I'm curious: The bible recognizes, accepts, and at places condones slavery. What would Jesus have said about this subject? Also, should we take direction from the bible on this issue?
Also: Jesus himself got angry and tore up the bazaar in the temple. I'm trying to be like Jesus in all ways (not making that up), and I'm wondering if it's OK to do that? Is getting angry on occasion, and doing damage to public areas OK for the informed activist?
And finally: What does the bible have to say about homosexuality? Many *many* biblical scholars through history that have interpreted the bible as being four-square against homosexuality - should we accept their interpretations because they are scholars and have studied the field extensively?
Okay, nothing in the linked article (that I could find) points to the actual study. After some googling, people are apparently reporting on this paper.
The paper has these highlights:
A survey of nearly 7000 Internet users tested associations between personality traits, past behavior, and viewing cat-related media online.
The study also examined Internet users’ motivations for consuming cat-related content, including emotion regulation and procrastination.
Additionally, it explored effects of Internet cat consumption on emotional states and enjoyment of this type of digital media.
Results point to certain personality types being more strongly associated with Internet cat consumption.
Furthermore, results support a conceptual model arguing that the happiness gained from viewing Internet cats can moderate the relationship between procrastination motives, guilt, and enjoyment.
None of this, and nothing in the abstract, is anywhere close to what others and linked articles in the post summary claim.
However, taking an austere view of the highlights, note that 7,000 people were polled and *self reported* that they felt good after watching cat videos.
Also, what does "[viewing] can moderate the relationship between procrastination motives, guilt, and enjoyment" mean? What is this study reporting, and how does one use this information?
"Moderate the relationship between things" is complete non-content speech. It's the thing one would expect from a politician trying to dodge a question.
A lot of the time I am searching for something but there is a top search category that is NOT what I want and keeps showing up. the "-" tag simply doesn't help enough.
Here's a way to tell if your search engine is thinking for you.
Search for "Great Tits" (a type of bird) and check the results.
If your search engine is trying to think for you, it'll become obvious on the first page of search results.
We eat too much, we exercise too little, and we eat the wrong things.
More fruits, veg, and yes meat... and less starchy food.
As to getting people to move their fat asses every so often... good luck with that.
Out of curiosity, what observations would invalidate your hypothesis, Mr. "random some guy on the internet"?
If there were, for example, a rise in obesity in 6-month old babies - would that invalidate the hypothesis, or does it simple mean the 6-month old babies need to get out and exercise more?
How about lab animals? If lab animals grown with the same diet and same exercise regimens were getting progressively more obese over the last few decades, would that invalidate your views, or does it mean that the lab rats should just cut down on the calories?
A lot of people expound the virtues of this-or-that theory of obesity, there's thousands of miracle cure diets and theories of nutrition to choose from. Do I want the primitive diet? The all-meat diet? The vegetarian diet? The new fancy diet from some genuine charlatan interviewed on Oprah? (It's a diet made by a doctor... and it really works!!!)
How about basic thermodynamics? If I reduce my food intake, I'm guaranteed to lose weight... right? It's basic thermodynamics after all.
How about we all read up on the subject and look at some evidence. Nothing in people's diet - either type or amount - explains the rise of obesity in our culture, and neither does anything related to lifestyle.
If you have an alternate explanation, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, stop shouting debunked views and commonly-held myths.
Modern obesity has nothing to do with diet, exercise, or lifestyle.
What bollocks is that? What has an RTG in space to do with a nuclear (fission) reactor on earth?
No one cares how you power your satellites, space probes.
I think the fear was that if the system broke up on launch (exploded, perhaps) that it would strew radioactive materials over a wide swath of landscape.
(To be fair, we've had a couple of satellite launches screw up in the last decade, so the probability of failure isn't zero.)
Microfluidic channels are fairly easy to produce using traditional lithography, and a simple water pump produces all of the motion necessary. It's difficult to see how this really improves upon that model.
You have a valid point, but I thought it was an interesting approach(*).
In his paper, Dr. PraKash notes that microfluidics requires pumps, valves, and other controlling hardware to route the chemicals to the required places.
His system moves microsamples around using magnetic fields, eliminating the need for pumps and valves.
Check out his dancing droplets video on YouTube. There's really a lot going on at the atomic level with these micro droplets.
