That's not the same as dehumanizing Michelle Obama for being black.
Right. The same thing would be likening George H. W. Bush or his close confederates to members of the KKK. And no one would do that.
After all, these people are white, southern and conservative, so they must be racists, right?
In fairness, I do think the Obama/monkey pictures are more offensive, since they are based on nothing but race, but I feel like I'm probably guilty of some kind of double standard, because pictures of Bush as a chimp or a KKK member don't bother me at all... and they probably should.
Monads in haskell are pure. The IO monad lets you paste together IO values in a way that they remain opaque.
After staring at this explanation for fifteen minutes I feel deep sympathy for the people on/. who try to understand my comments on physics, because I imagine they make as little sense to them as this does to me:-D
I think I kind of understand what you're saying: a monad is created on-the-fly by the (non-Haskell) runtime as an immutable object.
I'm still tempted to quibble at the difference between "opaque" and "side effect free". Hidden side effects are still side effects, although I guess so long as they truly are opaque then the formal constraints on the language are still enforceable, and one gets the power of pure functional programming out of it.
That's what I really wasn't understanding: Haskell does let you create side effects. But it is still a "pure functional" language in the sense that the side effects are implemented in such a way that you can still analyze Haskell programs as pure functional programs, because the side effects that Haskell lets you create are entirely hidden from the universe that Haskell knows about.
So, to pay you back with an obscure comment from my own area of expertise: it's a bit like our universe being strictly causal under SR, but QM still being able to have acausal spooky actions at a distance. That's an analogy I can get behind.
You *must* presuppose that the future is relevantly like the past for empiricism to have any meaning in any context; it's pretty much an irreducible problem.
Who must what?
That is, you--who who exist and are persistent in time with a unique personal identity and live in a causal world that is persistent in time and full of a diversity of phenomena that are identifiable by you and persistent in time--must, to engage in the act of disagreeing with the self-consistency and sturdiness of the logical foundations of empiricism, must presuppose--as a condition of entering into the discourse--the very conditions that you for some reason want to say must be uniquely presupposed by empiricists.
That is, you are saying, "I completely accept these conditions without dispute and can raise no argument or question against them, but I demand that empiricists justify them, even though I don't demand the same thing of anyone else, including myself."
What you are claiming is a problem with empiricism is actually nothing more than a universal and rather uninteresting form of scepticism, and anyone who raises it seriously immediately rules themselves out of bounds by the simple fact of not having applied their own argument to their own utterance first.
Well, pure functional languages are (potentially) good for concurrency in general. Because they have no mutable variables in the usual sense, it doesn't actually matter what order functions are evaluated in (other than the fact that callers cannot continue until their callees return).
Maybe you can help me get past one of my mental stumbling-blocks with Haskell, which seems like a really cool language, but which I clearly have no clue about because I don't get a very fundamental thing. As I understand it there are two fundamental claims about Haskell:
1) it is a "pure functional" language, which is therefore entirely and completely and "purely" side-effect-free. I appreciate the immense potential value of this for things like program verification, and I'd love to learn more about it.
2) there is a Haskell construct that is part of the Haskell language called a "monad" that can have side-effects.
I'm a deeply pedantic guy, and I'm unable to reconcile these two claims, and it puts me off looking more deeply into the language every time I read about it because there's clearly something I don't get. It seems to me that either:
a) Haskell is not actually purely functional: it is a purely functional core sub-language with extremely well controlled additional side-effect-producing parts
b) Monads are not actually considered "part" of the Haskell language, in the same way that pre-standardization STL was not "part" of the C++ language.
Texas has the second highest population of the US states and North Dakota is the second lowest.
Assuming for some reason that population plays a role in murder rate--which seems a little weird to me--the more reasonable solution would be to break Texas up into lots of little states, if you really think that the number of people who happen to fall inside an accidental political boundary is determinative of the murder rate therein.
If you're going to reify political boundaries in this way you're going to have to explain why the US as a whole doesn't have a higher murder rate than Texas: after all, it has a much higher population.
Twenty years... sounds pretty close. I guess that some people, good people, honest people, might be out there wondering... "Who really did this terrible thing?"
Except in the all-too-common case when the Organs of the State kill the wrong person.
As for the deterrent effect: Texas has the death penalty and has for a long time, and the State of Texas is aggressive about killing people on Death Row. Texas has one of the highest murder rates in the US.
North Dakota does not have the death penalty, and as far as I know never has. It has one of the lowest murder rates in the US.
Anyone who is not batshit insane will look at those facts and ask, "What is it about North Dakota that keeps the murder rate so low, and what can we do to make Texas more like that?" Instead, ideological idiots distract everyone from the debate with their data-free imaginings.
Thanks for the correction! Now I'm wondering if Pohl and Kornbluth ever collaborated on a story in the same universe... I'm pretty sure Kornbluth used it as background for his story "The Little Black Bag", but I'm now doubting my memory of that, too!
In any case, I recommend "The Marching Morons"--it doesn't go for the cheap laughs the way "Idiocracy" does.
Plus no one has any clue how the brain computes really so making a claim about the formation of thoughts is just nonsense.
