Others have detailed what's so bad about this, but it is worth pointing out that experimental science is in general a dangerous enterprise.
Experimental physicists routinely handle dangerous materials (a colleague once worked on a project where he was using hydrofluoric acid, which has to be one of the nastiest substances known.) We also deal with pressure vessels (another colleague working on high pressure proportional counters considered explosions a routine part of his testing protocol). We deal with high voltage sources that are the kind of thing you might find connected to an electric chair in less civilized countries. And the list goes on...
The number of things that can go wrong with any new machine is large, and we are very fortunate that relatively few experimentalists are killed each year from the risks they expose themselves to in the name of greater knowledge.
The key falsehood in the summary is the word "likely". No one sane thinks any of this is likely ("having a high probability of occurring or being true: very probable").
Only someone as ignorant and dishonest as a journalist would suggest that strategic planners engaged in this kind of process of exploring the nooks and crannies of the future think the scenarios they are spinning are "likely." Possible, yes. Worth contemplating as worst-cases, certainly.
Likely? Only to an dishonest, ignorant journalist. But I repeat myself.
Mentioning the numbers I posted above to my kids, I realized that the 22 MJ/year figure must be wrong, even granted that I don't use a lot of electricity. There's 45 MJ in a litre of gas, and I don't think I'm only using the equivalent of half a litre of gas per year.
Checking the numbers, I dropped a factor of 1000--those pesky kW. So in fact I use 21,600 MJ per year, or not quite three times the total insolation available from my roof. Ergo, my intuition was correct, and the GPs claim that "Most houses use less energy than even 6% of the sunlight that falls on their roofs (except perhaps at extreme latitudes)." is not correct.
Oh well. It was a nice fantasy for the few minutes it lasted.
Absolute efficiency only matters where you're area-limited. Most houses use less energy than even 6% of the sunlight that falls on their roofs (except perhaps at extreme latitudes).
I started out thinking this was obviously false, and set out to prove that I was right and you were wrong. I must have made an error in the calculations below, because I seem to have proven just the opposite...
I live at 45 N, and use about 500 kWh/month, or 6000 kWh/year, which works out to about 22 MJ per year in sensible units. Let's cut the solar constant from 1360 to 1000 to deal with absorption and another factor of two to deal with night time, and we are left with 500 W/m**2 (the average for the whole Earth is 400 W/m**2, so this is a reasonable value for 45 degrees.) My house is about 10 m by 5 m in terms of useful roof area--it isn't a very big place, and only half the roof faces south, and much of that is in the shadow of the neighbour's place. That gives me a total insolation on my roof over the year of a bit under 800 MJ.
Ergo, the minimum solar cell efficiency I need to support my current lifestyle is just below 3%.
Lots of assumptions go into this, not least of which is the storage issue. A 5% efficient cell may not be enough to cope with storage losses, and more importantly the non-uniform distribution of sunlight over the course of the year implies a much larger storage requirement than is currently practical.
But the bottom line is, to steal a phrase: it's raining soup. All we need is a bucket.
the article goes on about "archaic" groups of humans who the humans coming from out of Africa met up with and made love to without ever explaining who or what these archaic groups were and how they had got where they were.
Evidence suggests that early hominids migrated out of Africa in waves. Homo erectus, for example, is believed to have evolved in Africa and spread over much of Asia one or two million years ago. The general pattern of hominid evolution is one of evolution of new species in Africa followed by general dispersion over those parts of the globe accessible by foot. This pattern appears to have been repeated several times: H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis/neanderthalensis[1] and H. sapiens.
The reality of hominid evolution is that we don't know a lot. The number of fossils is small and the weight of inference they bear is heavy. As Mark Twain said, in science one gets such a huge return in speculation from such a trifling investment of fact. However, the DNA evidence points quite strongly to the evolution of modern humans in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, and the migration across the rest of the Old World about 70,000 years ago, with the settling of Australia by perfectly ordinary H. sapiens who are just like all the rest of us about 40,000 years ago. North America was colonized somewhat later, but probably not that much.
Humans are much bigger on exogamy than any other primate: we have a strong tendency to breed outside our kin group. We'll have sex with just about anything, and actually show a marked preference for those who are not perceived to be close kin. This is why the differences between races are so tiny, and restricted entirely to rapidly evolved and quite trivial enzymic variations that have high survival value in different climates. We are all multi-racial under the skin, and all have ancestors of different races far more recently in our family tree than most people appreciate (Icelanders may be exempt from this rule.)
So on the face of it, if there were multiple waves of near-modern humans migrating across the Old World, it is very likely that the members of the most recent group would have interbred with previous groups.