It's an embarrassment to have a ask Slashdot featuring Kim Dotcom.
And why is that?
We're supposed to be the smart crowd in the internet, and pride ourselves in having open minds and hearing both sides.
Is it important to get information that wasn't delivered by the news outlets?
Is it important to give both sides a chance to tell their story?
Is it effective to make judgements based on arrest claims, and not on convictions?
The GP has it dead-on: these posted questions are an embarrassment to our community. You could fault sock puppets and spammers, but our moderation system is supposed to let us suppress the junk and let our true natures shine forth.
I am astonished at the crass and low-born nature of the posted questions.
I thought we were better than that - I honestly did.
the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
"Poised" my lily white ass.
You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.
Google is on the cusp of having some demonstration technology which will be perpetually 10 years away due to legal issues, corner cases, and the myriad of ways in which it will almost work as an idea, but fail in practice.
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.
Oh, I agree with you and that sentiment completely.
To be specific, take a look at Manna, by Marshall Brain. It's an easy read, and it shows in frighteningly clear steps the two different ways the economy can go.
I'm all for automation, and I've worked on automation projects before. By and large, automation takes away those jobs that humans don't really want to do. Boring, repetitive, dehumanizing things like crop harvesting or long-haul driving.
While I recognize that automated production is the way of the future, I'm not quite sure how to get there. If there were some clear path, I'd be advocating it.
The best I can come up with at the moment is to point out how we're going to be in tough straits when 3 million people find themselves without a job in the next 5 years (and 2 1/2 million after that when short-haul driving is mostly automated, automated drone delivery of packages and mail and such.)
Pointing out the problems might nudge us into rethinking how economics works. That's all I can think of at the moment.
Do you have any ideas on how we can be part of that transition?
The effect of 'contests' and 'rewards' is often a bunch of people coming up with an expensive one-off stunt that does exactly what is required for the prize money and nothing more, and does not really advance the state of the art. The various turing test contests are an example, as well as the Ansari X prize.
I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
The original grand challenge might actually be the problem - people looked at the success and tried to emulate it.
The differences might stem from problem specifications, or proper choice of problem. I remember the Darpa prize for building a machine to ascend the space elevator powered by a big searchlight at the bottom. The contest rules specifically required solar cells and electric motors, completely cutting out thermodynamic engines of various type (steam engines, stirling-cycle, other mechanical types). With so little room for innovation, it became a simple cutting-edge engineering chore.
Another prize involved a machine that can ride (and pilot) a tractor, dismount and walk into a building, find and turn a valve, and return. That doesn't quite fire the imagination as much as building a self-driving car, and the requirements are quite specific.
The Turing Test has no fundamental basis in theory, but it's led to some interesting algorithms like ELIZA, insights into human interaction (ie - that you don't actually have to be intelligent to keep up a conversation), and clarified the definition of AI a little.
So there's definitely value in having prizes, but I agree with you that it's not a 1-to-1 ratio of prize money to return.
It's no great effort to find interesting and informative videos on the net. If you have the time to tape someone talking, you have the time to seek out things that nerds might want to see.
Also, there's really no feedback from the slashdot submission process. If a video doesn't meet your requirements, it's impossible to tell *why* they don't meet them, so that submitters could modify their selection process.
But this is beside the point. I'm not suggesting that you show other peoples' videos, I'm suggesting that *you* use the medium properly when making your own videos.
These same points were made back when Slashdot started video'ing people, to no great effect. Vinegar is needed to catch your attention. You have the perfect opportunity to use "directed practice based on feedback" which would turn you into a world-class videographer in a couple of years.
It's because they don't use the medium properly. Videos of "people talking" adds nothing to the presentation of information.
Add the fact that the viewer can read and scan text much faster than the video talks, and the fact that most people don't present well in the first place (vocal disfluencies such as "ahh... um... you know..." and so forth) and it makes for a lousy experience.
For contrast, imagine an audio of the person talking while the video shows graphs and charts illustrating or bolstering the talking points, or showing the action being described (as in voiceover showing a 3-alarm fire in a datacenter), or showing an animation clarifying the speaker's voiced description.
Use video in the right way and people will love you for it.
...or continue with what you currently do.