Unfortunately, what a certain class of pseudo-scientist has learned is that monkeys in suits are too stupid to know the difference between real, conservative, careful science and over-hyped handwaving. Since we live in a world where monkeys in suits have managed to get almost total control of the corporate system and used that to leverage thier way into political power, people who suck up to the monkeys and make them feel good about themselves and their world by making outrageously false claims get rewarded with cash, while real scientists get left behind.
Our world increasingly looks like Fredrick Pohl's story "The Marching Morons", in which idiots have taken over the world (it's much more clever than the film "Idiocracy" was) and the idiots refer to the few remaining smart people, who keep things running, as "dummies". In retrospect, Pohl's story seems less about genetics (intelligence being at best very weakly heritable, as everyone with a brain knows) and more about the social factors that put money and power into the hands of exactly the kind of human who seeks money and power (rather than knowledge and serenity.)
Because it's impossible to load a bomb onto a ship while it is at sea.
And a nuclear bomb is so big it can't fit into a modest-sized sailboat of the kind that people have been known to sail around the world in. There are thousands upon thousands of such boats, and the rate of inspection of cargo is pretty much nil. So unless you're going to stop everyone crusing along your coasts and inspect them, no matter how small the boat, you're going to have to live with the risk that nuclear weapons will be delivered to your shores.
I'm sure the Organs of the State would love to institute a program of random coastal inspection. After all, harrassing innocent sailors is the only way to keep America safe, and the revenue they could generate from seizing yachts would no-doubt keep them in coke and hookers for a long, long time.
The real problem here is I have no idea what is being patented. Since/. patent-related headlines and summaries are always false and misleading, this posting just makes me wonder what Amazon has actually patented. It would be interesting to know, but since neither the headline nor the summary of the article contains any factual information about the patent that could be used to form a rational judgement about the novelty of the subject matter there's really no point in discussing it.
Since it's Amazon--assuming the summary has the assignee correct--the patent probably has something to do with online sales, but I wonder what? I just wish there was some way of figuring that out without digging down into the USPTO site myself, which I can't be bothered to do because all it will tell me is that a patent has been granted on something that might actually be kind of innovative. At least, that's what's always happened in the past when I've bothered to contribute to the/. community by trying to inform people about how the (badly flawed) American patent system actually works.
If we knew what had been patented, people might be able to present prior art, but since we know nothing about what has been patented there really isn't any point in talking about it, is there?
Thanks for the information! When I read the headline I of course thought, "I wonder what Google has patented. It's too bad I don't know anything about it, having just read the headline and summary. I can be pretty Google has filed a patent application, but I have no idea what it's on."
Wouldn't it be amazing if the/. editors actually posted actual information in summaries?
but why add that extra unnecessary step in the middle when it's just an added inefficiency?
Is compressing air more or less efficient than charging a battery? The latter is about 70% efficient. The former depends on the precise circumstances, but can be made pretty much 100% efficient. That's a small gain, but it's a gain.
Also, the "carbon footprint" claims are obviously bogus: only 25% of the electricity where I am comes from fossil fuels. 40 or 50% is nuclear, the balance hydro.
The advantages of compressed-air vehicles are cheap manufacture, low maintenance and zero local emissions. My car sits out back six days a week (and in fact, right now it's been over two weeks since I last drove!) I've adapted my lifestyle for minimum costs, so I don't drive much (or use much power generally). I'd leap at an compressed air vehicle, and I expect that as more and more people in North America feel the squeeze of our corporate overlords they will get off the treadmill of high-consumption, high-debt living and adopt lower-cost lifestyles like mine.
So there may be a future for compressed-air vehicles yet.
When you read a large number of the e-mails, it becomes clearer and clearer just how much their data must be massaged and adjusted in order to reach the results they have.
This is unsurprising--the unfortunate thing about the way climate studies has been politicized is that while this kind of thing goes on in all fields, it does so in public. That's ok because nobody cares.
In climate science, with such vigorous voices on both sides claiming the most extreme conclusions imaginable from unphysical simulations, low-quality data and bad economics, both sides have tended to hide the inner workings of their processes, which results in lower quality science and much lower quality public policy.
Climate scientists need to spend a few years publishing every little bit of information they have, letting the nutjobs on the other side have a go at it, and therefore draw them in to an open scientific process. The impression the climate community gives of being closed, secretive and unscientific helps undermine their credibility.
I would argue to everyone, that the word hide implies falsification or concealment. So the author was knowingly manipulatin data to conceal the truth.
Hey, you sound just like my psycho ex-g/f, who would stop in the middle of an argument to claim that the way I used some particular word could only mean exactly one thing, and it was the thing she wanted it to mean, and not anything else.
Psychotic, abusive people often think this way: they believe they have or can infer from a few words exactly what the original intent of the speaker was, whereas sane people know that we most of us choose our words poorly and sloppily and our utterances simply will not bear anything like such close psychotic analysis.
So sure he used the words "hide the decline", and all that means--unless you're on some kind of witch hunt and don't believe that stupidity explains far more than venality--is that he's being sloppy and casual about what he's doing to clean up a known issue with the data.
