We are pretty clearly in the 4th age, or "Bureaucracy". The 5th age, or "The Aftermath", cannot be far away. Prepare yourself for an apocalyptic transition back to "Chaos"...
Again, had you RTFA you would know that they weren't talking about 'weak' papers, they were talking about papers and studies that were later contradicted by several other studies. Their principal message was that we need to be careful about accepting a brand new study at face value, before anyone has had a chance to try replicating the results. Most anybody versed in science would know this. But many in the media and the general public apparently don't. Hence the article.
The Slashdot summary of this particular article is more than a little misleading and sensationalist.
Yes, but this wasn't talking about surveys with leading questions. TFA was talking about clinical studies published in medical journals like JAMA and the New england Journal of Medicine.
Thank you! I was about to post something similar myself, until I saw your post. Seems like every time we get a story like this there's a flood of stupid analogies. Followed by a flood of messages saying "No, it's not like that, it's more like this..."
None of the analogies are good. And in many cases, the analogue scenarios becomes so convoluted (in an attempt to "better represent the situation") that it is either nonsensical, or leads to a conclusion opposite to the intent of the poster.
As the parent post said: Please stop the analogies.
26:63 But Jesus held his peace, And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God.
26:64 Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.
Mark
14:61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
14:62 And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.
...
15:2 And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering said unto them, Thou sayest it.
Luke
22:70 Then said they all, Art thou then the Son of God? And he said unto them, Ye say that I am.
John
18:37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king.
Aside from that one passage in Mark most of his answers seem pretty cryptic, and amount to "that's what you said". Granted, the fact that are so many contradictory accounts makes it hard to discern the truth (assuming of course that these events actually occurred at all).
It's a question of prioritization. Is it really worth spending the amount of resources and manpower that have apparently been used for this crackdown? Warez sites cost corporations money. Terrorists kill people. Lots of 'em. And the government keeps reminding us that terrorists are a HUGE threat, that takes massive resources to track down and stop (that's why they need bigger budgets and more power).
To use your analogy: Should we stop prosecuting parking violations? No, I don't think so. But I don't see any reason to set up a massive parking violator sting operation either.
This isn't exactly true. He wasn't so passive that he refused to admit that he was, in fact, God. This was ultimately what led him to be crucified, the charge of blasphemy.
Uh, my memory of the New Testament is a little rusty, but wasn't the conversation in question something along the lines of
Not to mention the fact that you'd think these organizations might have something better to do. Like oh, say, catching "terrorists". Given how much effort the government puts into building up the terrorist threat, I'd be interested to hear how they rationalize wasting so much time and manpower on something so (relatively speaking) trivial. Or does the warez scene secretly finance terrorist groups?
Won't a bad teacher still be relatively bad given the same training as good teachers?
Possibly. But the bad teacher will presumably still be better than they were before the training, so the quality of education provided to students will improve. Does putting tech into the classroom actually improve the quality of education, or is it simply change for the sake of change?
Even if we put money in to raising teacher salaries, hoping to attract better teachers away from other careers, won't we also attract a lot of bad teachers looking for a relatively easy buck?
The point of raising teacher salaries is to make replacing the current crop of bad teachers with good teachers feasible, by increasing the pool of potential teachers. If there are few or no good teachers available, you have little choice but to hire bad teachers in order to fill your staffing requirements. With more candidates to choose from, you can choose to hire only the good ones.
Despite its NeXTSTEP roots, Mac OS X is still a very young operating system. Most of the technologies that make it interesting and unique are actually brand new: Quartz, Core Audio, IOKit, Core Foundation. The hold-overs from NeXT and classic Mac OS have also evolved substantially: QuickTime, Carbon, Cocoa.
So, perhaps not quite "nothing to what we have now in 5 years", but still a pretty substantial development in a very short amount of time. I think that the OP's point about the Mac/Linux comparison being humiliating for Linux is not anywhere near as extreme as you seem to believe..
How long has Linux been in development? Since the early 90's, no? Not to mention the fact that NeXT underwent the huge effort required to integrate it into the Mac world. Not to say that Linux development hasn't proceeded rapidly. But NeXT/OSX is a prime example of the fact that small, tightly coordinated teams (whether open or closed source) can produce high quality products very rapidly.