[1] For the racists in the audience, it might be worth contemplating that Neanderthals are the only hominid species that appears to have evolved in Europe (from H. heidelbergensis that left Africa earlier) and of all the hominids they are amongst the least successful.
Really, guys, it pretty much takes your sails out of the wind to post headlines that lie and then complain that eeevil companies are disingenuous in their fine print.
I think the solution for our energy problem will not come from a single source.
Each of which will require a large investment in infrastructure.
To say the solution for our energy problem will come from many sources is to say that the solution to our energy problem will be hugely expensive, because it will require large investments in multiple technologies. That investment will take the form of R&D, infrastructure, marketing (no point in building it if people don't know about it), creation of service and support industry, etc.
The global, universal nature of the petroleum business is one of the keys to low prices, and we can be certain that no really fragmented multi-source energy solution will ever be as cheap as petroleum once was. Because of this, it is likely that what we will see in the next few decades is an explosion of alternative energy sources (which I hope is not a pun) followed by a consolidation into one or two majors, probably solar and nuclear for electricity, with algal biodiesel and batteries for transport, although the final result will depend as much on political machinations and marketing tricks as technological quality. The winners will get stupidly rich. The losers will lose.
So a diversity of solutions is no solution in the long run. Monocultures succeed because they keep costs down, and so there will be a major economic incentive to find one or two alternative energy technologies that can be stretched to cover the overwhelming majority of the energy consumer's needs.
And when your choice is Incumbant Congressional Whore A vs. Challenging Congressional Whore B there isn't a whole hell of a lot anyone can do about it...
So what you're saying is, "I know not what course others may choose, but as for me, give me the easy way, or I can't be bothered!"
Remember: "You can't fight city hall" is government propaganda.
the difference here is that it screws with the Constitution, which is a procedural problem (should only be done via Constitutional amendment)
This is only a "procedural problem" if you can guarantee with near certainty that the result of the correct procedure will be the same as the result of the illegitimate, illegal, unconstitutional and incorrect procedure, which is by no means a sure thing in this case.
Even your sleepwalking populace might notice a proposal to amend the Constitution to remove Habeas Corpus protections. In fact, if Congress doesn't pass any more "procedural problems" to override those pesky 2nd Amendment rights, the people might just get up in arms over it.
Which is one reason the US isn't a democracy. What the majority of people think is not necessarily the best course of action -- the will of the people can be a very dangerous thing.
Too true, which is why the framers of your constitution put in a section entitled Limits on Congress that says, amongst other things, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
This provides a nice empirical test of the claim "the US isn't a democracy." So long as Congress does not pass a law like the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspends Habeas Corpus for non-citizens the US could plausibly be claimed to not be a democracy. Now that the law has been passed, it is much more difficult to make that claim. Note that the language of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous and says nothing about the citizenship of the people for whom Habeas Corpus may be suspended.
The fact that Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 suggests that they know the voters will reward them despite the unconstitutional nature of the law. That sounds like a democracy to me.
As time passes, the US looks less and less like a democratic republic and more and more like a democratic oligarchy, in which a small clique of the ultra-wealthy ruling class both court and manipulate the unrestrained will of the populace, usually in the name of security of some kind. The Republicans focus on security against drugs and porn and terrorism; the Democrats focus on security against poverty and unemployment and porn (remember Tipper Gore?). This is a far cry from the republic your founders envisioned and to an extent achieved, in which the constitution put limits on the will of the people in the name of liberty.
The problem with "fake news" on the Web is that it's trivial to produce, and not so very different from what you can get every day of the year on the political blog of your choice.
My personal advice to anyone who gets the urge to run a fake news story is: if you could create funny fake news stories successfully, you'd be working for The Onion by now. If you aren't working for The Onion, it would probably be best if you kept your "humour" to yourself.
Why the/. editors see fit to bore us with this nonsense each year is beyond me.
Maybe it's time for individuals and corporations to be held libel for what their computers spew. Got a botnet sending phishing emails from your business? Boom, big fine.
Sure, because look at how well putative penalties for other crimes have worked at reducing the crime rate.
For example North Dakota has one of the lowest homicide rates in the U.S., and no death penalty, ever. Texas has amongst the highest homicide rates, and the death penalty not only exists, it is fairly routinely applied.
Anyone who was serious about reducing homicide in Texas would look at this and say, "How can we make Texas more like North Dakota?" Unfortunately, we live in a world full of self-aggrandizing, arrogant, power-hungry blow-hards, who are far more likely to conclude, "We aren't killing enough Texans. Boom!"