I often use the word "fake" when describing data analysis algorithms, as in, "We can fake an XYZ algorithm here," meaning that what I'm doing is not a true XYZ algorithm, but rather some known and valid approximation to it (usually done for reasons of computational efficiency.) Someone like you would see that, declare that I could only possibly mean one thing by "fake", and call me a fraud.
That would be childish, narrow-minded and stupid, and I don't see any reason to make a different judgment of what you're doing here.
1. A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising:
Thank-you for fulfilling and important step in the rigidly scripted/. patent-story method patent:
1) Editors post patent-related story with false headline and misleading summary
2) Commentors who know nothing about patent law and who have not read the claims respond with outrage
3) Someone posts the actual claims, thereby demonstrating the headline is false and the summary misleading.
4) Outrage continues unabated, although sometimes its target shifts to the supposed trivialiality of the actual claims.
5) I post a message like this, which no one reads.
6) Discussion peters out, having changed nothing, and educated no one about the nature of patents or about the nature of/. patent stories, which always have false headlines, misleading summaries, and rigidly follow this script.
the Slashdot editors should do more to fact check these stories before publishing them.
They would get fewer page-views from the outraged and ignorant if they did that, which is the only reason I can see for them to persist in posting patent stories with false headlines and misleading summaries.
It would actually be pretty incredible if every patent-related post or comment on Slashdot was met by a host of patent attorneys chiming in on the issue.
It would be even more incredible if any patent-related story on/. ever deviated from the rigid kubuki theatre script we inevitably see:
1) One of the editors posts a story with a false headline and misleading summary saying that X has a patent on Y, when Y never appears anywhere in the claims.
2) Commenters chime in with minor variants on the following themes, in sequence:
a) "Product Z has had this feature for years, as did something I wrote in kindergarten! How dare X try to patent it! Are the patent examiners on drugs!!!???"
b) "The patent is actually on something quite different. The claims actually say..." followed by a clear explanation of how to read a patent, and how the claims as actually written could be considered sufficiently novel to meet the abysmally low standard required for patentability.
c) "I don't care if the patent is actually on something else! It isn't sufficiently novel to satisfy my intuitive sense of the way the patent system should work! I'm outraged! Software patents are dumb!"
It's a curious phenomenon, particularly since the/. editors clearly believe that the US patent system is extremely solid and only issues pretty reasonable patents. If they believed otherwise, they wouldn't have to put false headlines and misleading summaries on every single patent story that appears on/.
After all, when you lie about your enemy to try to make your point, you're clearly stating, "My enemy is actually such a good guy that I have to make stuff up to make them look bad. Telling the truth about them simply won't generate the outrage I want, because there's really nothing very outrageous about what they are doing."
Since/. editors never tell the truth about software patents in the US, we can only conclude that they are highly supportive of the existing software patent system, as they can't come up with any substantive reality-based critique.
If I'm not doing anything illegal, then I don't have to worry about being arrested.
That statement is false. People who have not done anything illegal get arrested all the time. Sometimes completely innocent people get shot and killed by police. That Brazilian guy who was murdered by British police in broad daylight. The Polish immigrant who was killed by the RCMP in Vancouver airport a year or so ago. How can you not be aware of this?
Furthermore: if I am not doing anything illegal, what possible reason do they have to watch me?
What pray-tell, directly disadvantages the average citizen if they were to be watched at all times?
Loss of privacy. Even in public, citizens have a reasonable expectation of not being under continuous, recorded, surveillance. It's what I expect, it's what I have now, and I would lose something of great value to me if it were to disappear.
One might equally ask: what advantage do citizens gain by being watched at all times? It certainly isn't a reduction in crime: Chicago is somewhat more dangerous in terms of robberies and assaults than Huston or Los Angeles, and almost twice as dangerous as New York (all cities of comparable size or larger, and at least one with major drug and gang violence problems.)
If anyone cared about making Chicago safer they'd be asking how to make it more like New York (or Toronto), not engaging in fantasy science-fiction beliefs about how allowing corrupt police to watch everyone will make the city safer, when it demonstrably, empirically, doesn't.
However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better. To make matters worse, these large banks are fairly interconnected, which means if even a couple major banks were to go under, it would have caused problems for anyone who it owed money to, including all the other banks. Letting a company like CitiGroup go under would cause a chain reaction that would cause lots of other banks to go under.
So if I understand you correctly, the government putting a large bank into receivership, taking it over with full tax-payer backing, and selling it off for parts in a systematic way would cause a chain reaction that would destroy the entire financial system of the world.
Sweden--a far more capitalist nation than the US, apparently--did exactly this in the '90's without the world ending. The only counter argument I've heard to that is, "Well but the US is SO MUCH BIGGER and we have SO MANY BANKS."
But it isn't the thousands of mom-and-pop banks that were in trouble: it was a handful of big banks, and AIG. Rather than socialize the risk while leaving the profits in private hands, which is what the Bush/Obama administration did, putting them into receivership was clearly the right thing to do.
It's been clear that as American imperial power grows, the US becomes a more "conservative" place, in the sense of being afraid to try anything outside the envelope of "business as usual". This is a common effect of imperial power, which is jealous of its reputation and therefore afraid to try anything that might fail.
