...which is exactly why it will be hard to accept them if they cause even one death or injury. If I am driving and I make a mistake it is my fault and I have to deal with the consequences. If a robot is driving I have no control over whether it makes a mistake and yet I will still have to deal with the consequences.
The problem is therefore one of trust. I trust (most) people I know to drive me safely - after all there lives are on the line too. However with a robot I have to trust that some random programmer has not made a mistake somewhere in the code and that the sensors and other hardware it relies on will not fail. We already have aeroplanes which can fly themselves and I see nobody is suggesting that we have computer controlled passenger jets...so why should cars be different?
Not really. Helps nail someone who you can't get for any other crime.
If this is really the point of it then it is still a bad law. You should make breathing illegal and then you can arrest anyone you want. This of course undermines the entire point of having laws and leads back to the feudal system where you just do what the guy with the biggest pointy stick wants. It might be frustrating to not be able to get someone who is committing real crimes but the solution is not to undermine the entire system by making everyone criminals.
Nuclear power has more than one thing going for it. In particular you are forgetting zero green house gas emissions from operation and the vast reserves of fuel available - assuming we build some breeder reactors (although these do have some security implications because they create and burn plutonium).
I'll agree that the downsides are pretty significant but at the moment it is the only current technology capable of meeting our power supply needs without _guaranteed_ huge environmental impact. So either we use it, develop something better (e.g. fusion), live with the environmental impact of coal or learn to like living in the dark.
Supply never exceeds demand for very long in an oil market. Where would the oil be stored?
You leave it in the ground. What supply and demand means in this context is the ability to supply. If you have more supply capability than demand requires you have to run your facilities below capacity which means they make less money and so you want to lower your price slightly to sell more of your product and increase your profit (obviously at some point this ceases to work which is when you go bust).
Give me three coconuts, a piece of string, MacGyver, and your bank account numbers.
That won't work what you really need are two palladium plates, some water and a battery to make your own cold fusion reactor which is an excellent neutron source and should work well for powering your thorium reactor. However please don't tell al Qaeda because you know they'll just start making plutonium from all the depleted uranium NATO occasionally supplies them with.
But calculating a level of certainty is, in fact, a theoretical exercise.
...which is only as accurate as the available data wil allow. Given what Columbus knew he was very certain that if he sailed west he would find India. How could he know that there was a huge landmass in the way that would make it practically impossible for him to do so? When you are doing something that has never before been done all you have are best guesses based on extrapolation and you cannot expect that to be correct all the time.
You really need to read more academic (probably focus on literature) rules on plagiarism.
I am an academic so I am very familiar with the rules! Literature is a particularly bad example when talking about facts because that is primarily a subjective discipline and deals far more in opinion rather than fact. If we consider physics then I can easily state in a paper that "top quarks decay primarily into b quarks" without having to cite the first paper that measured the branching ratio, although I might do so if I thought that it might be a contentious claim without the link to the research showing it to be true.
Just like writing about Shakespeare and including metaphors interpreted by someone else isn't plagiarism, right?
Wrong. That would be presenting another's ideas as your own. However presenting facts gleaned elsewhere is not plagiarism. So if the article has said words to the effect of "we know they are not real because look they use this stock footage photograph" that is not plagiarism because they are reporting knowledge gained from elsewhere, not someone else's thoughts or ideas. Even if they claim that they discovered the photo is is still not plagiarism - that would just be a lie.
As far as facts are concerned it is not plagiarism to repeat them. However it is good practice (and in science essential) to cite the sources of such information but newspapers typically do not do this because journalists use many sources and it would clutter and confuse the article to have multiple citations everywhere, at least in print, online they could, and arguably should, do this....but not doing so does not make it plagiarism anymore than I plagiarize J.J. Thomson if I mention an electron in a scientific paper without a citation to his discovery paper.
It is great that you learned polynomial calculus, but most schools didn't teach that fifty years ago.
Well I don't know where you grew up but where I did in the UK they most certainly did teach polynomial calculus 50 years ago. Both my father and grandfather learnt it at school.
