why this sort of study is interesting: we don't know what drove inflation, nor even exactly when it occured, nor, in point of fact, if it did occur.
Inflation is by far the most natural mechanism we know of that produces a universe as flat as our own. So on that basis we'd really like for there to have been one. An inflationary era occurs when the rate of expansion of the universe increases with time in the early going, probably due to a phase transition in the vacuum field of an elementary particle.
We know such phase transitions exist: electro-weak theory is based on the spontaneous breaking of a symmetry that is strictly observed at high energy, in much the same way that the rotational and translational symmetry of a liquid is broken by the process of crystalization as the temperature drops sufficiently for it to become a solid.
But we know that the electro-weak symmetry breaking was too late to induce the kind of early inflationary era necessary to produce a universe as perfectly balanced between open and closed as the one we see.
By studying the details of the CMB we can learn more about when and what kind of inflation occured, or in the best case we can find something that is inconsistent with inflation having occured at all, which would be hugely exciting. It would set a big chunk of modern cosmology on its ear. Alternatively, we might be able to pin down specific properties of the phase transition that drove the inflationary era, and distinguish between string-theoretic explanations and more mundane ones.
The only way to permanently end oppression is through violence or the implied or explicit threat of violence.
Sure, because that worked so well for the Irish, and the Palestinians, and the Basque and the Tamil and the Chechyns...
Violence is the best solution for bringing about social change, except compared to all the others.
Creative non-violence works pretty well comparitively. You'll notice a distinct lack of Russians running Poland, and I don't recall any cannon-fire bringing down the Berlin Wall, and then there's that whole liberation of India thing, which was as badly managed as could be imagined, yet still came off not too badly comparatively because the principles on the side of liberation deliberately chose creative non-violence as their primary means of effecting change.
What you mean when you say "nonviolent change is impossible" is "I'm too stupid and/or cowardly to see how to use creative non-violence to change things."
The rest of us, who know a little history, know that violence is the stupidest, least effective, choice for change, and the empricial evidence of the last 100 years makes this so obvious that anyone who choses violence today is obviously either brain-damaged, a coward, or evil. Sometimes all three.
the same people who wanted to set off a nuclear bomb on the moon
I think they got the date on that story rong: it says May 14 but should be April 1.
Seriously, a "scientist" talking about "the dark side of the moon"? Which side would that be? And a few kilotonne nuke leaving a crater that would "ruin the man in the moon" appearance?
This looks like a combination of an elderly scientist suffering from senile dementia and a journalist being a sensationalist ignorant hack, although I guess describing a journalist that way is kind of redundant.
Why print an email or directions, don't you have your iPad?
Ever hike in the wilderness? Go sailing? Canoeing? Kayaking? Diving?
I spend a lot of time outdoors, much of it on the water, and I never take my netbook with me because I think it really looks better in its non-immersed state. But sometimes there's useful information online that I want to take with me.
Ergo: printing.
Until they build one of these things that's water resistant to at least 10 m printing is a must. The only electronics that goes on the water with me is a throw-away-cheap cell phone.
Most of them were buying a consumer electronic device they felt would be useful and after using it for a month or two, they found that it was useful.
Except that this little moral fable ignores some well-known empirical psychology that Apple uses heavily in their branding. Apple devices, with their sleek aesthetics and sexy image, are appealing for reasons that have nothing to do with their functionality.
People feel good about owning them not (just) becauase they're useful, but because they are envied and admired. People feel good about owning stuff that other people wish they could own too. And people who don't see the value in paying a premium for that denigrate such devices as being overpriced toys.
There's nothing wrong with any of this, but it's important to recognize that this dynamic has nothing to do with what your average TrueGeek would consider the "functional" aspects of the device.
An iPad doesn't do anything (for me) that my netbook won't do (cue people who Just Don't Get It lining up to tell me I'm wrong [yes, there's a pun in there]). But I've seen the way iPaddies show off their new toy, and felt both envy and irritation with them, just like everything we know about the psychology of social factors in success would lead me to expect.
