Actually, it could have been used almost from the start of the web. As a grad student at CERN, I was introduced to the web very early on in its history and what was possibly the worlds first webcam was used to monitor the coffee pot in the Cambridge Computer Science department. I even surprised one of my friends when I got back to the UK by asking to see it - he was amazed anyone over in physics had heard of it!.
But way to go with trying to make him into an expert in cognitive studies, because he went part way through a biology PhD. In my part of the world that's called a fallacious appeal to authority.
Actually, you were the one guilty of the "appeal to authority" (or lack thereof) originally since your first post clearly suggested we should dismiss his arguments because he was not an expert. Given this, it is the height of hypocrisy to criticize the person who effectively refuted your argument of committing the error which you made. This is doubly true when the only reason he mentioned the engineer's credentials was to show that you own fallacious "appeal to a lack of authority" was wrong because the engineer did actually have some expertise in the area!
NK's nuke deterrent is working because of the possibility of Kim being crazy enough to actually use it.
A deterrent is something which persuades someone else not to do something. The fact that Kim is crazy enough to use nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike means that it is far more likely that Trump will be crazy enough to launch a pre-emptive strike to stop him gaining that ability. This is not a policy of deterrence it's a game of chicken with nuclear-tipped missiles.
Both astrophysics and particle physics are in chaos now.
No, we are not. There are two unexplained phenomena at galactic and intergalactic scales but either could easily be explained by adding a new field to the physics we already have. This is no more 'chaotic' than it was before we found the Higgs boson or the top quark.
At the same time, the energy level of the newly discovered higgs boson has trashed decades of string theory.
That is simply not true. The Higgs mass is at the upper end of the allowed range for SUSY but it is still in the allowed range to avoid vacuum instability. I believe that there were some papers that suggested that the mass was closer to this limit than initially expected but I've not read any papers that indicated it was definitely over the limit.
I suspect the reason that they only want SMS is that it is hard to send while on the plane. You have to wait until you land by which time they are hoping that you may be slightly less incandescent.
If you get rid of dark energy, you eliminate the need for dark matter as well.
That's completely wrong. Dark energy is needed to explain the acceleration in the expansion of the universe. Matter - either dark or ordinary - is gravitationally attractive and can never cause the expansion to accelerate. Dark Matter is needed to explain the "clumpiness" of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the rotation curves of galaxies and gravitational lensing observations e.g. bullet cluster. Black Holes have been considered a dark matter candidate before (MACHOs) and have been ruled out.
They won't get in trouble because he is a white male.
They won't get in trouble because they technically have done nothing wrong. They fired a guy for not having the right political view point which, as I understand it, is not protected in the US like it is elsewhere.
The ironic thing is that they are missing the entire point of diversity which is that a disparate collection of world views leads to finding better ideas and solutions to problems. To put it in terms familiar to Slashdot it's like the Federation and the Borg and Google just showed they are the Borg.
No, nothing broken just a healthy pragmatism when it comes to human behaviour. Let's compare ground pilots to medicine. There are countless examples of medical error which lead to deaths. This is clearly not medical professionals deliberately deciding to put the lives of their patients at risk but simply to the occasional lack of focus, distractions, forgetfulness etc that everyone does from time-to-time when their life is not on the line. I have every confidence that a 'ground pilot' will do the legally required duties the vast majority of the time. However, if the pilot is on board they are far more likely to go the extra mile and do the extra check because something did not look quite right etc. and so you will lose that safety margin.
As for terrorists, the concern is about the new attack vectors it opens up because now the plane is being flown remotely. This opens up the possibility to hi-jack control, knocking out the reception equipment, feed false telemetry to the ground pilots etc. all while being at a safe, remote distance.
All of this means that a remotely controlled plane has increased risks and the only benefit is that the airlines get to increase their profits by firing lots of people. That does not sound like a good enough reason to increase the risks to passengers lives. So no, I'm not scared of terrorists nor am I assuming the worst of people, I just think lives should rank higher than corporate profits.
You are forgetting that the world is a sphere. The flight paths from NK to the US pass over Canada. We actually had an article in the papers here pointing this out and raising questions about how safe Canada would be if the US starts shooting down nuclear missiles over us. I believe the Seattle is closest but, looking at the map they had there did not seem to be a huge difference in distance between Los Angeles and Chicago.
Lets make our power dependent on one huge collection of transmission lines that can be taken down with one well placed bomb.
