The Wiccans are a straw man. No major Democratic figure is a Wiccan, or panders to Wiccans. On the issue of going along with obvious falsehoods to appease religious nutjobs, the two parties are not equivalent. The Republican party will proudly support policies based on obvious falsehoods, and will not get my vote until they return to valuing reality.
And for what little it's worth, Wiccans aren't pre-Christian, they're post-Christian, though for most purposes I wouldn't even distinguish them from Christians at all. Superstitous clap-trapist covers it well enough I think.
No, it is not the same type of problem. George Soros is trying to persuade others to agree with his opinion on the appropriate role and conduct of government. He gets to talk more loudly than many because he is very rich. If others agree with him, I may well think they are wrong (and do), but the things I think they are wrong about are things upon which intelligent people might honestly disagree.
The religious crazies seek to base public policy on clear falsehoods. Those who go along cannot be in my judgment both intelligent and honest.
"I don't personally actually KNOW any Republicans that don't consider evolution to be an obvious, plain-as-day fact."
Three of the presidential candidates said they didn't believe in evolution. None of the others painted the question as ridiculous. I don't confuse Republicans with religious crazies; I myself know Republicans who are not. I correctly identify the Republican party as ready and willing to pander to religious crazies, and have it's policies shaped by them.
"True, they're not really double blind, but as I said to the other posters, that makes their results stronger. You would expect that less blindness would make it *more* likely to get the public to appreciate the art..."
The point of doing something double-blind is that you can't know with any certainty what effect a lack of blindness will have. Did Joshua Bell, knowing he was a famous musician pretending to be a mere street performer unconsciously project an air of "nothing to see here"?
Other than that though, I entirely agree with you. The desire of people to hear/read/see "the best" and the desire of promoters to sell it to them means both will want to perceive the "best" few musicians/authors/artists as significantly better than the next hundred or thousand. But this is entirely unlikely. It's not so in any objectively-measurable endeavor; e.g. the best sprinters are only very slightly faster than the hundreth best.
If you can tell the difference between *any* speaker cable and something costing $1 a foot at Home Depot... well, you're mistaken. You can't tell a difference in the sound because there isn't any.
Speaker design is complex, and all manner of things can make all manner of difference. Cable has a certain gauge, it is well-connected or not, it is broken or not, end of story. OK, silver is marginally more conductive than copper so you could use a slightly thinner cable to achieve the exact same result if for some reason you wanted to spend a lot of money to make your cables more easily breakable.
I'm not entirely sure what your larger point is, but the examples you cite are not double blind tests.
In the first, for example, the passers-by on the metro didn't know the street musician was a world-renowned violinist, but for a double blind study, you would need the observing journalist and the violinist himself to be similarly ignorant, which strikes me as impossible.
"Isn't it true, as you build an audio system with very high end components, you need better cables?
While I think THESE cables are way over the top, I think only an audiophile would possible hear the slightest difference."
The point is, not even an audiophile can possibly hear the slightest difference. There is not the slightest difference. You can slap a meter on both cables and establish there is no difference. You can (and people have) easily set up a double-blind experiment where nobody knows which system is using the uber high end speaker cables and which one is using a 50-cent-a-foot lamp cord from Home Depot, and nobody can successfully tell which is which.
The gauge of the wire is the only thing that makes any difference anywhere close to being perceivable by humans. Gold plated contacts inhibit corrosion, so you might be able to tell the difference there; After ten years or so if you live in a really humid climate; but probably not even then. You should probably just get a nice lamp cord)
The difference between a "high end audiophile" and everyone else is not that he hears anything they don't; it's that he thinks he does. But if it doesn't sound better until you hear the price...
The builders of this have not called it an "aircraft". It is a rocket. I see little reason to doubt that it will get off the ground in some fashion, as building it obviously required quite a bit more technical sophistication than the simple thrust to weight comparison need to ensure liftoff. One of the builders quite straightforwardly rates structural failure during flight "likely".
Don't worry about being mean by suggesting that this is some overly geeky guys presenting their geeky thing as more than it is. You don't come across as mean making such a suggestion, just foolish. This is some extremely geeky guys, utterly reveling in the awesome geekery of this wicked cool thing they built.