There is a big overlap between science and engineering. Just to take one example, the fluid flow equations for dealing with...
The difference is that engineering is applied science, mainly physics. This is not really an overlap. The example you give is not science but engineering. The concern was not whether fluid dynamics was valid under those conditions but rather whether they had designed the engine correctly and not overlooked some solution of the equations which would cause the thing to fail.
Sometimes doing engineering you can also do science in amazing and unexpected ways e.g. discovery of the cosmic microwave background. However, this did not happen in this case. We learnt how to build truly massive rocket engines but did not make new scientific discoveries.
You are speculating. What numbers do you have to show that education has gotten worse?
Actually I would argue that the orignal plot linked above provides such evidence. Given that the importance of education and the access to it has not significantly changed over the past few decades and that, in the same time, there has been no chance for humans to evolve to become smarter the only conclusion you are left to draw is that educational standards have dropped.
If I compare the expectations on my kids currently in primary school vs. what I was expected to learn it becomes even clearer. In fact in secondary school we did, admittedly basic, polynomial calculus by the age of 16. Now many students leave school at 18 without ever having seen calculus.
the offensive attack the US had planned if they didn't use the bomb would have been far worse. And that is historical fact.
Since when did educated guesses become fact? While I would tend to agree with you that is my (and your) opinion which is it something very different from a fact since we could both be wrong.
The "Space Race" was the single greatest time in scientific advancement in history.
Not really - the space race was more about technology than science. Scientifically the problem was solved: there was no problem calculating the physics involved to go to the Moon - the problem was developing the technology capable of doing so. It was a fantastic motivator for science and remains one of mankind's shining achievements but was really the result of applying science rather than discovering new science.
...one thing worth considering is that the work of finance itself is tremendously fulfilling. The problems that you are presented with are fascinating, you are surrounded with motivated people of incredible ability, and have unbelievable responsibility at a young age
This is also true of working in science but to a far greater degree. In particular the problems you are faced with are not only fascinating but also likely to be of great benefit in the future to humankind (not always and the lead times can be the best part of a century sometimes but nevertheless...) can you say the same? Would those problems look as fascinating if there was not a lot of money involved?
where else would I get to advise the CEO of a company on his strategy at age 25? If you have never helped a desperate company raise capital to avoid going bust by working consecutive 100 hour weeks...
Where else would I get to be responsible for installation of a multi-million dollar subdetector at the age of 22 while living in a foreign country and using a foreign language? Have you ever worked consecutive 100 hour weeks during evenings and nights trying to get a detector working in an attempt to understand how matter and anti-matter are different? Have you ever looked at the result your work and thought I'm the first person ever to know this?
I'm glad you enjoy your job but if you think it so attractive based on it merits compared to science the why do they need to pay people in finance so much more than scientists to attract them? I suspect it has something to do with being able to sleep easily at night...at least those you are not working through.
I think you are being too hard on your fellow countrymen - and I say that as a non-American, not associated with any US institute and member of an LHC experiment. Part of the difference between true, groundbreaking research and the stuff industry typically does is that you are working well beyond the bleeding edge. Building something which your physics says is possible but which nobody has actually ever done is always fraught with unexpected issues simply because nobody has any real experience.
If you look at the LHC it was originally due to start running in 2002 (IIRC) and so there have been significant delays with us as well and...ahem... not all of our magnets worked so well the first time we started to ramp them with beam in 2008. So I would argue that it is not that they did not expect problems just that the problems were perhaps greater than expected...and since nobody had ever built such a huge superconducting magnet system before how can you possibly expect to identify all the problems in advance? As the saying goes it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all and with research you can never guarentee success. If you can it isn't research because someone must have already done it!
It seems like it exists for the sole purpose of being censored.
Exactly...which is why you have to wonder at what the Indian government was thinking when the article also states that "India along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia opposed the grant of the domain in the first place". Shouldn't they have been campaigning for it since it makes it easier to ban?