(I need to point out that anyone can grab a camera and record someone talking for ten minutes. What makes Slashdot better than all the YouTube teenagers who do this for their HS project? You have the intent, time, and money to do this. Do it right, then learn to do it well.)
As with terrorism, this recent rise of "you disagree with me thus you must be a secret government paid sockpuppet" is by far more damaging than anything paid trolls could actually do by themselves.
I'm just pointing things out and asking the question. Your response seems to be "In my opinion, it's not so".
I posted specific examples so that people could discuss the issues and point out problems with the conclusion. Several, in fact.
You took the most vulnerable example and framed it in a "conspiracy theorist" context, and used it to frame the entire position.
That's fine, it's a good use of rhetoric, but it adds nothing new to the conversation other than "in my opinion...".
Would you care to formulate a response with examples and/or references that explain *why* raising the question is more damaging than anything the sock puppets could do?
Because looking at the chemical plant explosion hoax and Acorn hoax would indicate ro me that sock puppets can have an enormous negative effect on public opinion and government policy.
Acorn was brought down specifically to stop its voter registration drives, which is on its face an attack against the freedom of democracy.
It's really, *really* hard for me to see how "be careful of sock puppets" can rise to that level of damage.
It's just about time to drag the American organized political trolling on sites like reddit, twitter, and tumblr into the open too, right?
I've often wondered about certain comment threads on slashdot. Framing certain actions as "hijacking the conversation for propaganda purposes" seems to hit the Bayesian priors higher than just "a lot of people really feel that way".
The conversations attached to Uber articles are weird, not at all what one would expect.
The recent one about California raising the minimum wage was suspect: affecting roughly 2.4% of wage earners, you would expect posts like "has no effect because costs are passed on to consumers", "raising everyone's wages make costs rise to compensate", and so on to be roundly debunked by the first person to google some numbers.
It's worse around election time. In a presidential election year, about 6 weeks beforehand we start to get framing posts - some of which are quite insidious. "I agree with him on *that* issue, but everything else he stands for is batshit crazy". It seemed like every response to a Ron Paul was that way: his immediate position is OK, but it puts the "batshit crazy" idea into people's minds with no supporting evidence.
...and it's starting to happen for Rand Paul as well.
Then there's the visibility-massaging techniques: posting an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond so that text further down gets pushed below the fold where no one can see it. Posting a definition that's not *quite* right so that people argue the definition back and forth and avoid the core issues, and of course modding things down.
I sometimes monitor certain posts and see them modded down... only to see them modded up a few hours later. That indicates to me that there are people trying to promote an agenda with the moderation system, but get overruled by the general population.
In addition to participating in the conversation, take a step back and look at the overall context of the conversation some time. Instead of just responding, think about the reasoning behind *why* the person made the post that they did.
So he did one thing you agree with. The rest of his profile is just bat shit crazy.
That's a useful technique - agreeing or conceding the immediate issue, while making nebulous unsupported statements about everything else. Look to see this for the next year or so. "I agree with him on this issue, but everything else is crazy".
...problem is, that "agreeing on this one issue" seems to happen a lot. Like, for most issues.
Who do you recommend as an alternative? (And did they, by any chance, support the Patriot act?)
The Huffington Post was live updating the proceedings, and said this:
USA Freedom Act advances 77-17
In a stunning reversal from last week’s drama, the USA Freedom Act was passed by a vote of 77-17. The bill, which passed the House overwhelmingly several weeks ago will now move forward and is likely to receive a final vote on Tuesday.
The bill fell three votes short of the needed supermajority to advance last week but with the clock ticking on controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, supporters of NSA surveillance thought that the proposed reforms were better than letting the program expire entirely.
Rand Paul stated that the Freedom Act will likely get passed on Tuesday.
Wait... did we win or not? Isn't this just a 2-day repreive?
On the other hand, if no new physics is discovered, could this be the Michelson–Morley experiment of the 2000s?
It could be "Shaka, when the walls fell!"
A valid question, and I like a well-turned metaphor ("it was a wine red sea"), but wasn't there a Star Trek episode essentially mocking that sort of usage?
When out president says something is "our Sputnik moment", the Tamarians would understand perfectly.
if you dont want people to know what you are doing.... dont post it online for the world to see! is it really that hard???