This is the genius of Jobs: his company makes products that are hard to be indifferent to. Everyone wants to own one because they we'd get to be the center of attention too, and this is the primary determinant of satisfaction with consumer electronics products.
grabbing the thing with your hand is going to *wreck* it. Apparently Steve wanted too much for it to look like a Leica camera (whose stainless steel bodies were, surprisingly, *not* doubling as antennas)
The human body has the strangest impedance imaginable. I've worked on any number of experimental RF circuits that were just fine when I put my hand in just the right place on the board, but oscillated wildly otherwise.
With regard to your latter point... I don't understand. A camera that doesn't make phone calls? I've never seen one of those! I know things were primitive in Ye Olden Days, but that's really hard to believe. How did people make phone calls if their cameras didn't have that functionality?
of course this will turn into a "bash the left" and a "bash the right" thread. when ideology isn't the point. polling is the idiocy in question
The striking thing here is not that the poll numbers are made up, but that the fraud was carried out in such a clumsy and obvious manner.
Half a dozen lines of Python could have generated all the numbers these clowns needed, but presumeably they didn't have the brains to write them. Sad, really.
Can anyone give a reasonable explanation for why this story is listed under "science.slashdot.org"?
Because the statistical analysis used to reveal the fraud is a good examples of how science works: take the raw data and squeeze it for internal and external inconsistencies.
Science is the policy that to be credible an idea must pass tests involving systematic observation and controlled experiment subject to as careful quantitative and qualitative analysis as the subject matter permits. This is a wonderful example of practical scientific technique applied to perfectly ordinary empirical data.
Labelling data "political" doesn't make it any less empirical. It just labels the labeller as someone who doesn't understand science.
"Commitment" is one of those code-words people use, like "morality" or "good". In each case they implicitly attach a very specific, concrete meaning to a very abstract term, and for the most part are unable to grasp that anyone else might have a different concrete instantiation of that term.
In the case of "commitment" they generally mean "commitment to not have sex with anyone else." Sexual monogamy is so deeply embedded in people's heads that they can't conceive of a notion of "commitment" that doesn't include it. They also, as other posters have pointed out, identify sex with love, and sexual fidelity with "true love".
In fact, those of us who have discovered true love know that sexual fidelity has nothing to do with it, and may even be opposed to it. Being in an open relationship only works if your love for each other is absolute, because only then do you trust each other to go have fun however you please, secure in the knowledge that at the end of the day (or night) you'll come back together, in no small part because the sex is so much better with someone you genuinely love (and even moreso when it's not the only meal on the menu...)
I think for many couples sexual fidelity involves a kind of reversal of cause and effect. People in open relationships stay together because they want to be together, and their love is not threatened by the involvment of others. Many people in closed relationships try to emulate that by creating artificial boundaries against anything that might tempt them to leave. But people who genuinely love each other don't need those boundaries or artificial constraints.
In my mind the "open" in "open relationship" means more than just being free to have sex with other people: it also means a commitment to be open with each other about who you are, what you want and what (or who) you're doing. That "commitment to openness" is what I mean by commitment, the exact opposite of the "commitment to closedness"--in every respect--that so many people seem to mean by it.
Slashdot Mirror
More info...
But none of that info relates to why the ERAST programme was terminated in 2003.
Obviously a single failure of a single prototype wouldn't be enough to cancel an entire programme that was intended to lead the way toward a new type of long-term sustainable aerial platforms. If that were the case then Apollo would have never come close to getting off the ground! We all know that governments are needed to fund this kind of enterprise because only they have the long time horizons and staying power to get the job done.
Furthermore, since there is obviously a huge amount of money to be made the free market would never let this technological opportunity languish, but would invest prudently in innovation and create "atmospheric satellites" that would be flying high above our cities today. Given the enormous creative potential of the free market seven years is more than enough time for this to have happened.
So it is fundamentally mysterious why the long-term prudent investment by governments and aggressive innovation by the free market hasn't already produced a technological revolution based on these ideas.
It's pretty sad that someone had to write a whole story surrounding the mystery behind this md5 hash sum, when it is plainly written in black and white on wiki, hence your link.
There's a whole school of modern journalism built around ignoring easily accessible answers to relatively trivial questions. If you've followed any of the recent economic debates you'll find that it's full of "but they never say anything about what they mean by XYZ" claims regarding their opposition, only to have the opposition respond with links to where they explain clearly what they mean by XYZ.