Also, this thing was turning into a white elephant - between mismanagement by the physicists
The problem was not physicists but politicians. Large colliders like the LHC and SSC require a chain of accelerators of increasing energy to inject protons into them. The US already has just such a chain but in Fermilab near Chicago, not in the middle of Texas. As I understand it the decision to move the SSC from Illinois to Texas was made by politicians for political reasons. Since the entire lower energy accelerator complex had to be built from scratch in Texas this literally doubled the cost of the project.
The damage to US physics goes well beyond the loss of the project though. There were many non-US groups involved in the SSC and its cancellation has meant that many are extremely adamant that future international accelerator projects should not be built in the US due to a complete lack of faith in the US funding system.
Interesting. Google recently removed malware apps. Is that censorship? Why was the offending app removed? The answer was that it caused potential harm to the end user. Ideally any app that causes emotional distress can be just as harmful.
No, not really. The difference is that physical harm is easy to quantify and measure and so is an objective criterion. Emotional distress is entirely subjective: what one person may find distressing another will not. So long as any app is clearly labelled so that you are not tricked into downloading something that you find distressing I see no argument to ban its existence. It is up to you, as a supposedly responsible adult, not to download apps you find offensive.
You don't protest Toys-R-Us because they don't have porn racks with Hustler displayed out front.
True, but by the same token Toys-R-Us does not prevent you shopping at a store which does so what would be the point? While it is reasonable to argue that you knew you could only run Apple-approved apps when you purchase the Apple product there are no clear rules for app approval and even what they have is subject to change on a whim. This is the problem with monopolies - one person has close to absolute power and, as we all should know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So while I have no particular problem with them banning this idiotic app what happens if they ban an app teaching evolution because they deem it to be too controversial?
So... you think that 71% of 635 apps are in violation of OSS licenses even though TFA states that only 68 apps out of the 635 included OSS licensed code?
No, I merely think the article claims that...possibly because that it was it actually says.
It's also unfortunate that basic logic processing isn't still taught to kids in school.
Indeed, because if it were you might have reasoned that the article was making illogical claims and even reading the article in the way you thought it should be read results in illogical claims. In fact the position that you are taking defending this appallingly written article really only makes logical sense if you were somehow involved with the writing or editorial approval of it...
If you are just going to demonstrations, then I see no reason why kids should not just be watching videos.
There is a huge difference between seeing something live and watching a recording. We are all used to seeing amazing and impossible things on video for entertainment. Doing something real in front of a lecture has a far bigger impact. Plus students get the chance to ask "but what if you did X instead of Y" and see the results (assuming it is safe!).
Sadly, there is almost nothing that will be learned in 4 years of college that used that couldn't be taught in 10 minutes of skimming through a "best practices" document
...and how would you know which "best practices" document to skim through if you don't have a broad knowledge of the field? What happens when you encounter a problem for which there is no "best practice" because you are the first to do it? The value of a university education is that it gives you a framework of knowledge and skills and the ability to expand it as needed.
Given that EVERY student taking science should be made to take basic calculus. In fact in the UK basic (polynomial) calculus used to be part of the old maths O'level so everyone going to university ended up learning it - even those going to do an english degree - in the same manner that those of us doing physics had to learn Shakespeare. So if 16 year-old future english students could manage to learn enough calculus to pass an O'level there should be no problem for any science student, no matter what their field, to pass a basic calculus course at university.
Claiming this as an annual rate is actually wrong because it assumes a constant rate of sales over a year when in reality you would expect a peak and then a decline. So claiming an annual income of over $500k is not supported by the available data and so is arguably wrong...just for a different reason.
At least on the nook, you are able to lend books to other people. There are whole forums dedicated to lending ebooks.
You can only do this because, at the moment, B&N let you. What happens if they have a change of mind because they are not making enough money? What happens if they go bankrupt? What happens if some company comes up with a "magical and revolutionary" device and despite the horrendous hype you decide to switch from a Nook to that?
When I purchase an analogue book the transaction is over and complete and the book is mine to do with as I will (except to copy). The problem with DRM'd ebooks is that the transaction is never over. You continuously have to ask permission to do things with your purchase. If you trust the company to continue to give this permission then it is not a problem. However I have a real problem doing this especially since, by using DRM, the company is explicitly saying that they do not trust you.