But we need to call a spade a spade, and not pretend that the fearful fantasies of world-wide collapse were remotely realistic, when clearly putting a small handful of big banks into receivership would be just a minor variant on what actually happened--which was banks continuing to operate with taxpayer backing, except that the taxpayer would have actually been the owner rather than simply absorbing all the risk.
Exploded mines and artillery shells leave unburnt residue.
Wow, you've identified an imperfection. I guess we'd all better quit and not bother then.
Seriously, is this how the world looks from the safety of your basement, where you can't be bothered to go out 'cause everthing isn't perfect?
This is a brilliant and useful addtion to the deminer's toolkit, and any potential issues are tiny compared to the added value it gives. Having poked around the problem of demining (I'm a sensors and image processing guy, not a biochemistry guy) I can say that this idea is clever and useful, despite the whining of armchair critics.
The added information this stuff would give deminers is worth a lot. Obviously other sources of explosive material is going to show up, but tell me, can you see from your basement how the distribution pattern of those other sources will differ from the distribution pattern of intact mines?
Can you see in your imagination how it might be more diffuse, say? Or how the pattern from intact mines might actually contain some information as to the depth and age and type of the mine?
No, of course you can't, because you stopped thinking at the moment you thought of a plausible deviation from perfection--I can tell because you didn't even bother to complete your comment with the clearly implicity "therefore this is useless". And if you don't think it's useless, why didn't you say so, because anyone reading your comment sure would think that's what you were saying. So you should work on either improving your thinking skills, or your communications skills, or both.
but to be honest, the whole scientific backstory of the film is so thin I never actually considered that people would genuinely fear a cataclysm as depicted in the movie. "Mutating neutrinos"... really?
Yeah, I can't even hate you for working on it, nor the producers et al for creating it. It's just a movie, after all, so you don't fall into anything like the same class as the people who are promoting the 2012 thing as fact for their own benefit.
If anyone ends up killing themselves or ruining their lives, it'll be at the feet of those bastards, not artists and businesspeople who are honestly trying to make a buck piggy-backing on the phenomenon. You lot have pursued the only honourable way of profiting from this kind of idiocy, and more power to you.
That given, my question is: if we have people who want to ban cell phones because of zero evidence that they emit any harmful radiation, when will see a movement to ban panic-mongers? Panic-mongers do cause demonstrable harm and in the case of the LHC black-hole lies are known to have precipiated at least one death (a teenage girl who committed suicide.) So while artists making clearly absurd fiction ("mutating neutrinos"?) are in the clear, I think we should be looking very carefully at how to come down hard on panic-mongers. They are far more dangerous than any of the ridiculous threats they promote.
The CFL condition that limits the maximum time step one can take shows no sign of relenting. Score has been Courant (the C in CFL) 1, Moore 0 for the last three decades.
Yeah, I always get a laugh out of people who think that we're ever going to beat down turbulent flow with higher resolution. It's vortices all the way down, and no matter how clever your implicit scheme you still have to be able to propogate information through the grid at less than the speed of sound to prevent numerical shock waves from blowing up your solution. Regularization schemes that throw away information are good, but that reduces the value of going to higher resolutions.
So I'm doubtful that we'll be predicting the weather, or the climate, with significantly greater accuracy ten years from now than we are today. Some problems just don't yield to brute force very well, although one would hope that at least the higher resolution models will conserve energy and have free boundary conditions in place of today's frequently artificially fixed ones.
Heisenberg is reputed to have said at the end of his life, "I have two questions I want to ask God: 'Why relativity?', and 'Why turbulence?' I'm really hoping He'll be able to give me an answer on relativity..."
The ability for bosses, politicians, whoever to just look at your "program code" and filter for the best candidate is dangerous
But in a free market that'll mean that companies that don't do such stupid things will out-compete the ones who do, right? Unless of course actual performance is really just an unpredictable crap-shoot!
This isn't a "dating" site, it's a "mating" site, presumably aimed primarily at people under 30 or so who want to hook up for life with a single partner they intend to have children with. That's not "dating", which is spending time in the company of a member of the complementary sexual orientation, possibly naked, for pleasure (social, sexual, whatever).
If you're going to call "singled minded pursuit of a suitable life-partner" "dating", then we need another word for "spending enjoyable time with someone who may or may not be a potential life partner but who's fun to be with."
And the real problem is that if you think that the only point of dating is mating, you're missing out all of the social and relationship learning that goes on during dating. Some of my best times have been spent with women I knew from very early on had no potential as a life-partner, and those experiences taught me a great deal about myself and what works for me and doesn't in a relationship. Dating is an instance where the journey itself is an important part of the goal, and there is no other way to learn what you need except by actually taking the long way.
Women, in my experience, really do tend to view every date as a potential step toward marriage or a long-term relationship, and tend to drop men when they feel things are "not going anywhere" (which means "not heading in the direction of marriage".) This is a silly attitude that seems to have been reified by this site. Dating only potential life partners is like companies that focus all of their resources on a few big customers, which is known to be a bad long-term strategy for a sustainable business.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the same as dehumanizing Michelle Obama for being black.