There is a lot of work going on with ethanol from cellulose.
And there has been for thirty years.
Cellulosic ethanol is the green movement's nuclear fusion: it is the energy source of the future, and always will be.
It's good to do continuing research on the problem, but very bad to use any presumption that the research will yield positive results when trying to plan our day.
Racism is idiotic because it's not based on fact, whereas there are real reasons to perceive the actions of men and women differently. I don't think you can compare the two.
Even granted that men and women have some significant differences (women are physically tougher, live longer, have faster reflexes, etc) it does not follow that any individual man who is a victim of male violence is somehow complicit in his own victimization simply by virtue of being male, which is something that I hear surprisingly often when I point out that the rate of male victimization is much higher than the rate of female victimization.
This is because we as a society do not care two figs about violence against males. We do not value our young males, and we do not teach them to take care of themselves. Quite the opposite: we teach them to be careless of their own safety, and we teach them they are cowards or worse if they take reasonable precautions like giving a thought to being attacked when walking to their car in a dark parking lot.
This is not to say that violence against females is acceptable. It is obviously not. But any time I hear anyone decrying "violence against women" as being particularly bad I have to wonder if they think violence against men is OK? Or at least not so particularly bad? And if they do think that, I really have to wonder why. If they are even remotely decent and humane it certainly cannot be the fact that most violence is committed by men, because it is also the case that, for example, in the United States most violence is committed by black people, and there is a word for people who think that that fact makes violence against black people OK.
Imagine for instance that security officials are looking to see if there are any of 10,000 known criminal/terrorists at the superbowl.
I have an epistemological question. How do the security officials in your fantasy know that the people they are looking for are criminals or terrorists?
In your fantasy, have they been convicted by due process in any open and public court of law, in which they have been allowed to see and answer the evidence against them and question witnesses against them and show evidence and call witnesses in their own defence?
Because if that is what your fantasy is like, I feel impelled to point out that it is quite unlike the world we are actually living in.
It just so happens that Harper was once a champion of freedom, privacy, and Libertarianism.
Regardless of what Harper was once a champion of (and I'd dispute your claims that he was ever much of a supporter of freedom and privacy given his opposition to same-sex marriage and his strong anti-drug, law'n'order stance) he has shown himself in power to be an extreme pragmatist. The GST rate reduction is a perfect example of wrong-headed economic policy that Harper with good academic credentials in economics understands perfectly. But his knowledge of the principles made no difference when he realized it would get him votes.
Successful Canadian politicians have always been brutal pragmatists. Jean Cretien is typical of a successful Canadian prime minister, and that fellow who came after him, like Joe what-his-name in the late '70's, is typical of the failures.
On the good side, because of our lottery-style electoral system, where a five percent shift in popular vote can produce a fifty percent shift in parliamentary representation, it is very difficult for any party to stray very far from mainstream Canadian values and stay in power for long. Ergo, it is very unlikely that we will ever see the kind of police powers that have been granted in the U.S. and Britain lately, because the Canadian public have very little feeling that we need such things.
According to m-w.com, frigging is a word, coming from the Middle English word fryggen (to wiggle).
In that case, I'll see your m-w.com and raise you the Wiktionary (which presumably the GP would claim is also not a word.)
My point is that non-standard, rare, odd, and simply weird neologisms should all be treated by the same standard. "Virii" and "frigging" are outliers for different reasons, but it seems to me both churlish and inconsistent to condemn one of them to nonwordhood while keeping the other.
Good advice otherwise, though. What's hot today in IT will be tomorrow's dead end. If you do something you love, and it dies out, you may well be able to get a job for life maintaining the legacy code base in some dead technology. It's a pity there isn't more FORTRAN code still used outside of academia, because I'm still kinda partial to it.
And you wind up with as many ontologies as there are people, because meaning is a verb.
The problem isn't that people are stupid. It's that people are smart. They can think of more perfectly legitimate and completely incompatible ways of classifying things than I can possibly imagine, and there is as yet no proven, effective way of performing the vital task of "finding pages marked up relative to ontologies that are created by people who think sufficiently like me on the topic I am currently interested in to be useful."
That long specification is really what the semantic web needs to be useful, and I can tell you that after a couple of decades in and out of academia at all levels, I know that I can't predict how anyone will classify anything, and I know that their past behaviour in other areas of study is no guide to whether we will be compatible in a different area.
How do you even clearly define a species if it doesn't have sex?
This is an excellent question, and strongly suggests that if we view evolution from a mathematical perspective that there are strong attractors in the environment that maintain species boundaries. Otherwise, we would expect a lot more diversity amongst asexual species, as every individual would spawn a whole bunch of imperfect copies that would all do about equally well.