That's a nice, pithy saying, and true in all respects.
What if I want to post innocuous things, but don't want people to *misinterpret* what I'm saying?
Alternate: What if I want to post innocuous things, but don't want people to invent subtext where there is none?
Have you ever tried to write to a public audience? There's a reason why the President's "State of the Union" speech takes a lot of effort, and even then people bend the meanings of the words in extreme ways to justify bizarre interpretations.
Generally speaking, yes... so long as you are still within the effect range.
The germicidal effect comes from an absorption band in DNA. This is (like everything else) a bell curve, where the effect drops off either side of the peak.
Note that commonly available UV emitters (including UV lasers and LEDs and the quantum dots mentioned in the article) are so far out of the effective range to be completely ineffective.
And anything that is effective is pretty dangerous to use, so be careful taking one apart.
Peak effectiveness for sterilization is around 264 nanometers. DNA has a specific absorption at that wavelength, so light at this frequency destroys DNA.
This wavelength is in the UV-C band, which is the radiation blocked by the ozone layer, which is one reason people are concerned about ozone: it protects us from DNA-damaging radiation.
Mercury emits UV at around 254, which is close enough to the DNA absorption peak to have good effect. A fluorescent bulb without phosphor and UV-transparent glass will work.
The wavelengths cited in the post, 377nm, are too long for germicidal effect. If the work can be extended, it would result in much more efficient germicidal bulbs by generating wavelengths closer to optimal, and because quantum dots are generally very efficient.
You can get UV bulbs for your furnace that stick into the plenum and disinfect the air as it blows past. You might be able to run one of these from an inverter while hiking. Be sure to cover the bulb and be *very* careful not to look at it when it's on.
I'd like to hear what the economists here think should be done about Greece.
"Soverign debt is not like personal debt!"
That's what the economists on this very blog say, when discussing US debt. It doesn't matter how far into debt the US is, anyone can see this by comparing our debt to our GDP: the latter number is really big, while the debt is really small.
See? You can't just say getting into debt is bad, because the two are entirely different.
I'd like to hear what the Slashdot economists think should be done about Greece.
I remember putting the boot card at the front of my deck, placing it in the card reader, and pressing the "load" button on a system with 4K of core memory(*).
A lot of people think online voting is the next big thing, but the problem is actually very hard to do online.
To do it right requires a "proctored" setting where the person is guaranteed to be alone, and unobserved (including video recording).
If you can't guarantee that the person is alone, then they can be coerced into voting a specific way. If you can't guarantee that the person isn't observed, then the person can sell their vote.
Video recording hasn't been addressed yet, but with the current system a voter can record their vote as proof of how they voted, and so vote selling is possible. It's functionally the same as being observed, just time shifted.
Add in the requirements for recounts and verification, and physical ballots in a proctored environment is the simple solution.
I've seen mathematical solutions that make tampering statistically impossible. The system injects a large portion of non-human votes in a cryptographically secure way such that it doesn't change the actual outcome, but it's impossible for a hacker to change votes due to the statistical likelihood that he'll change one of the non-human votes and be detected.
Even with these systems, you still need a proctored environment that guarantees anonymous and unobserved voting.
And on the subject of interviewing companies, here's my response to Elon Musk:
The North Pole.
You lay a rifle on the surface of a [perfectly] spherical planet with no atmosphere. Firing the rifle, due to the curvature of the planet the bullet goes some distance and then falls to the ground. As you increase the muzzle velocity of the bullet, the point if impact gets further and further from the rifle.
If the planet has an acceleration of 10m/(s^2), what velocity must the bullet have to go around the planet and hit the gun in the stock?
(NB: This is a trick question, but Elon Musk is an actual rocket scientist.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious: The bible recognizes, accepts, and at places condones slavery. What would Jesus have said about this subject? Also, should we take direction from the bible on this issue?
Also: Jesus himself got angry and tore up the bazaar in the temple. I'm trying to be like Jesus in all ways (not making that up), and I'm wondering if it's OK to do that? Is getting angry on occasion, and doing damage to public areas OK for the informed activist?
And finally: What does the bible have to say about homosexuality? Many *many* biblical scholars through history that have interpreted the bible as being four-square against homosexuality - should we accept their interpretations because they are scholars and have studied the field extensively?