I used to think that the Web would make it harder for people to play this sort of stupid Straw Person type of argument, either postively--by imputing to your opponent an argument they are not making--or negatively--by ignoring explanations and justifications your opponent has clearly made. I thought the Web would improve human communication and engagement in argument. But what it has done is simply reveal the depths to which stupid people will dive to preserve their faith-based beliefs against any and all opposition.
I'm pretty sure that almost all the argument on the Web is one big game of "let's pretend we don't know anything because the world is more 'provocative' and 'exciting' that way."
It is increasingly clear that the average person lives their life entirely within the epistemological limits of Humpty Dumpty, to whom words meant what he wanted them to, and nothing else. In the present case, "mystery" apparently means "something that I can't be bothered to google."
BP was drilling in the Gulf in the quest for profit. It made the choices it made because it felt at the time that they had the best return on investment...
...given the protection the people who constitute BP get from the nanny state under the Companies Act and its descendents from personal liability for their actions.
This is the thing libertarians don't get: corporations only exist due to the special status they get by dint of government interference in the free market.
This is the same conclusion you'll come to with anybody who opposes GM crops
Yeah, it's just like arguing with anyone who is pro-GM crops, who insists despite all the evidence to the contrary that everyone who is anti-GM is that way solely because of the purported health effects, and not for any plausibly rational reasons like economic or ecological issues.
That's kind of like saying that consumers are underinformed because there are no autism warning labels on vaccines.
Except for the part where it isn't.
For an analogy that isn't simply wrong, try: "That's a bit like saying consumers are underinformed because there are no contains mercury compounds labels on vaccines." By all means tell people what stuff contains and allow them to make (ill) informed choices about it.
But don't tell me I don't have a right to know what is in the stuff I put in my body.
Corporations are a pure product of state intervention the the free market: they were created in their modern form by the various Companies Acts passed in the mid-1800's. They have demonstrated repeatedly that as a creation of state power they need to be regulated by state power, including requiring labelling of the stuff they sell.
People have many reasons for avoiding GM foods, some of them more plausible than others, and it is not for your or anyone else to decide for them what or why they want to put things (or not) in their body.
Personally, I avoid GM foods because of what I percieve to be both the economic and ecological effects of synthetic monocultures. We can debate whether that is rational. What is not up for debate is my right to know what I'm eating, and without labelling there is absoluely no way for me to ascertain that in practical contexts.
As much as I dislike having my cookie cutter home, there are other factors to consider.
But wait, everyone else replying is pointing out how every home has to be a unique and special little snowflake or the building inspector won't pass it based on the byzanine local regulations that have to vary 1000% from one county to the next!
So how can you have a "cookie cutter" home, and describe it in those terms in the certain knowledge that absolutely everyone here--at least in North America--will understand exactly what you mean?
Only models that show a good correlation are used to predict the future
Other than proving your ignorance of computational physics, this claim demonstrates very little. I can show you any number of unphysical, highly-parameterized models that can be made to correlate well with the past, but do very badly at predicting the future.
It is an unfortunate truth that climate models are unphysical and highly parameterized. This combination is very, very bad. An unphysical model with few parameters is not so bad, because it is unlikely to be able to fit real data and so is met with a proper degree of skepticism. A physical model with many parameters is not so bad because at least basic conservation laws will be respected.
So let me ask: in the model you are running is energy strictly conserved at all levels of the simulation? And are sea-surface and other boundary conditions plausibly physical? These are the two biggies I've found in the models I've examined, and neither of them bode well for the ability of the models to predict the future no matter how well they can be tuned to match the past.
It is the denial of this fact that distinguishes climate modellers from computational physicists. Computational physicists know--because we have explored a wide range of simple systems with unphysical models in the course of our education--that systems as simple as an orbiting spacecraft or swinging pendulum can be given the appearance of wildly impossible behaviour with apparently trivial unphysical "fixes" that accumulate over time.
For example, it was believed until about ten years ago that the solar system was chaotic, because all our models of its long term behaviour were unstable. It turns out that extremely subtle errors were creeping into our integrations to produce this behaviour. This is just one example of how even a physical numerical model of a relatively simple system can be badly misleading.
