I'll admit that my respect for academia in general is iffy, but there are certainly ladders to building a more accurate truth that can only occur through testing, refining, testing more, refining.
I think the general Slashdot population is fine with the scientific method as long as its applied to classically science based disciplines. Having a study reaffirming one's own suspicions about human nature is just as much a scientific study than testing the effects of varying light bandwidths on different plants. The important facet is that they're repeatable and have adequate controls to reduce unknown variances (or at least document them). There are hundreds, thousands, millions? of redundant seemingly obvious scientific studies to reaffirm what we as a group conscious believed to be true and nobody bats an eye. When the humanities apply it: "Academics are wasting time testing obvious things" is the rallying cry.. oh well.
Don't broad-brush any group. It makes you look ignorant.
Also, look up what Richard Feynman, The Academic, considered "cargo cult sciences." The FTA describes one such example to a tee.
In 2006, there were services that would use a photo of your face to make a 'skin' for your Unreal Tournament model.
In 1996, you could take an image of your face, reduce it to 16 x 16 pixels, and still have it be recognizable.
The ancient Egyptians used pictures as their written language at least 350 years ago. Scratch that... 3500 years ago.
This is as bizarre as shooting hamsters out of a cannon in a Superbowl Ad, or K-Tel Records announcing that they "were going to open a web site," and seeing a 1200% increase in their stock price in just a few days.
It's clear that 'Tay' just regurgitated clauses or full sentences wholesale. It didn't parse verbs, nouns, and adjectives, but just puked back text string that were thrown at it.
This has already been done -- over 30 years ago.
Racter was a chat-bot that came out in the mid 1980's. It was an improvement on the classic ELIZA chat-bot program from many years prior. The more you chatted with Racter, the more it populated its custom database, so that every user would end up with an entirely different conversational partner after some hours of chatting.
It is literally impossible to claim that our rate of CO2 change over the past 100 years is unprecedented in the historical record because we have no proxy with that kind of resolution. We see the world today in the equivalent of 4k UHDTV in full color, our records from the past are equivalent to cave paintings, and we're claiming that the color of deer is unprecedented.
But don't let that get in the way of a good, scary, apocalyptic tale of warning!
You are aware that "HD" is a marketing word that has no actual meaning, right?
And "UHD" TV? A superlative added onto a meaningless word in the first place.
Make your arguments – fine. But at least use terms that have actual definitions. Otherwise, you come off as an angry couch-bound crackpot.
"So, will Netflix pro-rate my monthly bill for time I spend on travel to foreign countries?"
Of course they will, just as soon as your landlord pro rates your rent, your cell phone pro rates your phone bill, and your gym pro rates your membership.
Good point, but there indeed some are counter-examples.
My car insurance company will pro-rate while I'm away. So will my internet (& TV) service.
My cell phone service. . . It's the opposite. I have to pay extra to add "International Roaming" so that people can call my US number in France, UK, and so on. Same for cell-phone data and texts. It's super-convenient, but boy does that one add up!
Power-lines are often buried already. It's the legacy ones that remainâ"Replacement costs money. Those 4 kV trunk lines? They are cut through forests and such, and are kept above ground for maintenance and security purposes. I doubt it makes sense to burry a 1.1MV power line.
Correct. Just space them several meters apart, high in the air, and use gigantic ceramic isolation-mounts of the lines to the gigantic long-distance power-grid structures cutting through the desert or forest.
FUN FACT: Maintenance or repair on such high-voltage lines is often done while they ate live. Yes, really. A helicopter brings up the linemen, who are careful to stay only an a single, particular line that they're inspecting, fixing, or whatever. (A flying helicopter is not grounded, and is thus at no risk of being part of a conductive path to ground.) Still, in the 100's kV or MV ranges, there is atmospheric loss. Workers say it feels a bit tingly to work on such lines.
Actually at that time battle fields where covered with smoke so thick, you could not see a Redcoat 20 yards away. However Napoleon showed: stealth/hiding/crawling pays off.