It may be that ecological competition is the key to maintaining the morphological integrity of asexual species. That is, rather than competing for mates, each member of an asexual species is competing with all other organisms in their environment for ecological resources--fundamentally, food. If this competition is strong, each generation will be culled of all but the best competitors. This is quite different from sexual species, where competition for mates tends to dominate the selection process, although that is obviously not independent of the ability to find food, shelter, etc. But individuals of all other species in the environment will be direct competitors for individuals of an asexual species, which is much less the case for sexual species, who are primarily competing with other members of their own kind for mates.
There are people who challenge the general validity of the "biological species concept", pointing out that in plants, for example, hybrids are extremely common, making species-classification very difficult. But the fact that we can readily talk about asexual species suggests that the evolutionary landscape has some rather deep, narrow minima where individuals thrive, surrounded by high rocky plateaus that are practically inaccessible.
As to the original poster's question: science journalists are trained in journalism school to lie and make stuff up. No science journalist is allowed to publish without first swearing a solemn oath to never tell the truth about any discovery. Science journalists all hate science. They understand neither the content of any field nor any aspect of the scientific process, and don't think anyone else should either.
Since in many jurisdictions abortion is not unlawful, it cannot be murder there, although the fetus is obviously a human being. Both sides of the abortion debate are playing silly games with language, cowardly retreating behind abstractions that hide the moral realities. The anti-abortion side falsely try to conclude that the simple fact of being human and innocent is sufficient to warrant extreme social sanctions against being killed, which any innocent young man who has ever been drafted will know is a novel and rarely seen idea. In moronic response to this the pro-choice side declare against all evidence that the fetus is not, in fact, a human being, which makes one wonder what kind of a being it is?
Anyone sane looking at the issue would conclude that: a) a fetus is human and b) killing humans is sometimes justified although always unfortunate and c) in early pregnancy the person who is in the best position to decide if her child would be better off dead is the child's mother. Virtually every human society has practiced some form of infanticide, and infanticide by vacuum suction curatage is a much kinder and more human alternative than anything else that has ever been done.
If you're looking for a grand principle to justify the killing of unwanted children while still in the womb it is simple: every child should be a wanted child, and it is a far greater crime to bring a child into the world unwanted than it is to kill a child in the early stages of gestation, and it is the child's mother who is both in the best position to judge and the only position to act on such a choice.
The abortion debate is populated by two kinds of people: those who see boundaries everywhere, and those who see no boundaries whatsoever. On the one hand, there are those who purport to be unable to tell the difference between a week-old fetus and a year-old baby. On the other, there are those who claim that a baby a week before birth is completely unrelated in every respect to a baby a week after birth. Both groups of people are idiots, and I would dearly love to see them apply the same style of logic to every other aspect of their lives, so they could drive their cars off the road (being unable to tell where the edge is because there is no infinitely sharp division) or wake up each morning wondering where they are, because their house has more dust in it than when they went to bed and so must be a completely different place.
In free societies, everyone is master, and our language is conditioned only by the minimal need to communicate approximately with others. Beyond that, we are free to impose whatever semantics we want, and we do this to a far greater extent than most people realize. As a friend who works in GIS once said, "If I send out a bunch of geologists to map a site and collate their data at the end of the day, I can tell you who mapped where, but not what anyone mapped." Individual meanings of terms as simple as "granite" or "schist" are sufficiently variable that even extremely concrete tasks are very difficult.
Imposing uniform ontologies on any but the most narrowly defined fields is impossible, and even within those fields nominally standard vocabularies will be used differently by rapidly-dividing "cultural" subgroups within the workers in the field.
The semantic web is doomed to fail because language is far more highly personalized than anyone wants to believe. I think this is a good thing, because the only way to impose standardized meanings on terms would be to impose standardized thinking on people, and if that were possible someone would have done it by now. Whereas we know, despite millennia of attempts, no such standardization is possible, except in very small groups over a very specialized range of concepts.
Slashdot Mirror
What's so bad about that?
Others have detailed what's so bad about this, but it is worth pointing out that experimental science is in general a dangerous enterprise.
Experimental physicists routinely handle dangerous materials (a colleague once worked on a project where he was using hydrofluoric acid, which has to be one of the nastiest substances known.) We also deal with pressure vessels (another colleague working on high pressure proportional counters considered explosions a routine part of his testing protocol). We deal with high voltage sources that are the kind of thing you might find connected to an electric chair in less civilized countries. And the list goes on...