I know this is Slashdot, and expecting anyone to RTFA before commenting is futile. But if you're going to question the factual underpinnings of another posters comment, could you read even the first sentence? Oh, hell, here it is:
"Testimony today in Capitol Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas quickly and inadvertently turned to the topic of fair use when Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, was called to the stand to testify."
True. But when a lawyer makes a statement like that under oath, I suppose we can say it is grounds for disbarment. She's committing perjury, unless she wants to claim she was just giving her opinion in ignorance of the actual law. But what's she going to say? "Whoops, as head of litigation for a major record label, I wasn't aware of the basic fundamentals of copyright law."
There were many forerunners of science. Discovering things about the world via repeatable observations is too good an idea, and too simple, to have a single originator. But I cannot credit Aristotle et al with pioneering science. The Ancient Greeks were clearer thinkers than many before and after them, and did great things for logic in particular. But they were far to happy cite authority. If we're going to credit the orgin of science to one time and group of people, we can't give it to those who first did some science-like stuff; there are too many. We must instead credit those who first insisted on discovery by observation exclusively. I vote for 1663, when the founders of the Royal Society adopted the motto "Nullius in Verba" (On the word of none). The others you mention all understood this principle on some level, but none said it directly nor insisted on it exclusively.
"Does it matter why a company actually adopts open software?"
Yes. It is much better for the open source community if companies adopt open software out of profit-driven, self-interested greed.
Companies that adopt openness out of some spiritual belief in altruism will change their mind when the one exec who thinks that leaves, or when they decide "We're nice guys!" is no longer their marketing spin of the moment.
Companies that adopt open software because they have found a way in which doing so gets them more money will be more dedicated and motivated.
Well, YMMV, obviously. Mind you, I'm thinking of low-mid range restaurants; expensive places tend to have good service regardless. You may be right about the waiter vs. retail connection... but personally, I like good service at a restaurant, but at retail stores I mostly want to be left alone to figure out what I want, so inattentive staff is great!
BSD is loved by me (an engineer at a closed-source company) because it plays well with others. The stuff that is our core competency is a small fraction of all the code in our products; their are innumerable other libraries and toolkits that make our code more useful. Quite a bit of this is stuff we've bought from others (including source for our use, but not to redistribute). We're not allowed to give that stuff away, even if we wanted to give away our core code. So some of our stuff is BSD, because that's no problem. None of it is GPL; we couldn't use it if we wanted to.
And for what it's worth, we do give back to the BSD projects we use, not because we have to, or because we're nice, but because it's better for us to have our improvements merged into the main tree.
I flatly reject the implication in the summary. It is better if someone is motivated to act as you want them to by their own self interest than by altruism. They'll work harder at it and be more committed. If Noika is pushing "open" because it's a market advantage, that's better than if open just sounded like the nice thing to do to some exec who may get replaced.
Those include the word viagra when hit by either GoogleBot or FireFox. The suggestion is to ignore sites that talk about viagra when hit by Firefox, but not when hit by Googlebot.
The correct critique of this suggestion is that Google already does it, so it must not be a solution for the problem at hand.
To be clear, in Apples place I would probably have done exactly what Apple did in both the cases I mention, as it was probably the best thing for Apple. Which is not the same as being the best thing for customers or the world at large, but that's to be expected.
I think the business decisions I reference are "lame" from my point of view, but not necessarily "incorrect" from Apples.
What I object to is not so much Apples decision, but putting all the blame for those decisions on their business partners. Apple worked a deal with AT&T and/or the record labels; the fruits of those deals are Apples responsibility as much as the other party.
It's frankly a pretty trivial peeve of mine, but the need of some people to put companies such as Apple into an exclusively "good guy" or "bad guy" role strikes me as one aspect of a failure to see nuance. Other symptoms of this failure have more serious consequences.
So, Apple does some things I think are lame (like this and DRM on iTunes). But you're saying I shouldn't hold it against them, because they don't *want* to do lame things, they're just forced to. Poor Apple, these big mean companies keep holding guns to their head and making them sign contracts that say they have to do lame things. But their products are happy and shiny, so you know they're really the good guys.