Right. The same thing would be likening George H. W. Bush or his close confederates to members of the KKK. And no one would do that.
After all, these people are white, southern and conservative, so they must be racists, right?
In fairness, I do think the Obama/monkey pictures are more offensive, since they are based on nothing but race, but I feel like I'm probably guilty of some kind of double standard, because pictures of Bush as a chimp or a KKK member don't bother me at all... and they probably should.
Monads in haskell are pure. The IO monad lets you paste together IO values in a way that they remain opaque.
After staring at this explanation for fifteen minutes I feel deep sympathy for the people on /. who try to understand my comments on physics, because I imagine they make as little sense to them as this does to me :-D
I think I kind of understand what you're saying: a monad is created on-the-fly by the (non-Haskell) runtime as an immutable object.
I'm still tempted to quibble at the difference between "opaque" and "side effect free". Hidden side effects are still side effects, although I guess so long as they truly are opaque then the formal constraints on the language are still enforceable, and one gets the power of pure functional programming out of it.
That's what I really wasn't understanding: Haskell does let you create side effects. But it is still a "pure functional" language in the sense that the side effects are implemented in such a way that you can still analyze Haskell programs as pure functional programs, because the side effects that Haskell lets you create are entirely hidden from the universe that Haskell knows about.
So, to pay you back with an obscure comment from my own area of expertise: it's a bit like our universe being strictly causal under SR, but QM still being able to have acausal spooky actions at a distance. That's an analogy I can get behind.
You *must* presuppose that the future is relevantly like the past for empiricism to have any meaning in any context; it's pretty much an irreducible problem.
Who must what?
That is, you--who who exist and are persistent in time with a unique personal identity and live in a causal world that is persistent in time and full of a diversity of phenomena that are identifiable by you and persistent in time--must, to engage in the act of disagreeing with the self-consistency and sturdiness of the logical foundations of empiricism, must presuppose--as a condition of entering into the discourse--the very conditions that you for some reason want to say must be uniquely presupposed by empiricists.
That is, you are saying, "I completely accept these conditions without dispute and can raise no argument or question against them, but I demand that empiricists justify them, even though I don't demand the same thing of anyone else, including myself."
What you are claiming is a problem with empiricism is actually nothing more than a universal and rather uninteresting form of scepticism, and anyone who raises it seriously immediately rules themselves out of bounds by the simple fact of not having applied their own argument to their own utterance first.
Well, pure functional languages are (potentially) good for concurrency in general. Because they have no mutable variables in the usual sense, it doesn't actually matter what order functions are evaluated in (other than the fact that callers cannot continue until their callees return).
Maybe you can help me get past one of my mental stumbling-blocks with Haskell, which seems like a really cool language, but which I clearly have no clue about because I don't get a very fundamental thing. As I understand it there are two fundamental claims about Haskell:
1) it is a "pure functional" language, which is therefore entirely and completely and "purely" side-effect-free. I appreciate the immense potential value of this for things like program verification, and I'd love to learn more about it.
2) there is a Haskell construct that is part of the Haskell language called a "monad" that can have side-effects.
I'm a deeply pedantic guy, and I'm unable to reconcile these two claims, and it puts me off looking more deeply into the language every time I read about it because there's clearly something I don't get. It seems to me that either:
a) Haskell is not actually purely functional: it is a purely functional core sub-language with extremely well controlled additional side-effect-producing parts
b) Monads are not actually considered "part" of the Haskell language, in the same way that pre-standardization STL was not "part" of the C++ language.
c) I'm completely missing something.
Enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.
Texas has the second highest population of the US states and North Dakota is the second lowest.
Assuming for some reason that population plays a role in murder rate--which seems a little weird to me--the more reasonable solution would be to break Texas up into lots of little states, if you really think that the number of people who happen to fall inside an accidental political boundary is determinative of the murder rate therein.
If you're going to reify political boundaries in this way you're going to have to explain why the US as a whole doesn't have a higher murder rate than Texas: after all, it has a much higher population.
Twenty years... sounds pretty close. I guess that some people, good people, honest people, might be out there wondering... "Who really did this terrible thing?"
Sure stops re-offending,
Except in the all-too-common case when the Organs of the State kill the wrong person.
As for the deterrent effect: Texas has the death penalty and has for a long time, and the State of Texas is aggressive about killing people on Death Row. Texas has one of the highest murder rates in the US.
North Dakota does not have the death penalty, and as far as I know never has. It has one of the lowest murder rates in the US.
Anyone who is not batshit insane will look at those facts and ask, "What is it about North Dakota that keeps the murder rate so low, and what can we do to make Texas more like that?" Instead, ideological idiots distract everyone from the debate with their data-free imaginings.
Thanks for the correction! Now I'm wondering if Pohl and Kornbluth ever collaborated on a story in the same universe... I'm pretty sure Kornbluth used it as background for his story "The Little Black Bag", but I'm now doubting my memory of that, too!
In any case, I recommend "The Marching Morons"--it doesn't go for the cheap laughs the way "Idiocracy" does.
Plus no one has any clue how the brain computes really so making a claim about the formation of thoughts is just nonsense.