Slashdot Mirror
...and before the grammar nazis strike - yes that should be 'their' not 'there' - sorry for the typo!
...which is exactly why it will be hard to accept them if they cause even one death or injury. If I am driving and I make a mistake it is my fault and I have to deal with the consequences. If a robot is driving I have no control over whether it makes a mistake and yet I will still have to deal with the consequences.
The problem is therefore one of trust. I trust (most) people I know to drive me safely - after all there lives are on the line too. However with a robot I have to trust that some random programmer has not made a mistake somewhere in the code and that the sensors and other hardware it relies on will not fail. We already have aeroplanes which can fly themselves and I see nobody is suggesting that we have computer controlled passenger jets...so why should cars be different?
Not really. Helps nail someone who you can't get for any other crime.
If this is really the point of it then it is still a bad law. You should make breathing illegal and then you can arrest anyone you want. This of course undermines the entire point of having laws and leads back to the feudal system where you just do what the guy with the biggest pointy stick wants. It might be frustrating to not be able to get someone who is committing real crimes but the solution is not to undermine the entire system by making everyone criminals.
Nuclear power has more than one thing going for it. In particular you are forgetting zero green house gas emissions from operation and the vast reserves of fuel available - assuming we build some breeder reactors (although these do have some security implications because they create and burn plutonium).
I'll agree that the downsides are pretty significant but at the moment it is the only current technology capable of meeting our power supply needs without _guaranteed_ huge environmental impact. So either we use it, develop something better (e.g. fusion), live with the environmental impact of coal or learn to like living in the dark.
Supply never exceeds demand for very long in an oil market. Where would the oil be stored?
You leave it in the ground. What supply and demand means in this context is the ability to supply. If you have more supply capability than demand requires you have to run your facilities below capacity which means they make less money and so you want to lower your price slightly to sell more of your product and increase your profit (obviously at some point this ceases to work which is when you go bust).
Give me three coconuts, a piece of string, MacGyver, and your bank account numbers.
That won't work what you really need are two palladium plates, some water and a battery to make your own cold fusion reactor which is an excellent neutron source and should work well for powering your thorium reactor. However please don't tell al Qaeda because you know they'll just start making plutonium from all the depleted uranium NATO occasionally supplies them with.
But calculating a level of certainty is, in fact, a theoretical exercise.
You really need to read more academic (probably focus on literature) rules on plagiarism.
I am an academic so I am very familiar with the rules! Literature is a particularly bad example when talking about facts because that is primarily a subjective discipline and deals far more in opinion rather than fact. If we consider physics then I can easily state in a paper that "top quarks decay primarily into b quarks" without having to cite the first paper that measured the branching ratio, although I might do so if I thought that it might be a contentious claim without the link to the research showing it to be true.
Just like writing about Shakespeare and including metaphors interpreted by someone else isn't plagiarism, right?
Wrong. That would be presenting another's ideas as your own. However presenting facts gleaned elsewhere is not plagiarism. So if the article has said words to the effect of "we know they are not real because look they use this stock footage photograph" that is not plagiarism because they are reporting knowledge gained from elsewhere, not someone else's thoughts or ideas. Even if they claim that they discovered the photo is is still not plagiarism - that would just be a lie.
As far as facts are concerned it is not plagiarism to repeat them. However it is good practice (and in science essential) to cite the sources of such information but newspapers typically do not do this because journalists use many sources and it would clutter and confuse the article to have multiple citations everywhere, at least in print, online they could, and arguably should, do this....but not doing so does not make it plagiarism anymore than I plagiarize J.J. Thomson if I mention an electron in a scientific paper without a citation to his discovery paper.
It is great that you learned polynomial calculus, but most schools didn't teach that fifty years ago.
Well I don't know where you grew up but where I did in the UK they most certainly did teach polynomial calculus 50 years ago. Both my father and grandfather learnt it at school.