Okay, nothing in the linked article (that I could find) points to the actual study. After some googling, people are apparently reporting on this paper.
The paper has these highlights:
None of this, and nothing in the abstract, is anywhere close to what others and linked articles in the post summary claim.
However, taking an austere view of the highlights, note that 7,000 people were polled and *self reported* that they felt good after watching cat videos.
Also, what does "[viewing] can moderate the relationship between procrastination motives, guilt, and enjoyment" mean? What is this study reporting, and how does one use this information?
"Moderate the relationship between things" is complete non-content speech. It's the thing one would expect from a politician trying to dodge a question.
Also - papers have "highlights" sections now?
A lot of the time I am searching for something but there is a top search category that is NOT what I want and keeps showing up. the "-" tag simply doesn't help enough.
Here's a way to tell if your search engine is thinking for you.
Search for "Great Tits" (a type of bird) and check the results.
If your search engine is trying to think for you, it'll become obvious on the first page of search results.
the corn subsidies and the silly food pyramid.
We eat too much, we exercise too little, and we eat the wrong things.
More fruits, veg, and yes meat... and less starchy food.
As to getting people to move their fat asses every so often... good luck with that.
Out of curiosity, what observations would invalidate your hypothesis, Mr. "random some guy on the internet"?
If there were, for example, a rise in obesity in 6-month old babies - would that invalidate the hypothesis, or does it simple mean the 6-month old babies need to get out and exercise more?
How about lab animals? If lab animals grown with the same diet and same exercise regimens were getting progressively more obese over the last few decades, would that invalidate your views, or does it mean that the lab rats should just cut down on the calories?
A lot of people expound the virtues of this-or-that theory of obesity, there's thousands of miracle cure diets and theories of nutrition to choose from. Do I want the primitive diet? The all-meat diet? The vegetarian diet? The new fancy diet from some genuine charlatan interviewed on Oprah? (It's a diet made by a doctor... and it really works!!!)
How about basic thermodynamics? If I reduce my food intake, I'm guaranteed to lose weight... right? It's basic thermodynamics after all.
How about we all read up on the subject and look at some evidence. Nothing in people's diet - either type or amount - explains the rise of obesity in our culture, and neither does anything related to lifestyle.
If you have an alternate explanation, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, stop shouting debunked views and commonly-held myths.
Modern obesity has nothing to do with diet, exercise, or lifestyle.
What bollocks is that? What has an RTG in space to do with a nuclear (fission) reactor on earth?
No one cares how you power your satellites, space probes.
I think the fear was that if the system broke up on launch (exploded, perhaps) that it would strew radioactive materials over a wide swath of landscape.
(To be fair, we've had a couple of satellite launches screw up in the last decade, so the probability of failure isn't zero.)
Microfluidic channels are fairly easy to produce using traditional lithography, and a simple water pump produces all of the motion necessary. It's difficult to see how this really improves upon that model.
You have a valid point, but I thought it was an interesting approach(*).
In his paper, Dr. PraKash notes that microfluidics requires pumps, valves, and other controlling hardware to route the chemicals to the required places.
His system moves microsamples around using magnetic fields, eliminating the need for pumps and valves.
Check out his dancing droplets video on YouTube. There's really a lot going on at the atomic level with these micro droplets.
(*) I submitted the article
It's an embarrassment to have a ask Slashdot featuring Kim Dotcom.
And why is that?
We're supposed to be the smart crowd in the internet, and pride ourselves in having open minds and hearing both sides.
Is it important to get information that wasn't delivered by the news outlets?
Is it important to give both sides a chance to tell their story?
Is it effective to make judgements based on arrest claims, and not on convictions?
The GP has it dead-on: these posted questions are an embarrassment to our community. You could fault sock puppets and spammers, but our moderation system is supposed to let us suppress the junk and let our true natures shine forth.
I am astonished at the crass and low-born nature of the posted questions.
I thought we were better than that - I honestly did.
"Poised" my lily white ass.
You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.
Google is on the cusp of having some demonstration technology which will be perpetually 10 years away due to legal issues, corner cases, and the myriad of ways in which it will almost work as an idea, but fail in practice.
