i'm a little tired of astronomers trotting out stupid gimmicks to "market" each one of their discoveries and try to make it sexy. I know that you need a catch line to get people interested and all, but stuff like this is just stupid.
when I read about a huge diamond in space, I expect a little more than a white dwarf discovery. Come on, this is ridiculous.
there are fuel cells that operate using ethanol instead of hydrogen -- why not use the ethanol directly and save the step of converting ethanol to hydrogen? anyone here know why?
who knows? It might just take a result of "George Bush: 99.9%, xyz 33.5%, 105% of precincts reporting, 803 million registered voteres" for people to wake up and realize that there is a problem here.
In Antarctica, fuel = life. Without fuel, you die.
For those who don't understand, the Antarctic research stations aren't exactly your local campsite where you've got free electricity and water hookups. Everything must be generated locally, and just to keep things heated so that machinery and people don't freeze is priority #1. There are 3 levels of backup generators to make sure that power *never* *ever* goes out.
To get fuel to Antarctica is more expensive than just about any where else in the world, and even if the bases down there were to sell it to him at a profit, it would represent a real loss in energy (though perhaps insignificant) that would have to be replaced somehow.
I agree with their policy. This is the real unexplored territory of the Earth here -- rescuing someone who had an accident is one thing, but picking up after their lack of planning puts other people's lives in danger.
A weapon like this brings out the best arguments for believing in peace and adopting a peaceful attitude (which I admit only works if everyone does it).
Why? Because this weapon naturally works against the most powerful member of a conflict. Weapons like these (as the article points out) are inherently more harmful to those countries who have a heavy reliance on technology. That's us. So there will be little disincentive or disadvantages for poor countries to try to build them and use them -- what do they have to lose?
In the face of this argument, you can see that we lose. We build this weapon, and the easiest target for it to be used against is us. How many times have weapons come back to bite us in the ass? And this is a weapon which only wants our ass to bite, not some third world country's technology infrastructure.
So while these things are technologically impressive, and may benefit us in the short run, the only ethical (and successful) solution is not to get started in the race. I hope we come to this conclusion as a people someday.
warning: USA readers may not understand this because of the mobile phone differences.
If you need an example of what is already working, take a look at SMS. There the recipient can get messages for free, but the person sending it foots the bill. And they had to come up with a billing system for that, right?
and I can bet you it doesn't cost the phone company 25 cents to send a damn text message.
In fact, at a meeting in Washington this past summer to debate the future of HST, one of the most interesting presentations was by the editor of Sky and Telescope. He pointed out that despite the optimistic timelines for launching new satellites, not a single one has come in on schedule, and in fact HST itself was delayed for seven years beyond the projected launch date. "few [amateur astronomers] will put any faith in NASA's claim that HST's successor will be in orbit by 2011."
And HST was built with only modestly new components. The next space telescope is now being designed with some very new technology -- including the biggest mirror ever lofted into space -- and you think there will be no delays or unforseen difficulties?
His final point was that much of the science as well as amateur community benefits and takes interest from the very existence and productivity of Hubble, and to take away a working observatory for the mere promise of one "next year" or "in 5 years" would be a big blow to astronomy.
there is some truth to this somewhat rambling parent comment.
In fact, at a meeting in Washington this past summer to debate the future of HST, one of the most interesting presentations was by the editor of Sky and Telescope. He pointed out that despite the optimistic timelines for launching new satellites, not a single one has come in on schedule, and in fact HST itself was delayed for seven years beyond the projected launch date. "few [amateur astronomers] will put any faith in NASA's claim that HST's successor will be in orbit by 2011."
And HST was built with only modestly new components. The next space telescope is now being designed with some very new technology -- including the biggest mirror ever lofted into space -- and you think there will be no delays or unforseen difficulties?