The number of things that can go wrong with any new machine is large, and we are very fortunate that relatively few experimentalists are killed each year from the risks they expose themselves to in the name of greater knowledge.
The key falsehood in the summary is the word "likely". No one sane thinks any of this is likely ("having a high probability of occurring or being true: very probable").
Only someone as ignorant and dishonest as a journalist would suggest that strategic planners engaged in this kind of process of exploring the nooks and crannies of the future think the scenarios they are spinning are "likely." Possible, yes. Worth contemplating as worst-cases, certainly.
Likely? Only to an dishonest, ignorant journalist. But I repeat myself.
Mentioning the numbers I posted above to my kids, I realized that the 22 MJ/year figure must be wrong, even granted that I don't use a lot of electricity. There's 45 MJ in a litre of gas, and I don't think I'm only using the equivalent of half a litre of gas per year.
Checking the numbers, I dropped a factor of 1000--those pesky kW. So in fact I use 21,600 MJ per year, or not quite three times the total insolation available from my roof. Ergo, my intuition was correct, and the GPs claim that "Most houses use less energy than even 6% of the sunlight that falls on their roofs (except perhaps at extreme latitudes)." is not correct.
Oh well. It was a nice fantasy for the few minutes it lasted.
Absolute efficiency only matters where you're area-limited. Most houses use less energy than even 6% of the sunlight that falls on their roofs (except perhaps at extreme latitudes).
I started out thinking this was obviously false, and set out to prove that I was right and you were wrong. I must have made an error in the calculations below, because I seem to have proven just the opposite...
I live at 45 N, and use about 500 kWh/month, or 6000 kWh/year, which works out to about 22 MJ per year in sensible units. Let's cut the solar constant from 1360 to 1000 to deal with absorption and another factor of two to deal with night time, and we are left with 500 W/m**2 (the average for the whole Earth is 400 W/m**2, so this is a reasonable value for 45 degrees.) My house is about 10 m by 5 m in terms of useful roof area--it isn't a very big place, and only half the roof faces south, and much of that is in the shadow of the neighbour's place. That gives me a total insolation on my roof over the year of a bit under 800 MJ.
Ergo, the minimum solar cell efficiency I need to support my current lifestyle is just below 3%.
Lots of assumptions go into this, not least of which is the storage issue. A 5% efficient cell may not be enough to cope with storage losses, and more importantly the non-uniform distribution of sunlight over the course of the year implies a much larger storage requirement than is currently practical.
But the bottom line is, to steal a phrase: it's raining soup. All we need is a bucket.
the article goes on about "archaic" groups of humans who the humans coming from out of Africa met up with and made love to without ever explaining who or what these archaic groups were and how they had got where they were.
Evidence suggests that early hominids migrated out of Africa in waves. Homo erectus, for example, is believed to have evolved in Africa and spread over much of Asia one or two million years ago. The general pattern of hominid evolution is one of evolution of new species in Africa followed by general dispersion over those parts of the globe accessible by foot. This pattern appears to have been repeated several times: H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis/neanderthalensis[1] and H. sapiens.
The reality of hominid evolution is that we don't know a lot. The number of fossils is small and the weight of inference they bear is heavy. As Mark Twain said, in science one gets such a huge return in speculation from such a trifling investment of fact. However, the DNA evidence points quite strongly to the evolution of modern humans in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, and the migration across the rest of the Old World about 70,000 years ago, with the settling of Australia by perfectly ordinary H. sapiens who are just like all the rest of us about 40,000 years ago. North America was colonized somewhat later, but probably not that much.
Humans are much bigger on exogamy than any other primate: we have a strong tendency to breed outside our kin group. We'll have sex with just about anything, and actually show a marked preference for those who are not perceived to be close kin. This is why the differences between races are so tiny, and restricted entirely to rapidly evolved and quite trivial enzymic variations that have high survival value in different climates. We are all multi-racial under the skin, and all have ancestors of different races far more recently in our family tree than most people appreciate (Icelanders may be exempt from this rule.)
So on the face of it, if there were multiple waves of near-modern humans migrating across the Old World, it is very likely that the members of the most recent group would have interbred with previous groups.
[1] For the racists in the audience, it might be worth contemplating that Neanderthals are the only hominid species that appears to have evolved in Europe (from H. heidelbergensis that left Africa earlier) and of all the hominids they are amongst the least successful.
The Aero interface is very fast on well supported hardware.
That is to say, Vista imposes a large and pointless cost on the vast majority of users for the purchase of "well supported hardware".
..."liquid" means "solid".