And anyone who understands computational physics knows this, and would not ever present correlation with the past as justification for the future accuracy of unphysical, highly parameterized models.
So what's the proper response to these brain-damaged, evil cowards?
Excellent question, to which I don't have any simple answer.
First and foremost: understand that change may not happen in your lifetime and that anything you do may not produce anything resembling immediate results. The important thing to remember is that the same is true of violence. The difference is that violence makes our monkey hind-brains feel like we're accomplishing something, even when we aren't.
That said: decide what you want to change. Be specific, and be concrete. Would you like a world where Americans didn't send their young men and women off to kill and die in foreign countries for no readily discernible reason? Pick a priority, and make it your thing. Learn the history. Become an expert on the facts related to the issue you care about.
Then write about it, argue it, promote it, make art about it. Get involved politically if art and argument aren't your things. The facts of non-violence vs violence are so stark that it's really easy to make fun of people promoting violence. If you're an American you can also have fun with the positions taken by your Founders, many of whom were extremely sceptical of the utility of violence despite having used it to wrest power from England. General Washington was no friend of the military, for example.
Those are just some thoughts off the top of my head. Another is: learn some economics. The economic arguments against violence are to my mind the most powerful, because they are coldly pragmatic: it is expensive and rarely successful. There's actually a serious question in economics called "the war puzzle" which is about why people ever go to war, as it is never eonomically rational to do so. It is therefore possible to demonstrate that the only people who are ever in favour of war are people addled by tribalism, or profiteers. It's fun to ask people who are in favour of war which camp they belong to.
Why make generalizations about the people who own this device?
I'm not making generalizations about people who own this device: I'm pointing out how a well-known and empirically validated psychological phenomenon has been used by Apple to market this device, and how well that works.
I find it amusing that although I've said that the iPad is a useful device the people replying to me are all acting like I've said it's not, almost as if people's perceptions of them and the device they (presumably but not provably) have bought is as important as the utility of the device to them, which was pretty much my point.
So your argument is that it's impossible for a device to be functional if it is also beautiful?
Nope. My argument has nothing to do with that at all, and no where do I say anything anyone could reasonably use to infer that is my argument.
I wonder why you think I wrote that people like owning them "not (just) because they're useful" if you think I am arguing that a thing can't be both functional and beautiful.
One problem is that people have different definitions of "functional".
Indeed, that is exactly why I specifically said I was talking about what a "TrueGeek" might consider functional.
Sleek aesthetics and functionality are not mutually exclusive.
Of course they aren't. That's why I specifically indicated "what a TrueGeek might think of as functionality". Reading comprehension: not just for English majors any more!
Your deep psychological insights are pretty much in line with the rest of your grasp of my thoughts on how functional the iPad is. Please feel free to go on ignoring well-known empirical phenomena.
I might make a crack here about how the kind of people who buy Apple products are just the sort to think they're "special" and not at all motivated by the things that motivate everyone else, except that would be stupid, as I have no evidence that you're someone who has purchased an Apple product.
As the entity "Slashdot" I hereby decree that the whole idea of "Professional Artist" is forever banned.
Not banned: technologically obsolete.
This is the unfortunate truth: the equilibrium market price of a good whose incremental cost of production is zero, is zero. The tendency of market prices to converge on the incremental cost of production is pretty fundamental, both theoretically and empirically.
The "Professional Artist" as we have known them in the 20th century was the result of a transient technological era in which mass production of copies was cheap but creation of a single copy was expensive.
Attempting to replace technological reality with legal opposition has never been a good bet. Holding back the tide an all that.
This is not to say that I don't feel sympathy for artists, and I don't rip music myself because it's illegal. But I also don't buy any DRM content of any kind, ever, because it's stupid and annoying and certain to fail in the relatively short term (that is, any specific DRM tech will become obsolete, requiring me to repurchase the same work in a new format...)
Once upon a time guilds operated based on legal restrictions on certain types of economic activity. Various technological and social upheavals put an end to that, and that pretty much sucked for the people who make their livings the old fashioned way.
Before Wedgewood invented the factory potters could make a pretty good living. Before Ford people made a lot of money on horse-related stuff. Various legal barricades were put in place to stop the spread of new technology that was wiping out the livelihood of established producers.