Wasn't the color RED chosen to hide any bleeding from fellow soldiers in the line? Y'know, that sight could be a bit demoralizing. Perhaps this (possibly apocryphal?) explanation could carry some weight?
And Napoleon, the cannoneer who somehow rose to be Emperor –twice. I hadn't heard of his tactics outside of barrage. I don't disbelieve it, as those are good tactics, but have never heard of them.
Napoleon DID take to canning food by putting boiling soup into empty wine bottles, then sealing them with wax. That helped his long-distance campaigns. An army travels on its stomach.
Yesterday was St. Patrick's. Do you have any idea how many people threw up in cabs last night?
State the obvious. I've known cab drivers who have had people screw on their ride home from the bar -- right in the back seat. "Come on, I'm only human," he cries at them to no avail.
Now take an Uber driver-less. Tape-over the cameras and have a good fuck on your way to the party. Won't the soccer-moms driving by with their kids in the SUV be mortified? (that she did the same back in college)
who will be the first BASE jumper to die jumping from the tower and how many days after its built will that take place?
I will not bet against you on this.
Ah, but how about a flying-suit crazy attempting to buzz close to one, between the slowly rotating blades? Wind farms are built in valleys between mountains, so this is a realistic scenario. Also realistic is that the flying-suit guy will not understand the flow of compressible fluids (he'll hit a low-pressure zone on one side or the other – one of the three blade-following zones that spirals).
If we all had some way to collect and store all the methane from farts, we'd be all set for fueling powerplants.
This is being done adjacent to garbage dumps all over the place. It's a good thing.
Historically, once a garbage dump was "full", it would be capped with a layer of soil, but not before installing several vent-stacks to let the methane out, keeping the dump from exploding. Why it is only now that we've realized that we can capture and use that methane (CNG), I have no idea.
In the USA's mid-west, some local "ski slopes" are capped-off garbage dumps. Why? They're the tallest hills around.
OK, I'll bite. I know some kinda dodgy private pilots, but nobody even remotely insane enough to attempt to land on a rotating blade, no matter how long or flat.
Who the hell are you hanging out with?
Hopefully with others who practice less-insane hobbies, like skydivers, who would jump out of that plane & quick-deploy before the dodgy pilot attempted this.
Who, exactly, is saying this? Why is this +4 Insightful? It's some idiocy made up as a laughable strawman argument and it's +4 Insightful?
It's currently rated +1 "Funny", which was the intention. If I hadn't already posted, I would have modded it up as "Funny", too.
Tune your BS- and sarcasm-meters. This isn't FARK, but "Funny" posts can be quite useful. The poster was mocking the paid shills that come in and mass-post when topics like this come up.
FARK's open mocking of Trolls and Shills has significantly reduced their numbers there... unless you click on the "Politics" tab. That is, they are stuck in the corner with their ilk.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll admit that my respect for academia in general is iffy, but there are certainly ladders to building a more accurate truth that can only occur through testing, refining, testing more, refining.
I think the general Slashdot population is fine with the scientific method as long as its applied to classically science based disciplines. Having a study reaffirming one's own suspicions about human nature is just as much a scientific study than testing the effects of varying light bandwidths on different plants. The important facet is that they're repeatable and have adequate controls to reduce unknown variances (or at least document them). There are hundreds, thousands, millions? of redundant seemingly obvious scientific studies to reaffirm what we as a group conscious believed to be true and nobody bats an eye. When the humanities apply it: "Academics are wasting time testing obvious things" is the rallying cry.. oh well.
Don't broad-brush any group. It makes you look ignorant.
Also, look up what Richard Feynman, The Academic, considered "cargo cult sciences." The FTA describes one such example to a tee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even a misdemeanor "Disturbing the Peace", the lowest you can get, will block you from being approved for the TSA's PreCheck program.
This, even though you might still hold valid a US SECRET or TOP SECRET security clearance.
As long as your meter stick has nanometer markings on it.
If you know what material your meter stick is made from, you can use it to measure distances on the nanometer scale.
But only over short distances. Tiny temperature fluctuations (just touching it) will change the length of the meter stick due to thermal expansion.
I can't decide who to root for.