His final point was that much of the science as well as amateur community benefits and takes interest from the very existence and productivity of Hubble, and to take away a working observatory for the mere promise of one "next year" or "in 5 years" would be a big blow to astronomy.
oh come on. The idea that turning your computer off every night hurts it is the argument that fuels our incredible energy waste. Who do you know has had a computer fail because it was turned on and off too many times? I mean, for how many users would the on/off duty cycle actually have a significant impact.
turn your computer off unless you have a good reason (like network server function) to keep it on.
one interesting development already: Justice Scalia will take no part in the decision of the case. Apparently he recused himself following a request by the anti-pledge side in the case. Scalia has vocally defended the right to religious activity, and I guess he recognized that this might come across as having a predisposition to the outcome of the case.
I would switch right now, if only the shut down command would work on my Windows machine! I guess I'll just have to keep on using it... MS are so devilishly clever.:)
why are we spending more and more money on students, and yet they're getting dumber and dumber?
how is it that some other countries have students 30 to a room with one teacher and one piece of chalk, and yet produce high-performing, disciplined individuals who can pass tests?
has anyone done a cost/benefit analysis for laptops?
Lisa: I can't believe you seriously expect us to swallow this tripe! Can you see it's corporate propaganda being shoved down our throats?
Principal Skinner: and now, courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourselves to some tripe.
Ralph Wiggum: Someday, I'm going to graduate from Bovine University!
let's not naively go around thinking that the movie industry are a bunch of saints here. The only reason that they haven't pulled out the RIAA tactics is that no one has the patience/disk space/bandwidth to download/store full resolution movies all the time... Ask them in 2 years, and they'll have the same bunch of lawyers working for them.
The most difficult thing about this issue is that most of the "solutions" are not concrete -- I mean they don't involve the regulation of physical goods or people crossing the border, as it used to be in the pre-internet economy.
How do you regulate a company using a phone line to outsource accounting work to India, for example? Do you say that they're not allowed to make calls over there? Or mandate that they hire a certain number of American accountants? It used to be more straightforward when the people were coming from overseas to do work here. You could see who was employing whom and what was being done where. Now we just send the work over the internet. Regulations address things that companies do, not things they don't do, such as not hire workers from the US>
This is going to take a new approach in the regulation of global trade if the issue is really to be addressed properly. Governments cannot keep on operating as if the internet age is an extension of global business. It has fundamentally changed the routes of labor and materials (even the definitions of those things).
Maybe this has been said before, but it seems worth thinking about. Enjoy.
I suppose that the story is not really surprising, so much as sad. Americans seem to cry foul only when things finally happen to them, like getting laid off. We were content to benefit from tapping the world's intellectual resources and leaving others behind -- now it's a taste of our own medicine, at the hands of those who can do it cheaper/faster, with no dental plan required.
It's time to realize that the market has no qualms about putting YOU out of work -- a capitalistic/competitive system (which is very successful at what it does) can cause very great instability in people's lives.
Some people mock the social employment systems in Europe, where you can't fire government/private workers without huge amounts of effort. They don't advance as fast (economically), which is why they lagged behind the IT boom. But also, people there don't have to change jobs every 6 months.
In 2 years, take a look at India again, and let's see where their jobs have gone. China? Estonia? Every one gets their turn in this game.
actually, it's the voices -- everytime I watch a tv show overseas, like Germany, Australia, the voices are a little bit higher pitched than here for some reason! Listen to the Simpsons especially when you're in another country, and you can tell for yourself.
I think you're confused. You may have the right to privacy (which is probably best interpreted as the right to be let alone in your affairs), but who ever said that you have the right to anonymity? Homeless people are not even asserting the right merely to be let alone -- they are affirmatively asking for help from the government. So, why should they not be documented, just like all other citizens?
Personally, if our tax money is being used to help the homeless (which I do not oppose), I wouldn't mind knowing where that money is going, how many people are benefiting, and how it's working out.
Many people have the misperception that the Supreme Court stands ready and willing (or unwilling) to intervene whenever someone's specific case comes to their attention. This is simply not true. The criteria for the Supreme Court are quite different from those of the lower regular courts, because its job is not to decide individual cases, but to weigh the fairness of laws themselves.