A human being should be able to figure out how to do a new thing when necessary. Acquiring probably useless skills ahead of time just in case is stupid.
The simple explanation is that in terms of science, the ISS isn't worth squat, and never has been. As a concept, a space station sounds cool and worthy enough to pay big politically connected contractors oodles of tax money to build the utterly pointless thing. This is uncomfortable to admit, hence the brief lifespan, rather than just dropping it in the ocean immediately upon completion. But with typical delays, that's probably what will happen anyway.
I think many journalists genuinely try, but good science reporting and being interesting to laypeople are often at odds with each other.
Journalists generally want to report news; the new, exciting breakthrough is obviously the interesting thing. But the more new, exciting, and breakthrough-ish a science item is, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong next week, or at least that there are subtle details that must be appreciated to properly understand its impact. Even for the breakthroughs that are the real deal, you don't know they are until people have sifted through the details and digested the implications for a few years.
The science stories that are really important are generally not the exciting daily events; they are the slowly emerging themes, the gradually building consensus. It's hard to write an interesting story about 95% of experts believing what 85% of them did last year, or another several studies lending support for what pretty much everyone thinks is the case.
"why should they check to see if their universal update to the iPhone would cause your individual unit harm?"
They shouldn't have to check it does to an unlocked iPhone, but do you really think they didn't? Mind you, we (I at least) don't actually know if it causes any harm. But what do you think the chances are that Steve Jobs doesn't know?
Maybe they know it doesn't really cause any harm, and they're just spreading FUD. That would be kinda lame. Maybe they know it causes a problem because they intentionally designed it that way. That would be extremely lame, and questionably legal. Maybe they know it just happens to cause a problem that bricks unlocked phones, and are trying to alert consumers. I don't really buy that, but I understand how an Apple fan might say it with a straight face. But they just don't know? Please.
I hear that here regularly, and it sounds so wise. But I don't buy it...
You choose and hire developers for a general problem domain; you and they choose a language they like that can handle that general problem domain well. Now choose projects from that general domain.
If you're planning a project and debating between two languages of wildly different capabilites, you've probably already failed to choose the right developer. If you're debating between languages of fairly similar capabilities, you're wasting your time.
I don't think you do understand my sentiment, I'm not asking them to use any psychoanalysis. Her sweatshirt should not be considered a threat, not because of any thinking about the mental state of a potential terrorist, but because it is inherently less threatening looking than a briefcase. The briefcase has more space for more mass of explosives. Blinking lights are not an "obvious threat", they're just not dangerous at all in the fist place.
Some information-desk staffer saw something unusual, but obviously non-threatening if they'd though about it. But instead of thinking about it they thought "Bomb!", and notified the police. A stupid reaction, and a poor reflection on the paranoia of our times, but OK, people make dumb judgments, it happens. So the cops reacted appropriately to the report they got, up to the point where they apprehended her and figured out what we're talking about is a blinky-light name tag. At that point they obviously should have said "Whoops, sorry miss, hope we didn't frighten you, have a nice day." End of story.
Instead, they are charging her with a crime, talking to the news about "fake bombs". It's not a fake bomb; it's a real name tag. Every carry on in that airport is a more convincing "fake bomb"; hers isn't big enough. She should sue for false arrest and defamation.
Yes, if you bought just the wrong sort of government debt at just the wrong time in the early 70s, you lost money. Of course, if you invested in something else over that same period, you probably lost money. If you stuck the money in a mattress, you lost a lot more money.
Arguing from that that the Fed will engage in continual rate-cuts (a close as I can guess to what you mean by "printing money") in order to intentionally spur inflation so as to reduce the real value of the nation debt is just not sensible. It doesn't make sense, wouldn't work, and is entirely contrary to actual Fed policy.
I too am concerned for the future of our economy given the fiscal insanity of recent Republican administrations. But the problem will not be addressed by arguments derived from ignorance. If you talk about the "the government" "printing money" in connection with the budget deficit, you are not saying anything meaningful about American fiscal and monetary policy.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wiccans are a straw man. No major Democratic figure is a Wiccan, or panders to Wiccans. On the issue of going along with obvious falsehoods to appease religious nutjobs, the two parties are not equivalent. The Republican party will proudly support policies based on obvious falsehoods, and will not get my vote until they return to valuing reality.