Um... OK. Fair point.
If it's not Google, then how about Daimler Chrysler?
Can they do it? Or am I still a drooling, panting idiot?
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.
Oh, I agree with you and that sentiment completely.
To be specific, take a look at Manna, by Marshall Brain. It's an easy read, and it shows in frighteningly clear steps the two different ways the economy can go.
I'm all for automation, and I've worked on automation projects before. By and large, automation takes away those jobs that humans don't really want to do. Boring, repetitive, dehumanizing things like crop harvesting or long-haul driving.
While I recognize that automated production is the way of the future, I'm not quite sure how to get there. If there were some clear path, I'd be advocating it.
The best I can come up with at the moment is to point out how we're going to be in tough straits when 3 million people find themselves without a job in the next 5 years (and 2 1/2 million after that when short-haul driving is mostly automated, automated drone delivery of packages and mail and such.)
Pointing out the problems might nudge us into rethinking how economics works. That's all I can think of at the moment.
Do you have any ideas on how we can be part of that transition?
The effect of 'contests' and 'rewards' is often a bunch of people coming up with an expensive one-off stunt that does exactly what is required for the prize money and nothing more, and does not really advance the state of the art. The various turing test contests are an example, as well as the Ansari X prize.
I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
The original grand challenge might actually be the problem - people looked at the success and tried to emulate it.
The differences might stem from problem specifications, or proper choice of problem. I remember the Darpa prize for building a machine to ascend the space elevator powered by a big searchlight at the bottom. The contest rules specifically required solar cells and electric motors, completely cutting out thermodynamic engines of various type (steam engines, stirling-cycle, other mechanical types). With so little room for innovation, it became a simple cutting-edge engineering chore.
Another prize involved a machine that can ride (and pilot) a tractor, dismount and walk into a building, find and turn a valve, and return. That doesn't quite fire the imagination as much as building a self-driving car, and the requirements are quite specific.
The Turing Test has no fundamental basis in theory, but it's led to some interesting algorithms like ELIZA, insights into human interaction (ie - that you don't actually have to be intelligent to keep up a conversation), and clarified the definition of AI a little.
So there's definitely value in having prizes, but I agree with you that it's not a 1-to-1 ratio of prize money to return.
Robert Murray Wilson, talking about transparent superconductors he's developed.
Chris, from ClickSpring, talking about building a clock.
Myfordboy showing how to cast aluminum at home.
Kevin Karsch et. al. rendering synthetic objects into legacy photographs
It's no great effort to find interesting and informative videos on the net. If you have the time to tape someone talking, you have the time to seek out things that nerds might want to see.
Also, there's really no feedback from the slashdot submission process. If a video doesn't meet your requirements, it's impossible to tell *why* they don't meet them, so that submitters could modify their selection process.
But this is beside the point. I'm not suggesting that you show other peoples' videos, I'm suggesting that *you* use the medium properly when making your own videos.
These same points were made back when Slashdot started video'ing people, to no great effect. Vinegar is needed to catch your attention. You have the perfect opportunity to use "directed practice based on feedback" which would turn you into a world-class videographer in a couple of years.
viz: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
Seriously. You have access to high-end feedback you could leverage to improve your technique. You should use it.
I agree with you 100%.
Ever wonder *why* these videos are bad?
It's because they don't use the medium properly. Videos of "people talking" adds nothing to the presentation of information.
Add the fact that the viewer can read and scan text much faster than the video talks, and the fact that most people don't present well in the first place (vocal disfluencies such as "ahh... um... you know..." and so forth) and it makes for a lousy experience.
For contrast, imagine an audio of the person talking while the video shows graphs and charts illustrating or bolstering the talking points, or showing the action being described (as in voiceover showing a 3-alarm fire in a datacenter), or showing an animation clarifying the speaker's voiced description.
Use video in the right way and people will love you for it.
...or continue with what you currently do.
(I need to point out that anyone can grab a camera and record someone talking for ten minutes. What makes Slashdot better than all the YouTube teenagers who do this for their HS project? You have the intent, time, and money to do this. Do it right, then learn to do it well.)
As with terrorism, this recent rise of "you disagree with me thus you must be a secret government paid sockpuppet" is by far more damaging than anything paid trolls could actually do by themselves.