Really, guys, it pretty much takes your sails out of the wind to post headlines that lie and then complain that eeevil companies are disingenuous in their fine print.
I guess hypocrisy never goes out of style.
I think the solution for our energy problem will not come from a single source.
Each of which will require a large investment in infrastructure.
To say the solution for our energy problem will come from many sources is to say that the solution to our energy problem will be hugely expensive, because it will require large investments in multiple technologies. That investment will take the form of R&D, infrastructure, marketing (no point in building it if people don't know about it), creation of service and support industry, etc.
The global, universal nature of the petroleum business is one of the keys to low prices, and we can be certain that no really fragmented multi-source energy solution will ever be as cheap as petroleum once was. Because of this, it is likely that what we will see in the next few decades is an explosion of alternative energy sources (which I hope is not a pun) followed by a consolidation into one or two majors, probably solar and nuclear for electricity, with algal biodiesel and batteries for transport, although the final result will depend as much on political machinations and marketing tricks as technological quality. The winners will get stupidly rich. The losers will lose.
So a diversity of solutions is no solution in the long run. Monocultures succeed because they keep costs down, and so there will be a major economic incentive to find one or two alternative energy technologies that can be stretched to cover the overwhelming majority of the energy consumer's needs.
And when your choice is Incumbant Congressional Whore A vs. Challenging Congressional Whore B there isn't a whole hell of a lot anyone can do about it...
So what you're saying is, "I know not what course others may choose, but as for me, give me the easy way, or I can't be bothered!"
Remember: "You can't fight city hall" is government propaganda.
the difference here is that it screws with the Constitution, which is a procedural problem (should only be done via Constitutional amendment)
This is only a "procedural problem" if you can guarantee with near certainty that the result of the correct procedure will be the same as the result of the illegitimate, illegal, unconstitutional and incorrect procedure, which is by no means a sure thing in this case.
Even your sleepwalking populace might notice a proposal to amend the Constitution to remove Habeas Corpus protections. In fact, if Congress doesn't pass any more "procedural problems" to override those pesky 2nd Amendment rights, the people might just get up in arms over it.
Which is one reason the US isn't a democracy. What the majority of people think is not necessarily the best course of action -- the will of the people can be a very dangerous thing.
Too true, which is why the framers of your constitution put in a section entitled Limits on Congress that says, amongst other things, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
This provides a nice empirical test of the claim "the US isn't a democracy." So long as Congress does not pass a law like the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspends Habeas Corpus for non-citizens the US could plausibly be claimed to not be a democracy. Now that the law has been passed, it is much more difficult to make that claim. Note that the language of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous and says nothing about the citizenship of the people for whom Habeas Corpus may be suspended.
The fact that Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 suggests that they know the voters will reward them despite the unconstitutional nature of the law. That sounds like a democracy to me.
As time passes, the US looks less and less like a democratic republic and more and more like a democratic oligarchy, in which a small clique of the ultra-wealthy ruling class both court and manipulate the unrestrained will of the populace, usually in the name of security of some kind. The Republicans focus on security against drugs and porn and terrorism; the Democrats focus on security against poverty and unemployment and porn (remember Tipper Gore?). This is a far cry from the republic your founders envisioned and to an extent achieved, in which the constitution put limits on the will of the people in the name of liberty.
The problem with "fake news" on the Web is that it's trivial to produce, and not so very different from what you can get every day of the year on the political blog of your choice.
My personal advice to anyone who gets the urge to run a fake news story is: if you could create funny fake news stories successfully, you'd be working for The Onion by now. If you aren't working for The Onion, it would probably be best if you kept your "humour" to yourself.
Why the
Maybe it's time for individuals and corporations to be held libel for what their computers spew. Got a botnet sending phishing emails from your business? Boom, big fine.
Sure, because look at how well putative penalties for other crimes have worked at reducing the crime rate.
For example North Dakota has one of the lowest homicide rates in the U.S., and no death penalty, ever. Texas has amongst the highest homicide rates, and the death penalty not only exists, it is fairly routinely applied.
Anyone who was serious about reducing homicide in Texas would look at this and say, "How can we make Texas more like North Dakota?" Unfortunately, we live in a world full of self-aggrandizing, arrogant, power-hungry blow-hards, who are far more likely to conclude, "We aren't killing enough Texans. Boom!"
There is a lot of work going on with ethanol from cellulose.
And there has been for thirty years.
Cellulosic ethanol is the green movement's nuclear fusion: it is the energy source of the future, and always will be.
It's good to do continuing research on the problem, but very bad to use any presumption that the research will yield positive results when trying to plan our day.