And for what little it's worth, Wiccans aren't pre-Christian, they're post-Christian, though for most purposes I wouldn't even distinguish them from Christians at all. Superstitous clap-trapist covers it well enough I think.
No, it is not the same type of problem. George Soros is trying to persuade others to agree with his opinion on the appropriate role and conduct of government. He gets to talk more loudly than many because he is very rich. If others agree with him, I may well think they are wrong (and do), but the things I think they are wrong about are things upon which intelligent people might honestly disagree.
The religious crazies seek to base public policy on clear falsehoods. Those who go along cannot be in my judgment both intelligent and honest.
"I don't personally actually KNOW any Republicans that don't consider evolution to be an obvious, plain-as-day fact."
Three of the presidential candidates said they didn't believe in evolution. None of the others painted the question as ridiculous. I don't confuse Republicans with religious crazies; I myself know Republicans who are not. I correctly identify the Republican party as ready and willing to pander to religious crazies, and have it's policies shaped by them.
"True, they're not really double blind, but as I said to the other posters, that makes their results stronger. You would expect that less blindness would make it *more* likely to get the public to appreciate the art..."
The point of doing something double-blind is that you can't know with any certainty what effect a lack of blindness will have. Did Joshua Bell, knowing he was a famous musician pretending to be a mere street performer unconsciously project an air of "nothing to see here"?
Other than that though, I entirely agree with you. The desire of people to hear/read/see "the best" and the desire of promoters to sell it to them means both will want to perceive the "best" few musicians/authors/artists as significantly better than the next hundred or thousand. But this is entirely unlikely. It's not so in any objectively-measurable endeavor; e.g. the best sprinters are only very slightly faster than the hundreth best.
If you can tell the difference between *any* speaker cable and something costing $1 a foot at Home Depot... well, you're mistaken. You can't tell a difference in the sound because there isn't any.
Speaker design is complex, and all manner of things can make all manner of difference. Cable has a certain gauge, it is well-connected or not, it is broken or not, end of story. OK, silver is marginally more conductive than copper so you could use a slightly thinner cable to achieve the exact same result if for some reason you wanted to spend a lot of money to make your cables more easily breakable.
I'm not entirely sure what your larger point is, but the examples you cite are not double blind tests.
In the first, for example, the passers-by on the metro didn't know the street musician was a world-renowned violinist, but for a double blind study, you would need the observing journalist and the violinist himself to be similarly ignorant, which strikes me as impossible.
"Isn't it true, as you build an audio system with very high end components, you need better cables?
While I think THESE cables are way over the top, I think only an audiophile would possible hear the slightest difference."
The point is, not even an audiophile can possibly hear the slightest difference. There is not the slightest difference. You can slap a meter on both cables and establish there is no difference. You can (and people have) easily set up a double-blind experiment where nobody knows which system is using the uber high end speaker cables and which one is using a 50-cent-a-foot lamp cord from Home Depot, and nobody can successfully tell which is which.
The gauge of the wire is the only thing that makes any difference anywhere close to being perceivable by humans. Gold plated contacts inhibit corrosion, so you might be able to tell the difference there; After ten years or so if you live in a really humid climate; but probably not even then. You should probably just get a nice lamp cord)
The difference between a "high end audiophile" and everyone else is not that he hears anything they don't; it's that he thinks he does. But if it doesn't sound better until you hear the price...
The builders of this have not called it an "aircraft". It is a rocket. I see little reason to doubt that it will get off the ground in some fashion, as building it obviously required quite a bit more technical sophistication than the simple thrust to weight comparison need to ensure liftoff. One of the builders quite straightforwardly rates structural failure during flight "likely".
Don't worry about being mean by suggesting that this is some overly geeky guys presenting their geeky thing as more than it is. You don't come across as mean making such a suggestion, just foolish. This is some extremely geeky guys, utterly reveling in the awesome geekery of this wicked cool thing they built.