I'm just pointing things out and asking the question. Your response seems to be "In my opinion, it's not so".
I posted specific examples so that people could discuss the issues and point out problems with the conclusion. Several, in fact.
You took the most vulnerable example and framed it in a "conspiracy theorist" context, and used it to frame the entire position.
That's fine, it's a good use of rhetoric, but it adds nothing new to the conversation other than "in my opinion...".
Would you care to formulate a response with examples and/or references that explain *why* raising the question is more damaging than anything the sock puppets could do?
Because looking at the chemical plant explosion hoax and Acorn hoax would indicate ro me that sock puppets can have an enormous negative effect on public opinion and government policy.
Acorn was brought down specifically to stop its voter registration drives, which is on its face an attack against the freedom of democracy.
It's really, *really* hard for me to see how "be careful of sock puppets" can rise to that level of damage.
Care to explain?
It's just about time to drag the American organized political trolling on sites like reddit, twitter, and tumblr into the open too, right?
I've often wondered about certain comment threads on slashdot. Framing certain actions as "hijacking the conversation for propaganda purposes" seems to hit the Bayesian priors higher than just "a lot of people really feel that way".
The conversations attached to Uber articles are weird, not at all what one would expect.
The recent one about California raising the minimum wage was suspect: affecting roughly 2.4% of wage earners, you would expect posts like "has no effect because costs are passed on to consumers", "raising everyone's wages make costs rise to compensate", and so on to be roundly debunked by the first person to google some numbers.
It's worse around election time. In a presidential election year, about 6 weeks beforehand we start to get framing posts - some of which are quite insidious. "I agree with him on *that* issue, but everything else he stands for is batshit crazy". It seemed like every response to a Ron Paul was that way: his immediate position is OK, but it puts the "batshit crazy" idea into people's minds with no supporting evidence.
...and it's starting to happen for Rand Paul as well.
Then there's the visibility-massaging techniques: posting an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond so that text further down gets pushed below the fold where no one can see it. Posting a definition that's not *quite* right so that people argue the definition back and forth and avoid the core issues, and of course modding things down.
I sometimes monitor certain posts and see them modded down... only to see them modded up a few hours later. That indicates to me that there are people trying to promote an agenda with the moderation system, but get overruled by the general population.
In addition to participating in the conversation, take a step back and look at the overall context of the conversation some time. Instead of just responding, think about the reasoning behind *why* the person made the post that they did.
It is sometimes quite enlightening.
Who do you recommend as an alternative? (And did they, by any chance, support the Patriot act?)
Bernie Sanders, who voted against the PATRIOT act and its reauthorization.
Voting against the Patriot act was a good thing, but everything else Bernie Sanders he stands for is just batshit crazy.
So he did one thing you agree with. The rest of his profile is just bat shit crazy.
That's a useful technique - agreeing or conceding the immediate issue, while making nebulous unsupported statements about everything else. Look to see this for the next year or so. "I agree with him on this issue, but everything else is crazy".
...problem is, that "agreeing on this one issue" seems to happen a lot. Like, for most issues.
Who do you recommend as an alternative? (And did they, by any chance, support the Patriot act?)
The Huffington Post was live updating the proceedings, and said this:
USA Freedom Act advances 77-17
In a stunning reversal from last week’s drama, the USA Freedom Act was passed by a vote of 77-17. The bill, which passed the House overwhelmingly several weeks ago will now move forward and is likely to receive a final vote on Tuesday.
The bill fell three votes short of the needed supermajority to advance last week but with the clock ticking on controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, supporters of NSA surveillance thought that the proposed reforms were better than letting the program expire entirely.
Rand Paul stated that the Freedom Act will likely get passed on Tuesday.
Wait... did we win or not? Isn't this just a 2-day repreive?
On the other hand, if no new physics is discovered, could this be the Michelson–Morley experiment of the 2000s?
It could be "Shaka, when the walls fell!"
A valid question, and I like a well-turned metaphor ("it was a wine red sea"), but wasn't there a Star Trek episode essentially mocking that sort of usage?
When out president says something is "our Sputnik moment", the Tamarians would understand perfectly.
This could be "The river Temarc in winter!"
if you dont want people to know what you are doing.... dont post it online for the world to see! is it really that hard???