Unfortunately, what a certain class of pseudo-scientist has learned is that monkeys in suits are too stupid to know the difference between real, conservative, careful science and over-hyped handwaving. Since we live in a world where monkeys in suits have managed to get almost total control of the corporate system and used that to leverage thier way into political power, people who suck up to the monkeys and make them feel good about themselves and their world by making outrageously false claims get rewarded with cash, while real scientists get left behind.
Our world increasingly looks like Fredrick Pohl's story "The Marching Morons", in which idiots have taken over the world (it's much more clever than the film "Idiocracy" was) and the idiots refer to the few remaining smart people, who keep things running, as "dummies". In retrospect, Pohl's story seems less about genetics (intelligence being at best very weakly heritable, as everyone with a brain knows) and more about the social factors that put money and power into the hands of exactly the kind of human who seeks money and power (rather than knowledge and serenity.)
Because it's impossible to load a bomb onto a ship while it is at sea.
And a nuclear bomb is so big it can't fit into a modest-sized sailboat of the kind that people have been known to sail around the world in. There are thousands upon thousands of such boats, and the rate of inspection of cargo is pretty much nil. So unless you're going to stop everyone crusing along your coasts and inspect them, no matter how small the boat, you're going to have to live with the risk that nuclear weapons will be delivered to your shores.
I'm sure the Organs of the State would love to institute a program of random coastal inspection. After all, harrassing innocent sailors is the only way to keep America safe, and the revenue they could generate from seizing yachts would no-doubt keep them in coke and hookers for a long, long time.
The real problem here is I have no idea what is being patented. Since /. patent-related headlines and summaries are always false and misleading, this posting just makes me wonder what Amazon has actually patented. It would be interesting to know, but since neither the headline nor the summary of the article contains any factual information about the patent that could be used to form a rational judgement about the novelty of the subject matter there's really no point in discussing it.
Since it's Amazon--assuming the summary has the assignee correct--the patent probably has something to do with online sales, but I wonder what? I just wish there was some way of figuring that out without digging down into the USPTO site myself, which I can't be bothered to do because all it will tell me is that a patent has been granted on something that might actually be kind of innovative. At least, that's what's always happened in the past when I've bothered to contribute to the /. community by trying to inform people about how the (badly flawed) American patent system actually works.
If we knew what had been patented, people might be able to present prior art, but since we know nothing about what has been patented there really isn't any point in talking about it, is there?
The summary's misleading
Thanks for the information! When I read the headline I of course thought, "I wonder what Google has patented. It's too bad I don't know anything about it, having just read the headline and summary. I can be pretty Google has filed a patent application, but I have no idea what it's on."
Wouldn't it be amazing if the /. editors actually posted actual information in summaries?
but why add that extra unnecessary step in the middle when it's just an added inefficiency?
Is compressing air more or less efficient than charging a battery? The latter is about 70% efficient. The former depends on the precise circumstances, but can be made pretty much 100% efficient. That's a small gain, but it's a gain.
Also, the "carbon footprint" claims are obviously bogus: only 25% of the electricity where I am comes from fossil fuels. 40 or 50% is nuclear, the balance hydro.
The advantages of compressed-air vehicles are cheap manufacture, low maintenance and zero local emissions. My car sits out back six days a week (and in fact, right now it's been over two weeks since I last drove!) I've adapted my lifestyle for minimum costs, so I don't drive much (or use much power generally). I'd leap at an compressed air vehicle, and I expect that as more and more people in North America feel the squeeze of our corporate overlords they will get off the treadmill of high-consumption, high-debt living and adopt lower-cost lifestyles like mine.
So there may be a future for compressed-air vehicles yet.
When you read a large number of the e-mails, it becomes clearer and clearer just how much their data must be massaged and adjusted in order to reach the results they have.
This is unsurprising--the unfortunate thing about the way climate studies has been politicized is that while this kind of thing goes on in all fields, it does so in public. That's ok because nobody cares.
In climate science, with such vigorous voices on both sides claiming the most extreme conclusions imaginable from unphysical simulations, low-quality data and bad economics, both sides have tended to hide the inner workings of their processes, which results in lower quality science and much lower quality public policy.
Climate scientists need to spend a few years publishing every little bit of information they have, letting the nutjobs on the other side have a go at it, and therefore draw them in to an open scientific process. The impression the climate community gives of being closed, secretive and unscientific helps undermine their credibility.
I would argue to everyone, that the word hide implies falsification or concealment. So the author was knowingly manipulatin data to conceal the truth.
Hey, you sound just like my psycho ex-g/f, who would stop in the middle of an argument to claim that the way I used some particular word could only mean exactly one thing, and it was the thing she wanted it to mean, and not anything else.
Psychotic, abusive people often think this way: they believe they have or can infer from a few words exactly what the original intent of the speaker was, whereas sane people know that we most of us choose our words poorly and sloppily and our utterances simply will not bear anything like such close psychotic analysis.
So sure he used the words "hide the decline", and all that means--unless you're on some kind of witch hunt and don't believe that stupidity explains far more than venality--is that he's being sloppy and casual about what he's doing to clean up a known issue with the data.