That could happen regardless of where you build the plant. The bigger concern is whether the EU really wants to hand the keys to its energy security over to a bunch of north African nations that are not exactly known for their stable governments and enlightened world view.
The number of circumstances where communications is lost during an emergency is almost zero.... emergency buttons like "fly mechanically in circles above clouds while we reboot all the computers".
Unless that emergency has been deliberately engineered by terrorists...and who exactly is going to be doing the flying while the computers are rebooting because it clearly isn't going to be the computers is it? Then there are questions such as is a pilot safe on the ground going to be sufficiently motivated to always pay full attention when their life is not on the line? Is whoever does the inspection before takeoff going to be bothered with even the tiniest thing that does not look quite right if they are not going to be flying the plane? etc.
This isn't just about women or gender issues either, it is the same kind of attitude the underlies all situations where there is an unwillingness to address problems with prejudice and unjust discrimination.
I agree. However, I think this unwillingness to address the problems is even more evident when attempting to "solve" the problems. Typically identifying and addressing the problem goes like this.
Perform a simple bean-counting experiment to get the numbers in social groups A and B in a career. If the ratio of A to B is lower than it is in the general population take this as evidence of unjust bias against A. Then, to fix this unjust bias introduce programs which deliberately discriminate against group B in favour of group A while, at the same time, telling those in group B to be very careful not to discriminate against those in group A.
At no point in the above process is anything done to identify the cause of the bias which is the first step to determining whether there even is a problem let alone how you might fix it. Even worse the "solution" is likely to cause more bias against group A by some in group B who see programs deliberately biased against them and act, as they perceive it, to rebalance the books. This is clearly not how you identify and correct prejudice. However, it is a cheap and easy way to make it look like you care and are doing something about it.
Why should it mean increased profit for airlines rather than lower prices for passengers?
It will mean both: the airlines will reduce prices so more people will want to fly and they will set the price so the increase in volume more than makes up for the smaller profit per flight. However, I don't see passenger's attitudes changing. Without a pilot on board, any disruption to the communication path might cause a crash. While the technology may eventually become trustworthy it will be a huge target for terrorists who will try to undermine and break it. It is hard to imagine they can make it completely secure from that.
Why would you need a web browser or plugin to do the conversion?
Simply to ensure it is done to the specifications that the remote site requires. I agree a standalone program is going to be far better at this but it would have to be available for multiple platforms, you would have to ensure it was up to date and that it was run with the right settings. If you require uploaders to be able to correctly configure a general video encoding application correctly you are going to get far fewer uploaders...although I suspect those you do get may upload higher quality videos.
Having endpoint to endpoint encryption is the right answer. And if that's not enough, we need an open and free internet and we need carriers to not be messing with any of my bits and bytes.
I agree but I'd actually go further and say that the only way to secure a network is with endpoint-to-endpoint encryption because how can anyone trust all the network providers in between? Once you send your packet out you have no control where different networks will route it and if it is routed through somewhere like the US, even if that is not the final destination, you know that the government there may potentially look at it.
That makes a lot of sense if you can get a web browser (or plugin) to do that for you to ensure that the format and encoding are correct. Without that, I think it would be very problematic given the huge numbers of file formats, codecs and options for those codecs which are available.
If learning is the students responsibility, then why have we always taught - - - from Neolith stone hand-tool makers to constructing Greens functions ?
Teaching hugely speeds up learning by directing students to what they need to learn and helping them learn it when they cannot understand or misunderstand a concept. You do realise that teaching is not the same thing as learning, right? Teaching is designed to aid learning, not replace it especially since you cannot teach something before you have learnt it.
What Volkswagen did was really easy for almost everyone to understand and so very hard to wriggle out of. The problem with bankers is that the laws they violate are amazingly complex and very hard for juries to understand. This gives them a lot more wriggle room to weasel out of criminal charges.
Defence lawyers know this and use it to fiddle the jury pool. My uncle was a UK bank inspector and sometimes had to sit in on trials for bank managers he caught on the fiddle. He always used to claim that jury selection was often done by which newspaper the prospective jurors were carrying: "The Sun", "Daily Mail" or equivalent were fine but show up with "The Times" or, worse, "The Financial Times" they would hardly be in the room before some objection to them was found. After that, anyone with a university degree was the next target for removal because if you can't really understand the crime because it is so complex then there is bound to be reasonable doubt that someone committed it.