The Supreme Court's charge is "to ensure the uniformity of judgments". It is not to correct individual cases that may have merely been decided wrongly -- the Court spends its time on cases that will have the most effect, to the most people. The Supreme Court is said to weigh these issues before even accepting a case:
does the case bring up substantial questions of law?
has the case been decided in conflicting ways by lower courts?
is the case a good test case to issue a decision on a matter of law?
are many people affected by it?
Does this guy's case satisfy any of these requirements? Remember, not all speech is protected speech. Obscenities, or material of purely prurient nature, is not protected, and probably there's no reason for them to intervene in a case like this.
The court's ruling was not saying that it is ok to email employees with your gripes. The court was ruling on the tactic used by Intel to sue the guy -- namely that these emails caused damage to their computer system -- a very different matter. The legal name for this is "trespasses to chattels". They held that the email in this case is no such thing.
Here is one very informative excerpt:
The consequential economic damage Intel claims to have suffered, i.e., loss of productivity caused by employees reading and reacting to Hamidi's messages and company efforts to block the messages, is not an injury to the company's interest in its computers -- which worked as intended and were unharmed by the communications -- any more than the personal distress cuased by reading an unpleasant letter would be an injury to the recipient's mailbox, or the loss of privacy caused by an intrusive telephone call would be an injury to the recipient's telephone equipment.
and another:
our conclusion does not rest on any special immunity for communications by electronic mail: we do not hold that messages transmitted through the Internet are exempt from ordinary rules of tort liability. To the contrary, email, like other forms of communication, may in some circumstances cause legally cognizable injury to the recipient or to third parties and may be actionable under various common law or statutory theories. Indeed, on facts somewhat simliar to those here, a company or its employees might be able to plead causes of action for interference with prospective economic relations.
So in short, the guy can be sued for those emails, but not on the basis of some "damage" they cause the company mail servers...
So it seems to me that the main thing that makes people modest, eg. not stripping naked and running around campus, is the fact that people will know it was you and you have to talk to them afterwards. The same is probably true of this machine, ie. people assume that the operator would see you before and after you walk through, and you might feel embarassed about beeing seen that way.
But just suppose for a second, that the operator of the x-ray vision machine is in a totally isolated room, and sees only the image of the person walking through the machine with no face shown, and doesn't get to see the person before or after. Wouldn't this eliminate the privacy problem? After all, if no one knows who you were individually walking through the machine, how are you to feel violated?
I personally would be ok with that kind of setup. Would you?
Slashdot Mirror
i'm a little tired of astronomers trotting out stupid gimmicks to "market" each one of their discoveries and try to make it sexy. I know that you need a catch line to get people interested and all, but stuff like this is just stupid.
when I read about a huge diamond in space, I expect a little more than a white dwarf discovery. Come on, this is ridiculous.
there are fuel cells that operate using ethanol instead of hydrogen -- why not use the ethanol directly and save the step of converting ethanol to hydrogen? anyone here know why?
who knows? It might just take a result of "George Bush: 99.9%, xyz 33.5%, 105% of precincts reporting, 803 million registered voteres" for people to wake up and realize that there is a problem here.
In Antarctica, fuel = life. Without fuel, you die.
For those who don't understand, the Antarctic research stations aren't exactly your local campsite where you've got free electricity and water hookups. Everything must be generated locally, and just to keep things heated so that machinery and people don't freeze is priority #1. There are 3 levels of backup generators to make sure that power *never* *ever* goes out.
To get fuel to Antarctica is more expensive than just about any where else in the world, and even if the bases down there were to sell it to him at a profit, it would represent a real loss in energy (though perhaps insignificant) that would have to be replaced somehow.
I agree with their policy. This is the real unexplored territory of the Earth here -- rescuing someone who had an accident is one thing, but picking up after their lack of planning puts other people's lives in danger.
A weapon like this brings out the best arguments for believing in peace and adopting a peaceful attitude (which I admit only works if everyone does it).