None of them worked because it was an attempt to make pi = 3, more-or-less. Economic laws are as much laws as any others, and can only be distorted for a short time by dint of great effort.
So while there is a huge amount of moral inconsistency here, the reality is that economics, not morality, is in the driver's seat, and while the composer is certainly in the right legally and possibly morally, he's in the wrong technologically and economically, and in a tag-team match between Legal/Moral on one side and Tech/Econ on the other, I know which way I'd bet.
for anyone spotting mistakes: please feel free to reveal them.
There's nothing really to correct, just an additional comment on why this sort of study is interesting: we don't know what drove inflation, nor even exactly when it occured, nor, in point of fact, if it did occur.
Inflation is by far the most natural mechanism we know of that produces a universe as flat as our own. So on that basis we'd really like for there to have been one. An inflationary era occurs when the rate of expansion of the universe increases with time in the early going, probably due to a phase transition in the vacuum field of an elementary particle.
We know such phase transitions exist: electro-weak theory is based on the spontaneous breaking of a symmetry that is strictly observed at high energy, in much the same way that the rotational and translational symmetry of a liquid is broken by the process of crystalization as the temperature drops sufficiently for it to become a solid.
But we know that the electro-weak symmetry breaking was too late to induce the kind of early inflationary era necessary to produce a universe as perfectly balanced between open and closed as the one we see.
By studying the details of the CMB we can learn more about when and what kind of inflation occured, or in the best case we can find something that is inconsistent with inflation having occured at all, which would be hugely exciting. It would set a big chunk of modern cosmology on its ear. Alternatively, we might be able to pin down specific properties of the phase transition that drove the inflationary era, and distinguish between string-theoretic explanations and more mundane ones.
I don't notice any difference in reading speed whether I'm using a book or e-book.
A factor of two in speed is about the minimum perceptible, so your experience is fully consistent with these data.
The only way to permanently end oppression is through violence or the implied or explicit threat of violence.
Sure, because that worked so well for the Irish, and the Palestinians, and the Basque and the Tamil and the Chechyns...
Violence is the best solution for bringing about social change, except compared to all the others.
Creative non-violence works pretty well comparitively. You'll notice a distinct lack of Russians running Poland, and I don't recall any cannon-fire bringing down the Berlin Wall, and then there's that whole liberation of India thing, which was as badly managed as could be imagined, yet still came off not too badly comparatively because the principles on the side of liberation deliberately chose creative non-violence as their primary means of effecting change.
What you mean when you say "nonviolent change is impossible" is "I'm too stupid and/or cowardly to see how to use creative non-violence to change things."
The rest of us, who know a little history, know that violence is the stupidest, least effective, choice for change, and the empricial evidence of the last 100 years makes this so obvious that anyone who choses violence today is obviously either brain-damaged, a coward, or evil. Sometimes all three.
If you voluntarily hold out your arms and say, "Here you may cuff me," the police can't claim you resisted can they?
Sure they can. It's called "lying". All humans have the capacity, and the last time I looked cops were still human.
the same people who wanted to set off a nuclear bomb on the moon
I think they got the date on that story rong: it says May 14 but should be April 1.
Seriously, a "scientist" talking about "the dark side of the moon"? Which side would that be? And a few kilotonne nuke leaving a crater that would "ruin the man in the moon" appearance?
This looks like a combination of an elderly scientist suffering from senile dementia and a journalist being a sensationalist ignorant hack, although I guess describing a journalist that way is kind of redundant.
We spelt dictionary incorrectly in a spell checking app
Now this is why dev's need offices with doors that close. I'm in a well-protected office-like cube, but it ain't enough to absorb my laughter...
This is the funniest thing I've read in ages. Thanks!
Why print an email or directions, don't you have your iPad?
Ever hike in the wilderness? Go sailing? Canoeing? Kayaking? Diving?
I spend a lot of time outdoors, much of it on the water, and I never take my netbook with me because I think it really looks better in its non-immersed state. But sometimes there's useful information online that I want to take with me.
Ergo: printing.
Until they build one of these things that's water resistant to at least 10 m printing is a must. The only electronics that goes on the water with me is a throw-away-cheap cell phone.