He is probably the lowest level flunky who would still be high enough for PR spin.
Actually, it sounded more like he was the only one they could get their hands on quickly. I suspect that others may well be the subject of extradition requests or at least they are now going to have far more restricted travel itineraries since they will have to avoid everywhere which has a suitable extradition treaty...and that's assuming that local EU authorities don't end up throwing them in jail first for the same crime.
No matter how rich he is this guy cannot have both because justice requires denying him his freedom. Being rich just means is that he is more likely to get freedom over justice.
Make the company bleed out a little bit. Nothing makes a company act straight other than the threat of losing money.
All this does is punish the shareholders and employees of the company who will lose their investment and their job respectively when the company goes bankrupt. The overwhelming majority of these people are not responsible for the crime committed. Putting the executives and employees who were responsible for the decision in jail as well as huge fines ($400k seems small given the likely salary of the executive) holds them accountable for the decisions which they are responsible for.
The more punishments like this the better because it will make executives realize that they cannot let their employees and shareholders take the hit for them if they commit crimes. The shareholders are still on the hook for the financial fallout of this crime which is reasonable because technically they are responsible for overseeing management (although the modern corporate structure makes that very hard for them to do in reality). If previous cases of corporate malfeasance had resulted in jail time and financially significant fines for the executives involved instead of just fining the company perhaps there would not have been a Volkswagen fraud case.
But it's higher education's damn job to figure out how to teach, not just how to hold group discussions after the fact.
True but the fact is that there are numerous studies showing that reading and watching material and then group problem solving/discussion is far more effective than just lecturing alone. Of course, this is averaged over all students and, like any teaching technique, it will work better for some students and less well for others.
Not only that but it is actually more-or-less how I learn myself now. I'll read up papers on a new topic and then discuss it with colleagues. Those discussions show me where I have either got gaps in my knowledge or where there are logical inconsistencies in my understanding. Without those conversations to challenge it my understanding would remain flawed which is why the discussion bit is important.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it could have been used almost from the start of the web. As a grad student at CERN, I was introduced to the web very early on in its history and what was possibly the worlds first webcam was used to monitor the coffee pot in the Cambridge Computer Science department. I even surprised one of my friends when I got back to the UK by asking to see it - he was amazed anyone over in physics had heard of it!.
But way to go with trying to make him into an expert in cognitive studies, because he went part way through a biology PhD. In my part of the world that's called a fallacious appeal to authority.
Actually, you were the one guilty of the "appeal to authority" (or lack thereof) originally since your first post clearly suggested we should dismiss his arguments because he was not an expert. Given this, it is the height of hypocrisy to criticize the person who effectively refuted your argument of committing the error which you made. This is doubly true when the only reason he mentioned the engineer's credentials was to show that you own fallacious "appeal to a lack of authority" was wrong because the engineer did actually have some expertise in the area!
NK's nuke deterrent is working because of the possibility of Kim being crazy enough to actually use it.
A deterrent is something which persuades someone else not to do something. The fact that Kim is crazy enough to use nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike means that it is far more likely that Trump will be crazy enough to launch a pre-emptive strike to stop him gaining that ability. This is not a policy of deterrence it's a game of chicken with nuclear-tipped missiles.
*sigh* At least the fireworks will be awesome this Christmas.
Both astrophysics and particle physics are in chaos now.
No, we are not. There are two unexplained phenomena at galactic and intergalactic scales but either could easily be explained by adding a new field to the physics we already have. This is no more 'chaotic' than it was before we found the Higgs boson or the top quark.
At the same time, the energy level of the newly discovered higgs boson has trashed decades of string theory.
That is simply not true. The Higgs mass is at the upper end of the allowed range for SUSY but it is still in the allowed range to avoid vacuum instability. I believe that there were some papers that suggested that the mass was closer to this limit than initially expected but I've not read any papers that indicated it was definitely over the limit.
I suspect the reason that they only want SMS is that it is hard to send while on the plane. You have to wait until you land by which time they are hoping that you may be slightly less incandescent.
If you get rid of dark energy, you eliminate the need for dark matter as well.
That's completely wrong. Dark energy is needed to explain the acceleration in the expansion of the universe. Matter - either dark or ordinary - is gravitationally attractive and can never cause the expansion to accelerate. Dark Matter is needed to explain the "clumpiness" of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the rotation curves of galaxies and gravitational lensing observations e.g. bullet cluster. Black Holes have been considered a dark matter candidate before (MACHOs) and have been ruled out.