Well, who to congratulate, now.
I thought QDOS, and thus the BSOD, went away with Windows Vista. At least, that's what the ads told me.
Are you implying that Microsoft might have lied to me? :cry emoji:
I smell another internet bubble about to pop.
In 2006, there were services that would use a photo of your face to make a 'skin' for your Unreal Tournament model.
In 1996, you could take an image of your face, reduce it to 16 x 16 pixels, and still have it be recognizable.
The ancient Egyptians used pictures as their written language at least 350 years ago. Scratch that... 3500 years ago.
This is as bizarre as shooting hamsters out of a cannon in a Superbowl Ad, or K-Tel Records announcing that they "were going to open a web site," and seeing a 1200% increase in their stock price in just a few days.
"Who likes short-shorts? We like short-shorts!"
It's clear that 'Tay' just regurgitated clauses or full sentences wholesale. It didn't parse verbs, nouns, and adjectives, but just puked back text string that were thrown at it.
This has already been done -- over 30 years ago.
Racter was a chat-bot that came out in the mid 1980's. It was an improvement on the classic ELIZA chat-bot program from many years prior. The more you chatted with Racter, the more it populated its custom database, so that every user would end up with an entirely different conversational partner after some hours of chatting.
'Tay' was not an AI in any sense of the word.
It was a dumb comment for sure, but turning this into a matter of class warfare or social justice is orders of magnitude dumber.
Yeah. A single word of Phil's speech is somehow reason to attack Apple as a monolithic, classest company. Really?!?
EXAMPLE: I have a 12-year-old MacBook Pro. It runs as my home media server, and I can access it from anywhere on the planet. It runs just fine.
I also have an IBM PCjr (from 1985). It still runs fine, too.
Anyone out there have a 12-year-old Dell? How does that piece of shit still run, if at all?
Millions of years ago, the Silurians did everything we've done and more. Shows what you guys know.
Good one.
Please remind me: Are the Silurians from von Danniken, or from the Raelians?
It is literally impossible to claim that our rate of CO2 change over the past 100 years is unprecedented in the historical record because we have no proxy with that kind of resolution. We see the world today in the equivalent of 4k UHDTV in full color, our records from the past are equivalent to cave paintings, and we're claiming that the color of deer is unprecedented.
But don't let that get in the way of a good, scary, apocalyptic tale of warning!
You are aware that "HD" is a marketing word that has no actual meaning, right?
And "UHD" TV? A superlative added onto a meaningless word in the first place.
Make your arguments – fine. But at least use terms that have actual definitions. Otherwise, you come off as an angry couch-bound crackpot.
Maybe I shouldn't advise the crackpots...
Only 60 million years?
Any living thing on Earth produce Plastic before human beings?
Or Open Pit Mining??
You forgot to mention Mountain-top Removal Coal Mining. It is exactly what the name implies, and destroys entire watersheds.
... People twirled paintbrushes that were used with paint containing radium, blissfully unaware of the dangers. . .
They also licked their brushes' bristle-tips to keep them shaped into a fine point. That is, the watch-dial painters licked radium.
We learned from that. . . the hard way.
[CITATION NEEDED]
yeah.. no. WiFi sucks balls for for anything you actually want to be reliably connected even in the home.
WiFi can actually be quite good.
On campus, I get 300Mbps, symmetric.
At home, well, it all depends on what hardware you buy. I chose an upper-tier station, which provides 50/50 Mbps symmetric.
Yeah, that's why I stopped programming in MS-BASIC. It just couldn't be trusted any more.
Slashdotter's response: ". . . What's MS-BASIC? Is that like COBOL and FORTRAN's love-child?"
Of course they will, just as soon as your landlord pro rates your rent, your cell phone pro rates your phone bill, and your gym pro rates your membership.
Good point, but there indeed some are counter-examples.
My car insurance company will pro-rate while I'm away. So will my internet (& TV) service.
My cell phone service. . . It's the opposite. I have to pay extra to add "International Roaming" so that people can call my US number in France, UK, and so on. Same for cell-phone data and texts. It's super-convenient, but boy does that one add up!