I know this is Slashdot, and expecting anyone to RTFA before commenting is futile. But if you're going to question the factual underpinnings of another posters comment, could you read even the first sentence? Oh, hell, here it is:
"Testimony today in Capitol Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas quickly and inadvertently turned to the topic of fair use when Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, was called to the stand to testify."
True. But when a lawyer makes a statement like that under oath, I suppose we can say it is grounds for disbarment. She's committing perjury, unless she wants to claim she was just giving her opinion in ignorance of the actual law. But what's she going to say? "Whoops, as head of litigation for a major record label, I wasn't aware of the basic fundamentals of copyright law."
There were many forerunners of science. Discovering things about the world via repeatable observations is too good an idea, and too simple, to have a single originator. But I cannot credit Aristotle et al with pioneering science. The Ancient Greeks were clearer thinkers than many before and after them, and did great things for logic in particular. But they were far to happy cite authority. If we're going to credit the orgin of science to one time and group of people, we can't give it to those who first did some science-like stuff; there are too many. We must instead credit those who first insisted on discovery by observation exclusively. I vote for 1663, when the founders of the Royal Society adopted the motto "Nullius in Verba" (On the word of none). The others you mention all understood this principle on some level, but none said it directly nor insisted on it exclusively.
"Does it matter why a company actually adopts open software?"
Yes. It is much better for the open source community if companies adopt open software out of profit-driven, self-interested greed.
Companies that adopt openness out of some spiritual belief in altruism will change their mind when the one exec who thinks that leaves, or when they decide "We're nice guys!" is no longer their marketing spin of the moment.
Companies that adopt open software because they have found a way in which doing so gets them more money will be more dedicated and motivated.
Well, YMMV, obviously. Mind you, I'm thinking of low-mid range restaurants; expensive places tend to have good service regardless. You may be right about the waiter vs. retail connection... but personally, I like good service at a restaurant, but at retail stores I mostly want to be left alone to figure out what I want, so inattentive staff is great!
I find the American tipping system odd, and sometimes a pain. On the other hand, in Europe I've found it much more common for the service to suck...
BSD is loved by me (an engineer at a closed-source company) because it plays well with others. The stuff that is our core competency is a small fraction of all the code in our products; their are innumerable other libraries and toolkits that make our code more useful. Quite a bit of this is stuff we've bought from others (including source for our use, but not to redistribute). We're not allowed to give that stuff away, even if we wanted to give away our core code. So some of our stuff is BSD, because that's no problem. None of it is GPL; we couldn't use it if we wanted to.
And for what it's worth, we do give back to the BSD projects we use, not because we have to, or because we're nice, but because it's better for us to have our improvements merged into the main tree.
I flatly reject the implication in the summary. It is better if someone is motivated to act as you want them to by their own self interest than by altruism. They'll work harder at it and be more committed. If Noika is pushing "open" because it's a market advantage, that's better than if open just sounded like the nice thing to do to some exec who may get replaced.
Those include the word viagra when hit by either GoogleBot or FireFox. The suggestion is to ignore sites that talk about viagra when hit by Firefox, but not when hit by Googlebot.
The correct critique of this suggestion is that Google already does it, so it must not be a solution for the problem at hand.
To be clear, in Apples place I would probably have done exactly what Apple did in both the cases I mention, as it was probably the best thing for Apple. Which is not the same as being the best thing for customers or the world at large, but that's to be expected.
I think the business decisions I reference are "lame" from my point of view, but not necessarily "incorrect" from Apples.
What I object to is not so much Apples decision, but putting all the blame for those decisions on their business partners. Apple worked a deal with AT&T and/or the record labels; the fruits of those deals are Apples responsibility as much as the other party.
It's frankly a pretty trivial peeve of mine, but the need of some people to put companies such as Apple into an exclusively "good guy" or "bad guy" role strikes me as one aspect of a failure to see nuance. Other symptoms of this failure have more serious consequences.
So, Apple does some things I think are lame (like this and DRM on iTunes). But you're saying I shouldn't hold it against them, because they don't *want* to do lame things, they're just forced to.