I think that about covers everything.
They won't get in trouble because he is a white male.
They won't get in trouble because they technically have done nothing wrong. They fired a guy for not having the right political view point which, as I understand it, is not protected in the US like it is elsewhere.
The ironic thing is that they are missing the entire point of diversity which is that a disparate collection of world views leads to finding better ideas and solutions to problems. To put it in terms familiar to Slashdot it's like the Federation and the Borg and Google just showed they are the Borg.
No, nothing broken just a healthy pragmatism when it comes to human behaviour. Let's compare ground pilots to medicine. There are countless examples of medical error which lead to deaths. This is clearly not medical professionals deliberately deciding to put the lives of their patients at risk but simply to the occasional lack of focus, distractions, forgetfulness etc that everyone does from time-to-time when their life is not on the line. I have every confidence that a 'ground pilot' will do the legally required duties the vast majority of the time. However, if the pilot is on board they are far more likely to go the extra mile and do the extra check because something did not look quite right etc. and so you will lose that safety margin.
As for terrorists, the concern is about the new attack vectors it opens up because now the plane is being flown remotely. This opens up the possibility to hi-jack control, knocking out the reception equipment, feed false telemetry to the ground pilots etc. all while being at a safe, remote distance.
All of this means that a remotely controlled plane has increased risks and the only benefit is that the airlines get to increase their profits by firing lots of people. That does not sound like a good enough reason to increase the risks to passengers lives. So no, I'm not scared of terrorists nor am I assuming the worst of people, I just think lives should rank higher than corporate profits.
Except during road construction when a signman holds up a "stop" sign...
If you have people standing in the middle of motorways holding signs the largest safety concern is not how a driverless car algorithm will handle it.
You are forgetting that the world is a sphere. The flight paths from NK to the US pass over Canada. We actually had an article in the papers here pointing this out and raising questions about how safe Canada would be if the US starts shooting down nuclear missiles over us. I believe the Seattle is closest but, looking at the map they had there did not seem to be a huge difference in distance between Los Angeles and Chicago.
NK isn't going to launch an attack on anyone, as it would be utter mass suicide and they know it.
Deterrents only work when you have reasonably rational people making the decisions on both sides. Here I'm not sure you have that on either side.
Lets make our power dependent on one huge collection of transmission lines that can be taken down with one well placed bomb.
That could happen regardless of where you build the plant. The bigger concern is whether the EU really wants to hand the keys to its energy security over to a bunch of north African nations that are not exactly known for their stable governments and enlightened world view.
The number of circumstances where communications is lost during an emergency is almost zero.... emergency buttons like "fly mechanically in circles above clouds while we reboot all the computers".
Unless that emergency has been deliberately engineered by terrorists...and who exactly is going to be doing the flying while the computers are rebooting because it clearly isn't going to be the computers is it? Then there are questions such as is a pilot safe on the ground going to be sufficiently motivated to always pay full attention when their life is not on the line? Is whoever does the inspection before takeoff going to be bothered with even the tiniest thing that does not look quite right if they are not going to be flying the plane? etc.
This isn't just about women or gender issues either, it is the same kind of attitude the underlies all situations where there is an unwillingness to address problems with prejudice and unjust discrimination.
I agree. However, I think this unwillingness to address the problems is even more evident when attempting to "solve" the problems. Typically identifying and addressing the problem goes like this.
Perform a simple bean-counting experiment to get the numbers in social groups A and B in a career. If the ratio of A to B is lower than it is in the general population take this as evidence of unjust bias against A. Then, to fix this unjust bias introduce programs which deliberately discriminate against group B in favour of group A while, at the same time, telling those in group B to be very careful not to discriminate against those in group A.
At no point in the above process is anything done to identify the cause of the bias which is the first step to determining whether there even is a problem let alone how you might fix it. Even worse the "solution" is likely to cause more bias against group A by some in group B who see programs deliberately biased against them and act, as they perceive it, to rebalance the books. This is clearly not how you identify and correct prejudice. However, it is a cheap and easy way to make it look like you care and are doing something about it.
Why should it mean increased profit for airlines rather than lower prices for passengers?