Fixture for centuries indeed :)
Ugh. I meant the windmills used for centuries to turn grain-grinding stones.
You knew that though, didn't you? :-)
Power-lines are often buried already. It's the legacy ones that remainâ"Replacement costs money. Those 4 kV trunk lines? They are cut through forests and such, and are kept above ground for maintenance and security purposes.
I doubt it makes sense to burry a 1.1MV power line.
Correct. Just space them several meters apart, high in the air, and use gigantic ceramic isolation-mounts of the lines to the gigantic long-distance power-grid structures cutting through the desert or forest.
FUN FACT: Maintenance or repair on such high-voltage lines is often done while they ate live. Yes, really. A helicopter brings up the linemen, who are careful to stay only an a single, particular line that they're inspecting, fixing, or whatever. (A flying helicopter is not grounded, and is thus at no risk of being part of a conductive path to ground.) Still, in the 100's kV or MV ranges, there is atmospheric loss. Workers say it feels a bit tingly to work on such lines.
Actually at that time battle fields where covered with smoke so thick, you could not see a Redcoat 20 yards away.
However Napoleon showed: stealth/hiding/crawling pays off.
Wasn't the color RED chosen to hide any bleeding from fellow soldiers in the line? Y'know, that sight could be a bit demoralizing. Perhaps this (possibly apocryphal?) explanation could carry some weight?
And Napoleon, the cannoneer who somehow rose to be Emperor –twice. I hadn't heard of his tactics outside of barrage. I don't disbelieve it, as those are good tactics, but have never heard of them.
Napoleon DID take to canning food by putting boiling soup into empty wine bottles, then sealing them with wax. That helped his long-distance campaigns. An army travels on its stomach.
Yesterday was St. Patrick's. Do you have any idea how many people threw up in cabs last night?
State the obvious. I've known cab drivers who have had people screw on their ride home from the bar -- right in the back seat. "Come on, I'm only human," he cries at them to no avail.
Now take an Uber driver-less. Tape-over the cameras and have a good fuck on your way to the party. Won't the soccer-moms driving by with their kids in the SUV be mortified? (that she did the same back in college)
who will be the first BASE jumper to die jumping from the tower and how many days after its built will that take place?
I will not bet against you on this.
Ah, but how about a flying-suit crazy attempting to buzz close to one, between the slowly rotating blades? Wind farms are built in valleys between mountains, so this is a realistic scenario. Also realistic is that the flying-suit guy will not understand the flow of compressible fluids (he'll hit a low-pressure zone on one side or the other – one of the three blade-following zones that spirals).
If we all had some way to collect and store all the methane from farts, we'd be all set for fueling powerplants.
This is being done adjacent to garbage dumps all over the place. It's a good thing.
Historically, once a garbage dump was "full", it would be capped with a layer of soil, but not before installing several vent-stacks to let the methane out, keeping the dump from exploding. Why it is only now that we've realized that we can capture and use that methane (CNG), I have no idea.
In the USA's mid-west, some local "ski slopes" are capped-off garbage dumps. Why? They're the tallest hills around.
OK, I'll bite. I know some kinda dodgy private pilots, but nobody even remotely insane enough to attempt to land on a rotating blade, no matter how long or flat.
Who the hell are you hanging out with?
Hopefully with others who practice less-insane hobbies, like skydivers, who would jump out of that plane & quick-deploy before the dodgy pilot attempted this.
(I used to skydive.)
Who, exactly, is saying this? Why is this +4 Insightful? It's some idiocy made up as a laughable strawman argument and it's +4 Insightful?
It's currently rated +1 "Funny", which was the intention. If I hadn't already posted, I would have modded it up as "Funny", too.
Tune your BS- and sarcasm-meters. This isn't FARK, but "Funny" posts can be quite useful. The poster was mocking the paid shills that come in and mass-post when topics like this come up.
FARK's open mocking of Trolls and Shills has significantly reduced their numbers there... unless you click on the "Politics" tab. That is, they are stuck in the corner with their ilk.
Copy Edit: RED-coats