I often use the word "fake" when describing data analysis algorithms, as in, "We can fake an XYZ algorithm here," meaning that what I'm doing is not a true XYZ algorithm, but rather some known and valid approximation to it (usually done for reasons of computational efficiency.) Someone like you would see that, declare that I could only possibly mean one thing by "fake", and call me a fraud.
That would be childish, narrow-minded and stupid, and I don't see any reason to make a different judgment of what you're doing here.
1. A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising:
Thank-you for fulfilling and important step in the rigidly scripted /. patent-story method patent:
1) Editors post patent-related story with false headline and misleading summary
2) Commentors who know nothing about patent law and who have not read the claims respond with outrage
3) Someone posts the actual claims, thereby demonstrating the headline is false and the summary misleading.
4) Outrage continues unabated, although sometimes its target shifts to the supposed trivialiality of the actual claims.
5) I post a message like this, which no one reads.
6) Discussion peters out, having changed nothing, and educated no one about the nature of patents or about the nature of /. patent stories, which always have false headlines, misleading summaries, and rigidly follow this script.
the Slashdot editors should do more to fact check these stories before publishing them.
They would get fewer page-views from the outraged and ignorant if they did that, which is the only reason I can see for them to persist in posting patent stories with false headlines and misleading summaries.
It would actually be pretty incredible if every patent-related post or comment on Slashdot was met by a host of patent attorneys chiming in on the issue.
It would be even more incredible if any patent-related story on /. ever deviated from the rigid kubuki theatre script we inevitably see:
1) One of the editors posts a story with a false headline and misleading summary saying that X has a patent on Y, when Y never appears anywhere in the claims.
2) Commenters chime in with minor variants on the following themes, in sequence:
a) "Product Z has had this feature for years, as did something I wrote in kindergarten! How dare X try to patent it! Are the patent examiners on drugs!!!???"
b) "The patent is actually on something quite different. The claims actually say..." followed by a clear explanation of how to read a patent, and how the claims as actually written could be considered sufficiently novel to meet the abysmally low standard required for patentability.
c) "I don't care if the patent is actually on something else! It isn't sufficiently novel to satisfy my intuitive sense of the way the patent system should work! I'm outraged! Software patents are dumb!"
It's a curious phenomenon, particularly since the /. editors clearly believe that the US patent system is extremely solid and only issues pretty reasonable patents. If they believed otherwise, they wouldn't have to put false headlines and misleading summaries on every single patent story that appears on /.
After all, when you lie about your enemy to try to make your point, you're clearly stating, "My enemy is actually such a good guy that I have to make stuff up to make them look bad. Telling the truth about them simply won't generate the outrage I want, because there's really nothing very outrageous about what they are doing."
Since /. editors never tell the truth about software patents in the US, we can only conclude that they are highly supportive of the existing software patent system, as they can't come up with any substantive reality-based critique.
If I'm not doing anything illegal, then I don't have to worry about being arrested.
That statement is false. People who have not done anything illegal get arrested all the time. Sometimes completely innocent people get shot and killed by police. That Brazilian guy who was murdered by British police in broad daylight. The Polish immigrant who was killed by the RCMP in Vancouver airport a year or so ago. How can you not be aware of this?
Furthermore: if I am not doing anything illegal, what possible reason do they have to watch me?
What pray-tell, directly disadvantages the average citizen if they were to be watched at all times?
Loss of privacy. Even in public, citizens have a reasonable expectation of not being under continuous, recorded, surveillance. It's what I expect, it's what I have now, and I would lose something of great value to me if it were to disappear.
One might equally ask: what advantage do citizens gain by being watched at all times? It certainly isn't a reduction in crime: Chicago is somewhat more dangerous in terms of robberies and assaults than Huston or Los Angeles, and almost twice as dangerous as New York (all cities of comparable size or larger, and at least one with major drug and gang violence problems.)
If anyone cared about making Chicago safer they'd be asking how to make it more like New York (or Toronto), not engaging in fantasy science-fiction beliefs about how allowing corrupt police to watch everyone will make the city safer, when it demonstrably, empirically, doesn't.
However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better. To make matters worse, these large banks are fairly interconnected, which means if even a couple major banks were to go under, it would have caused problems for anyone who it owed money to, including all the other banks. Letting a company like CitiGroup go under would cause a chain reaction that would cause lots of other banks to go under.
So if I understand you correctly, the government putting a large bank into receivership, taking it over with full tax-payer backing, and selling it off for parts in a systematic way would cause a chain reaction that would destroy the entire financial system of the world.
Sweden--a far more capitalist nation than the US, apparently--did exactly this in the '90's without the world ending. The only counter argument I've heard to that is, "Well but the US is SO MUCH BIGGER and we have SO MANY BANKS."
But it isn't the thousands of mom-and-pop banks that were in trouble: it was a handful of big banks, and AIG. Rather than socialize the risk while leaving the profits in private hands, which is what the Bush/Obama administration did, putting them into receivership was clearly the right thing to do.
It's been clear that as American imperial power grows, the US becomes a more "conservative" place, in the sense of being afraid to try anything outside the envelope of "business as usual". This is a common effect of imperial power, which is jealous of its reputation and therefore afraid to try anything that might fail.