Most of them were buying a consumer electronic device they felt would be useful and after using it for a month or two, they found that it was useful.
Except that this little moral fable ignores some well-known empirical psychology that Apple uses heavily in their branding. Apple devices, with their sleek aesthetics and sexy image, are appealing for reasons that have nothing to do with their functionality.
People feel good about owning them not (just) becauase they're useful, but because they are envied and admired. People feel good about owning stuff that other people wish they could own too. And people who don't see the value in paying a premium for that denigrate such devices as being overpriced toys.
There's nothing wrong with any of this, but it's important to recognize that this dynamic has nothing to do with what your average TrueGeek would consider the "functional" aspects of the device.
An iPad doesn't do anything (for me) that my netbook won't do (cue people who Just Don't Get It lining up to tell me I'm wrong [yes, there's a pun in there]). But I've seen the way iPaddies show off their new toy, and felt both envy and irritation with them, just like everything we know about the psychology of social factors in success would lead me to expect.
This is the genius of Jobs: his company makes products that are hard to be indifferent to. Everyone wants to own one because they we'd get to be the center of attention too, and this is the primary determinant of satisfaction with consumer electronics products.
grabbing the thing with your hand is going to *wreck* it. Apparently Steve wanted too much for it to look like a Leica camera (whose stainless steel bodies were, surprisingly, *not* doubling as antennas)
The human body has the strangest impedance imaginable. I've worked on any number of experimental RF circuits that were just fine when I put my hand in just the right place on the board, but oscillated wildly otherwise.
With regard to your latter point... I don't understand. A camera that doesn't make phone calls? I've never seen one of those! I know things were primitive in Ye Olden Days, but that's really hard to believe. How did people make phone calls if their cameras didn't have that functionality?
of course this will turn into a "bash the left" and a "bash the right" thread. when ideology isn't the point. polling is the idiocy in question
The striking thing here is not that the poll numbers are made up, but that the fraud was carried out in such a clumsy and obvious manner.
Half a dozen lines of Python could have generated all the numbers these clowns needed, but presumeably they didn't have the brains to write them. Sad, really.
Can anyone give a reasonable explanation for why this story is listed under "science.slashdot.org"?
Because the statistical analysis used to reveal the fraud is a good examples of how science works: take the raw data and squeeze it for internal and external inconsistencies.
Science is the policy that to be credible an idea must pass tests involving systematic observation and controlled experiment subject to as careful quantitative and qualitative analysis as the subject matter permits. This is a wonderful example of practical scientific technique applied to perfectly ordinary empirical data.
Labelling data "political" doesn't make it any less empirical. It just labels the labeller as someone who doesn't understand science.
So what exactly is commitment?
"Commitment" is one of those code-words people use, like "morality" or "good". In each case they implicitly attach a very specific, concrete meaning to a very abstract term, and for the most part are unable to grasp that anyone else might have a different concrete instantiation of that term.
In the case of "commitment" they generally mean "commitment to not have sex with anyone else." Sexual monogamy is so deeply embedded in people's heads that they can't conceive of a notion of "commitment" that doesn't include it. They also, as other posters have pointed out, identify sex with love, and sexual fidelity with "true love".
In fact, those of us who have discovered true love know that sexual fidelity has nothing to do with it, and may even be opposed to it. Being in an open relationship only works if your love for each other is absolute, because only then do you trust each other to go have fun however you please, secure in the knowledge that at the end of the day (or night) you'll come back together, in no small part because the sex is so much better with someone you genuinely love (and even moreso when it's not the only meal on the menu...)
I think for many couples sexual fidelity involves a kind of reversal of cause and effect. People in open relationships stay together because they want to be together, and their love is not threatened by the involvment of others. Many people in closed relationships try to emulate that by creating artificial boundaries against anything that might tempt them to leave. But people who genuinely love each other don't need those boundaries or artificial constraints.
In my mind the "open" in "open relationship" means more than just being free to have sex with other people: it also means a commitment to be open with each other about who you are, what you want and what (or who) you're doing. That "commitment to openness" is what I mean by commitment, the exact opposite of the "commitment to closedness"--in every respect--that so many people seem to mean by it.