Why? Because this weapon naturally works against the most powerful member of a conflict. Weapons like these (as the article points out) are inherently more harmful to those countries who have a heavy reliance on technology. That's us. So there will be little disincentive or disadvantages for poor countries to try to build them and use them -- what do they have to lose?
In the face of this argument, you can see that we lose. We build this weapon, and the easiest target for it to be used against is us. How many times have weapons come back to bite us in the ass? And this is a weapon which only wants our ass to bite, not some third world country's technology infrastructure.
So while these things are technologically impressive, and may benefit us in the short run, the only ethical (and successful) solution is not to get started in the race. I hope we come to this conclusion as a people someday.
a new web server.
warning: USA readers may not understand this because of the mobile phone differences.
If you need an example of what is already working, take a look at SMS. There the recipient can get messages for free, but the person sending it foots the bill. And they had to come up with a billing system for that, right?
and I can bet you it doesn't cost the phone company 25 cents to send a damn text message.
there is a lot of truth to this parent comment.
In fact, at a meeting in Washington this past summer to debate the future of HST, one of the most interesting presentations was by the editor of Sky and Telescope. He pointed out that despite the optimistic timelines for launching new satellites, not a single one has come in on schedule, and in fact HST itself was delayed for seven years beyond the projected launch date. "few [amateur astronomers] will put any faith in NASA's claim that HST's successor will be in orbit by 2011."
And HST was built with only modestly new components. The next space telescope is now being designed with some very new technology -- including the biggest mirror ever lofted into space -- and you think there will be no delays or unforseen difficulties?
His final point was that much of the science as well as amateur community benefits and takes interest from the very existence and productivity of Hubble, and to take away a working observatory for the mere promise of one "next year" or "in 5 years" would be a big blow to astronomy.
for his report, see here
there is some truth to this somewhat rambling parent comment.
In fact, at a meeting in Washington this past summer to debate the future of HST, one of the most interesting presentations was by the editor of Sky and Telescope. He pointed out that despite the optimistic timelines for launching new satellites, not a single one has come in on schedule, and in fact HST itself was delayed for seven years beyond the projected launch date. "few [amateur astronomers] will put any faith in NASA's claim that HST's successor will be in orbit by 2011."
And HST was built with only modestly new components. The next space telescope is now being designed with some very new technology -- including the biggest mirror ever lofted into space -- and you think there will be no delays or unforseen difficulties?
His final point was that much of the science as well as amateur community benefits and takes interest from the very existence and productivity of Hubble, and to take away a working observatory for the mere promise of one "next year" or "in 5 years" would be a big blow to astronomy.
for his report, see here
And as punishment for his crimes, the man will be forced to live in Dubbo for the rest of his life... :)
oh come on. The idea that turning your computer off every night hurts it is the argument that fuels our incredible energy waste. Who do you know has had a computer fail because it was turned on and off too many times? I mean, for how many users would the on/off duty cycle actually have a significant impact.
turn your computer off unless you have a good reason (like network server function) to keep it on.
one interesting development already: Justice Scalia will take no part in the decision of the case. Apparently he recused himself following a request by the anti-pledge side in the case. Scalia has vocally defended the right to religious activity, and I guess he recognized that this might come across as having a predisposition to the outcome of the case.
I would switch right now, if only the shut down command would work on my Windows machine! I guess I'll just have to keep on using it... MS are so devilishly clever. :)
why are we spending more and more money on students, and yet they're getting dumber and dumber?
how is it that some other countries have students 30 to a room with one teacher and one piece of chalk, and yet produce high-performing, disciplined individuals who can pass tests?
has anyone done a cost/benefit analysis for laptops?
Now if only they could assure people that they won't get wounded by random Baltimore gunfire while they surf the internet...