It will mean both: the airlines will reduce prices so more people will want to fly and they will set the price so the increase in volume more than makes up for the smaller profit per flight. However, I don't see passenger's attitudes changing. Without a pilot on board, any disruption to the communication path might cause a crash. While the technology may eventually become trustworthy it will be a huge target for terrorists who will try to undermine and break it. It is hard to imagine they can make it completely secure from that.
Why would you need a web browser or plugin to do the conversion?
Simply to ensure it is done to the specifications that the remote site requires. I agree a standalone program is going to be far better at this but it would have to be available for multiple platforms, you would have to ensure it was up to date and that it was run with the right settings. If you require uploaders to be able to correctly configure a general video encoding application correctly you are going to get far fewer uploaders...although I suspect those you do get may upload higher quality videos.
Having endpoint to endpoint encryption is the right answer. And if that's not enough, we need an open and free internet and we need carriers to not be messing with any of my bits and bytes.
I agree but I'd actually go further and say that the only way to secure a network is with endpoint-to-endpoint encryption because how can anyone trust all the network providers in between? Once you send your packet out you have no control where different networks will route it and if it is routed through somewhere like the US, even if that is not the final destination, you know that the government there may potentially look at it.
That makes a lot of sense if you can get a web browser (or plugin) to do that for you to ensure that the format and encoding are correct. Without that, I think it would be very problematic given the huge numbers of file formats, codecs and options for those codecs which are available.
If learning is the students responsibility, then why have we always taught - - - from Neolith stone hand-tool makers to constructing Greens functions ?
Teaching hugely speeds up learning by directing students to what they need to learn and helping them learn it when they cannot understand or misunderstand a concept. You do realise that teaching is not the same thing as learning, right? Teaching is designed to aid learning, not replace it especially since you cannot teach something before you have learnt it.
What Volkswagen did was really easy for almost everyone to understand and so very hard to wriggle out of. The problem with bankers is that the laws they violate are amazingly complex and very hard for juries to understand. This gives them a lot more wriggle room to weasel out of criminal charges.
Defence lawyers know this and use it to fiddle the jury pool. My uncle was a UK bank inspector and sometimes had to sit in on trials for bank managers he caught on the fiddle. He always used to claim that jury selection was often done by which newspaper the prospective jurors were carrying: "The Sun", "Daily Mail" or equivalent were fine but show up with "The Times" or, worse, "The Financial Times" they would hardly be in the room before some objection to them was found. After that, anyone with a university degree was the next target for removal because if you can't really understand the crime because it is so complex then there is bound to be reasonable doubt that someone committed it.
He is probably the lowest level flunky who would still be high enough for PR spin.
Actually, it sounded more like he was the only one they could get their hands on quickly. I suspect that others may well be the subject of extradition requests or at least they are now going to have far more restricted travel itineraries since they will have to avoid everywhere which has a suitable extradition treaty...and that's assuming that local EU authorities don't end up throwing them in jail first for the same crime.
With freedom and justice . . . for the rich . . .
No matter how rich he is this guy cannot have both because justice requires denying him his freedom. Being rich just means is that he is more likely to get freedom over justice.
Make the company bleed out a little bit. Nothing makes a company act straight other than the threat of losing money.
All this does is punish the shareholders and employees of the company who will lose their investment and their job respectively when the company goes bankrupt. The overwhelming majority of these people are not responsible for the crime committed. Putting the executives and employees who were responsible for the decision in jail as well as huge fines ($400k seems small given the likely salary of the executive) holds them accountable for the decisions which they are responsible for.
The more punishments like this the better because it will make executives realize that they cannot let their employees and shareholders take the hit for them if they commit crimes. The shareholders are still on the hook for the financial fallout of this crime which is reasonable because technically they are responsible for overseeing management (although the modern corporate structure makes that very hard for them to do in reality). If previous cases of corporate malfeasance had resulted in jail time and financially significant fines for the executives involved instead of just fining the company perhaps there would not have been a Volkswagen fraud case.
But it's higher education's damn job to figure out how to teach, not just how to hold group discussions after the fact.
True but the fact is that there are numerous studies showing that reading and watching material and then group problem solving/discussion is far more effective than just lecturing alone. Of course, this is averaged over all students and, like any teaching technique, it will work better for some students and less well for others.
Not only that but it is actually more-or-less how I learn myself now. I'll read up papers on a new topic and then discuss it with colleagues. Those discussions show me where I have either got gaps in my knowledge or where there are logical inconsistencies in my understanding. Without those conversations to challenge it my understanding would remain flawed which is why the discussion bit is important.