Racism is idiotic because it's not based on fact, whereas there are real reasons to perceive the actions of men and women differently. I don't think you can compare the two.
Even granted that men and women have some significant differences (women are physically tougher, live longer, have faster reflexes, etc) it does not follow that any individual man who is a victim of male violence is somehow complicit in his own victimization simply by virtue of being male, which is something that I hear surprisingly often when I point out that the rate of male victimization is much higher than the rate of female victimization.
Which is why such speculation is somewhat useless.
When Michael Faraday was asked "What good is electricity?" he replied, "What good is a baby?"
Ever walk to your car in a dark parking lot? When you do, do you give thought to being attacked? I don't
Well you should. Rates of male victimization for all crimes other than rape are considerably higher than female victimization. The rate of rape in males is very hard to estimate, but is reported at about 1/4 of the rate in females. Given that males are much less likely than females to report themselves as victims of rape, it is quite possible that the rate of rape in males is comparable to that in females. It is certainly the case that rates of violent assault and murder are about four times higher in males than females.
This is because we as a society do not care two figs about violence against males. We do not value our young males, and we do not teach them to take care of themselves. Quite the opposite: we teach them to be careless of their own safety, and we teach them they are cowards or worse if they take reasonable precautions like giving a thought to being attacked when walking to their car in a dark parking lot.
This is not to say that violence against females is acceptable. It is obviously not. But any time I hear anyone decrying "violence against women" as being particularly bad I have to wonder if they think violence against men is OK? Or at least not so particularly bad? And if they do think that, I really have to wonder why. If they are even remotely decent and humane it certainly cannot be the fact that most violence is committed by men, because it is also the case that, for example, in the United States most violence is committed by black people, and there is a word for people who think that that fact makes violence against black people OK.
Imagine for instance that security officials are looking to see if there are any of 10,000 known criminal/terrorists at the superbowl.
I have an epistemological question. How do the security officials in your fantasy know that the people they are looking for are criminals or terrorists?
In your fantasy, have they been convicted by due process in any open and public court of law, in which they have been allowed to see and answer the evidence against them and question witnesses against them and show evidence and call witnesses in their own defence?
Because if that is what your fantasy is like, I feel impelled to point out that it is quite unlike the world we are actually living in.
It just so happens that Harper was once a champion of freedom, privacy, and Libertarianism.
Regardless of what Harper was once a champion of (and I'd dispute your claims that he was ever much of a supporter of freedom and privacy given his opposition to same-sex marriage and his strong anti-drug, law'n'order stance) he has shown himself in power to be an extreme pragmatist. The GST rate reduction is a perfect example of wrong-headed economic policy that Harper with good academic credentials in economics understands perfectly. But his knowledge of the principles made no difference when he realized it would get him votes.
Successful Canadian politicians have always been brutal pragmatists. Jean Cretien is typical of a successful Canadian prime minister, and that fellow who came after him, like Joe what-his-name in the late '70's, is typical of the failures.
On the good side, because of our lottery-style electoral system, where a five percent shift in popular vote can produce a fifty percent shift in parliamentary representation, it is very difficult for any party to stray very far from mainstream Canadian values and stay in power for long. Ergo, it is very unlikely that we will ever see the kind of police powers that have been granted in the U.S. and Britain lately, because the Canadian public have very little feeling that we need such things.
According to m-w.com, frigging is a word, coming from the Middle English word fryggen (to wiggle).
In that case, I'll see your m-w.com and raise you the Wiktionary (which presumably the GP would claim is also not a word.)
My point is that non-standard, rare, odd, and simply weird neologisms should all be treated by the same standard. "Virii" and "frigging" are outliers for different reasons, but it seems to me both churlish and inconsistent to condemn one of them to nonwordhood while keeping the other.
"Virii" isn't a word, you frigging morons.
Neither is "frigging".
Good advice otherwise, though. What's hot today in IT will be tomorrow's dead end. If you do something you love, and it dies out, you may well be able to get a job for life maintaining the legacy code base in some dead technology. It's a pity there isn't more FORTRAN code still used outside of academia, because I'm still kinda partial to it.
So... you let people make their own ontologies.
And you wind up with as many ontologies as there are people, because meaning is a verb.
The problem isn't that people are stupid. It's that people are smart. They can think of more perfectly legitimate and completely incompatible ways of classifying things than I can possibly imagine, and there is as yet no proven, effective way of performing the vital task of "finding pages marked up relative to ontologies that are created by people who think sufficiently like me on the topic I am currently interested in to be useful."