Poor Apple, these big mean companies keep holding guns to their head and making them sign contracts that say they have to do lame things. But their products are happy and shiny, so you know they're really the good guys.
A human being should be able to figure out how to do a new thing when necessary. Acquiring probably useless skills ahead of time just in case is stupid.
-Me
The simple explanation is that in terms of science, the ISS isn't worth squat, and never has been. As a concept, a space station sounds cool and worthy enough to pay big politically connected contractors oodles of tax money to build the utterly pointless thing. This is uncomfortable to admit, hence the brief lifespan, rather than just dropping it in the ocean immediately upon completion. But with typical delays, that's probably what will happen anyway.
I think many journalists genuinely try, but good science reporting and being interesting to laypeople are often at odds with each other.
Journalists generally want to report news; the new, exciting breakthrough is obviously the interesting thing. But the more new, exciting, and breakthrough-ish a science item is, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong next week, or at least that there are subtle details that must be appreciated to properly understand its impact. Even for the breakthroughs that are the real deal, you don't know they are until people have sifted through the details and digested the implications for a few years.
The science stories that are really important are generally not the exciting daily events; they are the slowly emerging themes, the gradually building consensus. It's hard to write an interesting story about 95% of experts believing what 85% of them did last year, or another several studies lending support for what pretty much everyone thinks is the case.
"why should they check to see if their universal update to the iPhone would cause your individual unit harm?"
They shouldn't have to check it does to an unlocked iPhone, but do you really think they didn't? Mind you, we (I at least) don't actually know if it causes any harm. But what do you think the chances are that Steve Jobs doesn't know?
Maybe they know it doesn't really cause any harm, and they're just spreading FUD. That would be kinda lame.
Maybe they know it causes a problem because they intentionally designed it that way. That would be extremely lame, and questionably legal.
Maybe they know it just happens to cause a problem that bricks unlocked phones, and are trying to alert consumers. I don't really buy that, but I understand how an Apple fan might say it with a straight face.
But they just don't know? Please.
I hear that here regularly, and it sounds so wise. But I don't buy it...
You choose and hire developers for a general problem domain; you and they choose a language they like that can handle that general problem domain well. Now choose projects from that general domain.
If you're planning a project and debating between two languages of wildly different capabilites, you've probably already failed to choose the right developer. If you're debating between languages of fairly similar capabilities, you're wasting your time.
I don't think you do understand my sentiment, I'm not asking them to use any psychoanalysis. Her sweatshirt should not be considered a threat, not because of any thinking about the mental state of a potential terrorist, but because it is inherently less threatening looking than a briefcase. The briefcase has more space for more mass of explosives. Blinking lights are not an "obvious threat", they're just not dangerous at all in the fist place.
Some information-desk staffer saw something unusual, but obviously non-threatening if they'd though about it. But instead of thinking about it they thought "Bomb!", and notified the police. A stupid reaction, and a poor reflection on the paranoia of our times, but OK, people make dumb judgments, it happens. So the cops reacted appropriately to the report they got, up to the point where they apprehended her and figured out what we're talking about is a blinky-light name tag. At that point they obviously should have said "Whoops, sorry miss, hope we didn't frighten you, have a nice day." End of story.
Instead, they are charging her with a crime, talking to the news about "fake bombs". It's not a fake bomb; it's a real name tag. Every carry on in that airport is a more convincing "fake bomb"; hers isn't big enough. She should sue for false arrest and defamation.
Yes, if you bought just the wrong sort of government debt at just the wrong time in the early 70s, you lost money. Of course, if you invested in something else over that same period, you probably lost money. If you stuck the money in a mattress, you lost a lot more money.
Arguing from that that the Fed will engage in continual rate-cuts (a close as I can guess to what you mean by "printing money") in order to intentionally spur inflation so as to reduce the real value of the nation debt is just not sensible. It doesn't make sense, wouldn't work, and is entirely contrary to actual Fed policy.
I too am concerned for the future of our economy given the fiscal insanity of recent Republican administrations. But the problem will not be addressed by arguments derived from ignorance. If you talk about the "the government" "printing money" in connection with the budget deficit, you are not saying anything meaningful about American fiscal and monetary policy.