Lisa: I can't believe you seriously expect us to swallow this tripe! Can you see it's corporate propaganda being shoved down our throats? Principal Skinner: and now, courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourselves to some tripe. Ralph Wiggum: Someday, I'm going to graduate from Bovine University!
let's not naively go around thinking that the movie industry are a bunch of saints here. The only reason that they haven't pulled out the RIAA tactics is that no one has the patience/disk space/bandwidth to download/store full resolution movies all the time... Ask them in 2 years, and they'll have the same bunch of lawyers working for them.
The most difficult thing about this issue is that most of the "solutions" are not concrete -- I mean they don't involve the regulation of physical goods or people crossing the border, as it used to be in the pre-internet economy.
How do you regulate a company using a phone line to outsource accounting work to India, for example? Do you say that they're not allowed to make calls over there? Or mandate that they hire a certain number of American accountants? It used to be more straightforward when the people were coming from overseas to do work here. You could see who was employing whom and what was being done where. Now we just send the work over the internet. Regulations address things that companies do, not things they don't do, such as not hire workers from the US>
This is going to take a new approach in the regulation of global trade if the issue is really to be addressed properly. Governments cannot keep on operating as if the internet age is an extension of global business. It has fundamentally changed the routes of labor and materials (even the definitions of those things).
Maybe this has been said before, but it seems worth thinking about. Enjoy.
I suppose that the story is not really surprising, so much as sad. Americans seem to cry foul only when things finally happen to them, like getting laid off. We were content to benefit from tapping the world's intellectual resources and leaving others behind -- now it's a taste of our own medicine, at the hands of those who can do it cheaper/faster, with no dental plan required.
It's time to realize that the market has no qualms about putting YOU out of work -- a capitalistic/competitive system (which is very successful at what it does) can cause very great instability in people's lives.
Some people mock the social employment systems in Europe, where you can't fire government/private workers without huge amounts of effort. They don't advance as fast (economically), which is why they lagged behind the IT boom. But also, people there don't have to change jobs every 6 months.
In 2 years, take a look at India again, and let's see where their jobs have gone. China? Estonia? Every one gets their turn in this game.
actually, it's the voices -- everytime I watch a tv show overseas, like Germany, Australia, the voices are a little bit higher pitched than here for some reason! Listen to the Simpsons especially when you're in another country, and you can tell for yourself.
I think you're confused. You may have the right to privacy (which is probably best interpreted as the right to be let alone in your affairs), but who ever said that you have the right to anonymity? Homeless people are not even asserting the right merely to be let alone -- they are affirmatively asking for help from the government. So, why should they not be documented, just like all other citizens?
Personally, if our tax money is being used to help the homeless (which I do not oppose), I wouldn't mind knowing where that money is going, how many people are benefiting, and how it's working out.
The Supreme Court's charge is "to ensure the uniformity of judgments". It is not to correct individual cases that may have merely been decided wrongly -- the Court spends its time on cases that will have the most effect, to the most people. The Supreme Court is said to weigh these issues before even accepting a case:
does the case bring up substantial questions of law?
has the case been decided in conflicting ways by lower courts?
is the case a good test case to issue a decision on a matter of law?
are many people affected by it?
Does this guy's case satisfy any of these requirements? Remember, not all speech is protected speech. Obscenities, or material of purely prurient nature, is not protected, and probably there's no reason for them to intervene in a case like this.
somehow, I doubt that blind people are interested in screen after screen that say "Error 404: object not found"...
Here is one very informative excerpt:
and another:
So in short, the guy can be sued for those emails, but not on the basis of some "damage" they cause the company mail servers...
So it seems to me that the main thing that makes people modest, eg. not stripping naked and running around campus, is the fact that people will know it was you and you have to talk to them afterwards. The same is probably true of this machine, ie. people assume that the operator would see you before and after you walk through, and you might feel embarassed about beeing seen that way.
But just suppose for a second, that the operator of the x-ray vision machine is in a totally isolated room, and sees only the image of the person walking through the machine with no face shown, and doesn't get to see the person before or after. Wouldn't this eliminate the privacy problem? After all, if no one knows who you were individually walking through the machine, how are you to feel violated?
I personally would be ok with that kind of setup. Would you?