That's a nice, pithy saying, and true in all respects.
What if I want to post innocuous things, but don't want people to *misinterpret* what I'm saying?
Alternate: What if I want to post innocuous things, but don't want people to invent subtext where there is none?
Have you ever tried to write to a public audience? There's a reason why the President's "State of the Union" speech takes a lot of effort, and even then people bend the meanings of the words in extreme ways to justify bizarre interpretations.
Waiting to hear your pithy response.
Generally speaking, yes... so long as you are still within the effect range.
The germicidal effect comes from an absorption band in DNA. This is (like everything else) a bell curve, where the effect drops off either side of the peak.
This diagram is a good visual.
Note that commonly available UV emitters (including UV lasers and LEDs and the quantum dots mentioned in the article) are so far out of the effective range to be completely ineffective.
And anything that is effective is pretty dangerous to use, so be careful taking one apart.
Peak effectiveness for sterilization is around 264 nanometers. DNA has a specific absorption at that wavelength, so light at this frequency destroys DNA.
This wavelength is in the UV-C band, which is the radiation blocked by the ozone layer, which is one reason people are concerned about ozone: it protects us from DNA-damaging radiation.
Mercury emits UV at around 254, which is close enough to the DNA absorption peak to have good effect. A fluorescent bulb without phosphor and UV-transparent glass will work.
The wavelengths cited in the post, 377nm, are too long for germicidal effect. If the work can be extended, it would result in much more efficient germicidal bulbs by generating wavelengths closer to optimal, and because quantum dots are generally very efficient.
You can get UV bulbs for your furnace that stick into the plenum and disinfect the air as it blows past. You might be able to run one of these from an inverter while hiking. Be sure to cover the bulb and be *very* careful not to look at it when it's on.
I'd like to hear what the economists here think should be done about Greece.
"Soverign debt is not like personal debt!"
That's what the economists on this very blog say, when discussing US debt. It doesn't matter how far into debt the US is, anyone can see this by comparing our debt to our GDP: the latter number is really big, while the debt is really small.
See? You can't just say getting into debt is bad, because the two are entirely different.
I'd like to hear what the Slashdot economists think should be done about Greece.
32MB? Bah. I remember the days when you could fit a whole OS in a hundred K! And 640K was enough for anyone!
Pfft, I remember running 40 users on terminals on a machine with 16K that probably had less than 1/10,000th of the cpu power a laptop has today.
Luxury!
I remember putting the boot card at the front of my deck, placing it in the card reader, and pressing the "load" button on a system with 4K of core memory(*).
Who'd have thought 40 years ago, we'd all be sitting here drinking chateau de chatillon.
(*) That part's actually true. I started on an IBM-1130, predecessor to the IBM-360.
A lot of people think online voting is the next big thing, but the problem is actually very hard to do online.
To do it right requires a "proctored" setting where the person is guaranteed to be alone, and unobserved (including video recording).
If you can't guarantee that the person is alone, then they can be coerced into voting a specific way. If you can't guarantee that the person isn't observed, then the person can sell their vote.
Video recording hasn't been addressed yet, but with the current system a voter can record their vote as proof of how they voted, and so vote selling is possible. It's functionally the same as being observed, just time shifted.
Add in the requirements for recounts and verification, and physical ballots in a proctored environment is the simple solution.
I've seen mathematical solutions that make tampering statistically impossible. The system injects a large portion of non-human votes in a cryptographically secure way such that it doesn't change the actual outcome, but it's impossible for a hacker to change votes due to the statistical likelihood that he'll change one of the non-human votes and be detected.
Even with these systems, you still need a proctored environment that guarantees anonymous and unobserved voting.
And on the subject of interviewing companies, here's my response to Elon Musk:
The North Pole.
You lay a rifle on the surface of a [perfectly] spherical planet with no atmosphere. Firing the rifle, due to the curvature of the planet the bullet goes some distance and then falls to the ground. As you increase the muzzle velocity of the bullet, the point if impact gets further and further from the rifle.
If the planet has an acceleration of 10m/(s^2), what velocity must the bullet have to go around the planet and hit the gun in the stock?
(NB: This is a trick question, but Elon Musk is an actual rocket scientist.)