There is a big overlap between science and engineering. Just to take one example, the fluid flow equations for dealing with...
The difference is that engineering is applied science, mainly physics. This is not really an overlap. The example you give is not science but engineering. The concern was not whether fluid dynamics was valid under those conditions but rather whether they had designed the engine correctly and not overlooked some solution of the equations which would cause the thing to fail.
Sometimes doing engineering you can also do science in amazing and unexpected ways e.g. discovery of the cosmic microwave background. However, this did not happen in this case. We learnt how to build truly massive rocket engines but did not make new scientific discoveries.
You are speculating. What numbers do you have to show that education has gotten worse?
Actually I would argue that the orignal plot linked above provides such evidence. Given that the importance of education and the access to it has not significantly changed over the past few decades and that, in the same time, there has been no chance for humans to evolve to become smarter the only conclusion you are left to draw is that educational standards have dropped.
If I compare the expectations on my kids currently in primary school vs. what I was expected to learn it becomes even clearer. In fact in secondary school we did, admittedly basic, polynomial calculus by the age of 16. Now many students leave school at 18 without ever having seen calculus.
the offensive attack the US had planned if they didn't use the bomb would have been far worse. And that is historical fact.
Since when did educated guesses become fact? While I would tend to agree with you that is my (and your) opinion which is it something very different from a fact since we could both be wrong.
The "Space Race" was the single greatest time in scientific advancement in history.
Not really - the space race was more about technology than science. Scientifically the problem was solved: there was no problem calculating the physics involved to go to the Moon - the problem was developing the technology capable of doing so. It was a fantastic motivator for science and remains one of mankind's shining achievements but was really the result of applying science rather than discovering new science.
...one thing worth considering is that the work of finance itself is tremendously fulfilling. The problems that you are presented with are fascinating, you are surrounded with motivated people of incredible ability, and have unbelievable responsibility at a young age
This is also true of working in science but to a far greater degree. In particular the problems you are faced with are not only fascinating but also likely to be of great benefit in the future to humankind (not always and the lead times can be the best part of a century sometimes but nevertheless...) can you say the same? Would those problems look as fascinating if there was not a lot of money involved?
where else would I get to advise the CEO of a company on his strategy at age 25? If you have never helped a desperate company raise capital to avoid going bust by working consecutive 100 hour weeks...
Where else would I get to be responsible for installation of a multi-million dollar subdetector at the age of 22 while living in a foreign country and using a foreign language? Have you ever worked consecutive 100 hour weeks during evenings and nights trying to get a detector working in an attempt to understand how matter and anti-matter are different? Have you ever looked at the result your work and thought I'm the first person ever to know this?
I'm glad you enjoy your job but if you think it so attractive based on it merits compared to science the why do they need to pay people in finance so much more than scientists to attract them? I suspect it has something to do with being able to sleep easily at night...at least those you are not working through.
I think you are being too hard on your fellow countrymen - and I say that as a non-American, not associated with any US institute and member of an LHC experiment. Part of the difference between true, groundbreaking research and the stuff industry typically does is that you are working well beyond the bleeding edge. Building something which your physics says is possible but which nobody has actually ever done is always fraught with unexpected issues simply because nobody has any real experience.
If you look at the LHC it was originally due to start running in 2002 (IIRC) and so there have been significant delays with us as well and...ahem... not all of our magnets worked so well the first time we started to ramp them with beam in 2008. So I would argue that it is not that they did not expect problems just that the problems were perhaps greater than expected...and since nobody had ever built such a huge superconducting magnet system before how can you possibly expect to identify all the problems in advance? As the saying goes it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all and with research you can never guarentee success. If you can it isn't research because someone must have already done it!
It seems like it exists for the sole purpose of being censored.
Exactly...which is why you have to wonder at what the Indian government was thinking when the article also states that "India along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia opposed the grant of the domain in the first place". Shouldn't they have been campaigning for it since it makes it easier to ban?