That long specification is really what the semantic web needs to be useful, and I can tell you that after a couple of decades in and out of academia at all levels, I know that I can't predict how anyone will classify anything, and I know that their past behaviour in other areas of study is no guide to whether we will be compatible in a different area.
How do you even clearly define a species if it doesn't have sex?
This is an excellent question, and strongly suggests that if we view evolution from a mathematical perspective that there are strong attractors in the environment that maintain species boundaries. Otherwise, we would expect a lot more diversity amongst asexual species, as every individual would spawn a whole bunch of imperfect copies that would all do about equally well.
It may be that ecological competition is the key to maintaining the morphological integrity of asexual species. That is, rather than competing for mates, each member of an asexual species is competing with all other organisms in their environment for ecological resources--fundamentally, food. If this competition is strong, each generation will be culled of all but the best competitors. This is quite different from sexual species, where competition for mates tends to dominate the selection process, although that is obviously not independent of the ability to find food, shelter, etc. But individuals of all other species in the environment will be direct competitors for individuals of an asexual species, which is much less the case for sexual species, who are primarily competing with other members of their own kind for mates.
There are people who challenge the general validity of the "biological species concept", pointing out that in plants, for example, hybrids are extremely common, making species-classification very difficult. But the fact that we can readily talk about asexual species suggests that the evolutionary landscape has some rather deep, narrow minima where individuals thrive, surrounded by high rocky plateaus that are practically inaccessible.
As to the original poster's question: science journalists are trained in journalism school to lie and make stuff up. No science journalist is allowed to publish without first swearing a solemn oath to never tell the truth about any discovery. Science journalists all hate science. They understand neither the content of any field nor any aspect of the scientific process, and don't think anyone else should either.
Do you even know what murder means?
Murder means unlawful killing of a human being.
Since in many jurisdictions abortion is not unlawful, it cannot be murder there, although the fetus is obviously a human being. Both sides of the abortion debate are playing silly games with language, cowardly retreating behind abstractions that hide the moral realities. The anti-abortion side falsely try to conclude that the simple fact of being human and innocent is sufficient to warrant extreme social sanctions against being killed, which any innocent young man who has ever been drafted will know is a novel and rarely seen idea. In moronic response to this the pro-choice side declare against all evidence that the fetus is not, in fact, a human being, which makes one wonder what kind of a being it is?
Anyone sane looking at the issue would conclude that: a) a fetus is human and b) killing humans is sometimes justified although always unfortunate and c) in early pregnancy the person who is in the best position to decide if her child would be better off dead is the child's mother. Virtually every human society has practiced some form of infanticide, and infanticide by vacuum suction curatage is a much kinder and more human alternative than anything else that has ever been done.
If you're looking for a grand principle to justify the killing of unwanted children while still in the womb it is simple: every child should be a wanted child, and it is a far greater crime to bring a child into the world unwanted than it is to kill a child in the early stages of gestation, and it is the child's mother who is both in the best position to judge and the only position to act on such a choice.
The abortion debate is populated by two kinds of people: those who see boundaries everywhere, and those who see no boundaries whatsoever. On the one hand, there are those who purport to be unable to tell the difference between a week-old fetus and a year-old baby. On the other, there are those who claim that a baby a week before birth is completely unrelated in every respect to a baby a week after birth. Both groups of people are idiots, and I would dearly love to see them apply the same style of logic to every other aspect of their lives, so they could drive their cars off the road (being unable to tell where the edge is because there is no infinitely sharp division) or wake up each morning wondering where they are, because their house has more dust in it than when they went to bed and so must be a completely different place.
Lewis Carol had it right, and George Orwell agreed with him: "Which is to be master" is the question that matters.
In free societies, everyone is master, and our language is conditioned only by the minimal need to communicate approximately with others. Beyond that, we are free to impose whatever semantics we want, and we do this to a far greater extent than most people realize. As a friend who works in GIS once said, "If I send out a bunch of geologists to map a site and collate their data at the end of the day, I can tell you who mapped where, but not what anyone mapped." Individual meanings of terms as simple as "granite" or "schist" are sufficiently variable that even extremely concrete tasks are very difficult.
Imposing uniform ontologies on any but the most narrowly defined fields is impossible, and even within those fields nominally standard vocabularies will be used differently by rapidly-dividing "cultural" subgroups within the workers in the field.
The semantic web is doomed to fail because language is far more highly personalized than anyone wants to believe. I think this is a good thing, because the only way to impose standardized meanings on terms would be to impose standardized thinking on people, and if that were possible someone would have done it by now. Whereas we know, despite millennia of attempts, no such standardization is possible, except in very small groups over a very specialized range of concepts.