But we need to call a spade a spade, and not pretend that the fearful fantasies of world-wide collapse were remotely realistic, when clearly putting a small handful of big banks into receivership would be just a minor variant on what actually happened--which was banks continuing to operate with taxpayer backing, except that the taxpayer would have actually been the owner rather than simply absorbing all the risk.
Exploded mines and artillery shells leave unburnt residue.
Wow, you've identified an imperfection. I guess we'd all better quit and not bother then.
Seriously, is this how the world looks from the safety of your basement, where you can't be bothered to go out 'cause everthing isn't perfect?
This is a brilliant and useful addtion to the deminer's toolkit, and any potential issues are tiny compared to the added value it gives. Having poked around the problem of demining (I'm a sensors and image processing guy, not a biochemistry guy) I can say that this idea is clever and useful, despite the whining of armchair critics.
The added information this stuff would give deminers is worth a lot. Obviously other sources of explosive material is going to show up, but tell me, can you see from your basement how the distribution pattern of those other sources will differ from the distribution pattern of intact mines?
Can you see in your imagination how it might be more diffuse, say? Or how the pattern from intact mines might
actually contain some information as to the depth and age and type of the mine?
No, of course you can't, because you stopped thinking at the moment you thought of a plausible deviation from perfection--I can tell because you didn't even bother to complete your comment with the clearly implicity "therefore this is useless". And if you don't think it's useless, why didn't you say so, because anyone reading your comment sure would think that's what you were saying. So you should work on either improving your thinking skills, or your communications skills, or both.
but to be honest, the whole scientific backstory of the film is so thin I never actually considered that people would genuinely fear a cataclysm as depicted in the movie. "Mutating neutrinos"... really?
Yeah, I can't even hate you for working on it, nor the producers et al for creating it. It's just a movie, after all, so you don't fall into anything like the same class as the people who are promoting the 2012 thing as fact for their own benefit.
If anyone ends up killing themselves or ruining their lives, it'll be at the feet of those bastards, not artists and businesspeople who are honestly trying to make a buck piggy-backing on the phenomenon. You lot have pursued the only honourable way of profiting from this kind of idiocy, and more power to you.
That given, my question is: if we have people who want to ban cell phones because of zero evidence that they emit any harmful radiation, when will see a movement to ban panic-mongers? Panic-mongers do cause demonstrable harm and in the case of the LHC black-hole lies are known to have precipiated at least one death (a teenage girl who committed suicide.) So while artists making clearly absurd fiction ("mutating neutrinos"?) are in the clear, I think we should be looking very carefully at how to come down hard on panic-mongers. They are far more dangerous than any of the ridiculous threats they promote.
The CFL condition that limits the maximum time step one can take shows no sign of relenting. Score has been Courant (the C in CFL) 1, Moore 0 for the last three decades.
Yeah, I always get a laugh out of people who think that we're ever going to beat down turbulent flow with higher resolution. It's vortices all the way down, and no matter how clever your implicit scheme you still have to be able to propogate information through the grid at less than the speed of sound to prevent numerical shock waves from blowing up your solution. Regularization schemes that throw away information are good, but that reduces the value of going to higher resolutions.
So I'm doubtful that we'll be predicting the weather, or the climate, with significantly greater accuracy ten years from now than we are today. Some problems just don't yield to brute force very well, although one would hope that at least the higher resolution models will conserve energy and have free boundary conditions in place of today's frequently artificially fixed ones.
Heisenberg is reputed to have said at the end of his life, "I have two questions I want to ask God: 'Why relativity?', and 'Why turbulence?' I'm really hoping He'll be able to give me an answer on relativity..."
The ability for bosses, politicians, whoever to just look at your "program code" and filter for the best candidate is dangerous
But in a free market that'll mean that companies that don't do such stupid things will out-compete the ones who do, right? Unless of course actual performance is really just an unpredictable crap-shoot!
has been distilled into an online dating site.
This isn't a "dating" site, it's a "mating" site, presumably aimed primarily at people under 30 or so who want to hook up for life with a single partner they intend to have children with. That's not "dating", which is spending time in the company of a member of the complementary sexual orientation, possibly naked, for pleasure (social, sexual, whatever).
If you're going to call "singled minded pursuit of a suitable life-partner" "dating", then we need another word for "spending enjoyable time with someone who may or may not be a potential life partner but who's fun to be with."
And the real problem is that if you think that the only point of dating is mating, you're missing out all of the social and relationship learning that goes on during dating. Some of my best times have been spent with women I knew from very early on had no potential as a life-partner, and those experiences taught me a great deal about myself and what works for me and doesn't in a relationship. Dating is an instance where the journey itself is an important part of the goal, and there is no other way to learn what you need except by actually taking the long way.
Women, in my experience, really do tend to view every date as a potential step toward marriage or a long-term relationship, and tend to drop men when they feel things are "not going anywhere" (which means "not heading in the direction of marriage".) This is a silly attitude that seems to have been reified by this site. Dating only potential life partners is like companies that focus all of their resources on a few big customers, which is known to be a bad long-term strategy for a sustainable business.