Also, this thing was turning into a white elephant - between mismanagement by the physicists
The problem was not physicists but politicians. Large colliders like the LHC and SSC require a chain of accelerators of increasing energy to inject protons into them. The US already has just such a chain but in Fermilab near Chicago, not in the middle of Texas. As I understand it the decision to move the SSC from Illinois to Texas was made by politicians for political reasons. Since the entire lower energy accelerator complex had to be built from scratch in Texas this literally doubled the cost of the project.
The damage to US physics goes well beyond the loss of the project though. There were many non-US groups involved in the SSC and its cancellation has meant that many are extremely adamant that future international accelerator projects should not be built in the US due to a complete lack of faith in the US funding system.
Interesting. Google recently removed malware apps. Is that censorship? Why was the offending app removed? The answer was that it caused potential harm to the end user. Ideally any app that causes emotional distress can be just as harmful.
No, not really. The difference is that physical harm is easy to quantify and measure and so is an objective criterion. Emotional distress is entirely subjective: what one person may find distressing another will not. So long as any app is clearly labelled so that you are not tricked into downloading something that you find distressing I see no argument to ban its existence. It is up to you, as a supposedly responsible adult, not to download apps you find offensive.
You don't protest Toys-R-Us because they don't have porn racks with Hustler displayed out front.
True, but by the same token Toys-R-Us does not prevent you shopping at a store which does so what would be the point? While it is reasonable to argue that you knew you could only run Apple-approved apps when you purchase the Apple product there are no clear rules for app approval and even what they have is subject to change on a whim. This is the problem with monopolies - one person has close to absolute power and, as we all should know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So while I have no particular problem with them banning this idiotic app what happens if they ban an app teaching evolution because they deem it to be too controversial?
So... you think that 71% of 635 apps are in violation of OSS licenses even though TFA states that only 68 apps out of the 635 included OSS licensed code?
No, I merely think the article claims that...possibly because that it was it actually says.
It's also unfortunate that basic logic processing isn't still taught to kids in school.
Indeed, because if it were you might have reasoned that the article was making illogical claims and even reading the article in the way you thought it should be read results in illogical claims. In fact the position that you are taking defending this appallingly written article really only makes logical sense if you were somehow involved with the writing or editorial approval of it...
If you are just going to demonstrations, then I see no reason why kids should not just be watching videos.
There is a huge difference between seeing something live and watching a recording. We are all used to seeing amazing and impossible things on video for entertainment. Doing something real in front of a lecture has a far bigger impact. Plus students get the chance to ask "but what if you did X instead of Y" and see the results (assuming it is safe!).
Not in the real world it's not.
Oh come on - in the real world we celebrate pi day on the 31st April ;-)
Sadly, there is almost nothing that will be learned in 4 years of college that used that couldn't be taught in 10 minutes of skimming through a "best practices" document
Given that EVERY student taking science should be made to take basic calculus. In fact in the UK basic (polynomial) calculus used to be part of the old maths O'level so everyone going to university ended up learning it - even those going to do an english degree - in the same manner that those of us doing physics had to learn Shakespeare. So if 16 year-old future english students could manage to learn enough calculus to pass an O'level there should be no problem for any science student, no matter what their field, to pass a basic calculus course at university.
Claiming this as an annual rate is actually wrong because it assumes a constant rate of sales over a year when in reality you would expect a peak and then a decline. So claiming an annual income of over $500k is not supported by the available data and so is arguably wrong...just for a different reason.
At least on the nook, you are able to lend books to other people. There are whole forums dedicated to lending ebooks.
You can only do this because, at the moment, B&N let you. What happens if they have a change of mind because they are not making enough money? What happens if they go bankrupt? What happens if some company comes up with a "magical and revolutionary" device and despite the horrendous hype you decide to switch from a Nook to that?
When I purchase an analogue book the transaction is over and complete and the book is mine to do with as I will (except to copy). The problem with DRM'd ebooks is that the transaction is never over. You continuously have to ask permission to do things with your purchase. If you trust the company to continue to give this permission then it is not a problem. However I have a real problem doing this especially since, by using DRM, the company is explicitly saying that they do not trust you.