So which is better, the Cathedral or the Bazaar? Probably something somewhere in between (cf Apple's use of a variety of open source products). Apple seems to have found a very good balance. And now they are doing some of the first real innovation to have occurred in the Un*x world for quite a while (things that Linux arguably should have done long ago). For example, with the 10.4 release of OS X they have completely reengineered the traditional Un*x startup process and daemon handling. The new launchd (see here for more) consolidates inetd, init, mach_init, System Starter, cron, and a variety of other traditional Un*x features into one framework. Quoting from the man page:
launchd manages daemons, both for the system as a whole and for individ-individual
ual users. Ideal daemons can launch on demand based on criteria specified
in their respective XML property lists located in one of the directories
specified in the FILES section.
When run with a command, a specific instance of launchd is created and
the command is implicitly added to the list of jobs maintained by
launchd. If the command exits, that instance of launchd will clean up
all jobs maintained by itself and exit. All children of the command will
use that instance of launchd.
During boot launchd is invoked by the kernel to run as the first process
on the system and to further bootstrap the rest of the system.
This approach cleans up and simplifies daemon handling, and makes system startup quite a bit faster. The Apple approach to application installation (via app bundles and frameworks) provides a similarly clean and simplified feel. It would be nice to see Linux making similar efforts at cruft-removal, instead of simply layering on more and more complexity.
This has long been a problme with the management world. Not just in language, but in management fads. There are actually a few useful nuggets of information buried in things like TQM. But they can't be applied blindly or at random - you need to actually understand what you're doing.
The same goes for "management speak". Many of these ideas began as useful things that helped a corporation get its act together. Understanding what your "core competencies" are is important. Defining your corporate "mission" really can help. Identifying "key stakeholders" can be a good thing. But only is these things are actually done with a real understanding of what is being done and why. Paying lip service to these principles (such as slapping togther a "mission statement" simply because "everyone else has one") does not yield useful results. That's what leads to these things having a bad name.
Too often people lose sight of the result they are trying to achieve, and simply assume that so long as they follow some prescribed process or template they will automatically be successful. IMHO that's the number one problem in modern corporate (and government) culture: a focus on process rather than results. Having a "good process" is meaningless if the desired results are not achieved. Blindly imitating successful orgranizations is pointless if you don't understand why they were successful, and adapt their methods to fit your situation.
What's an OS that's a threat to Apple? Gee, you think the FREE Unix based OS with the most momentum could be a threat?
Hahahaha! If anything, OS X is a threat to Linux, not vice versa. Haven't you noticed the number of slashdotters that have "switched" from Linux to OS X? That's a trend in the rest of the world too. Many of the folks switching to OS X are people who want the power and flexibility of Un*x, but want it to "just work".
Almost a good point. Actually, whenever and wherever possible, I make a point of doing just that. In fact, I even experiment to see whether the ideas that I elicit from such conversations can be traced to dominant sociopolitical meme machines, like the rightwing talk radio or the fauxliberal magazines. What I get back is just a regurgitation of memes churned out by either the marketist-right or the identity-politics FauxLeft. Memes that favor the elite, IOW.
Given that the existing P2P communication mechanisms exhibit this behavior, what makes you think that adding WiFi will make anything different? Providing "yet another communication mechanism" won't make people actually think instead of simply regurgitating.
But these benefits are due to the steady increase in the accumulation of scientific knowledge, and is not a benefit of the brand of monopoly capitalism that dominates America today.
You make an implicit assumption that scientific innovation is not linked to economic conditions. Having said that, I don't necessarily support "monopoly capitalism" - see below.
Look at Europe. THey have the benefits of technology,...
Developed by them, or by the US?
...but they have cheap and available healthcare for everyone because they rein in the power of the elite.--specifically the power of the megacorporations.
Uh, the "power of the megacorporations" is the power of government. Corporations are a legal fiction created by governments. They have little or nothing to do with real free market capitalism (although they appear to be a strong component of the "monopoly capitalism" that we both seem to object to). The problem is fundamentally one of government control over people's lives. Governments (and by extension corporations) are run by "the elites" that you are so worked up about. They make sure that the rules of the game are rigged in their favor. Stripping power from corporations only to hand it to governments is not the answer - the rules will continue to be rigged. Better to take back power for individuals and cooperatives.
We Americans have increased productivity greatly, but we are not reaping the benefits of our work. Our lifestyles have declined because we do not have the great labor laws and social safety net of europe. THey have the best of both worlds. We do not, because we do not rein in our elite.
No, we do not because we become absorbed in gratuitous consumption and jealousy of "the elite". It's entirely feasible to have a good lifestyle without killing yourself at work. It simply requires a reprioritization in which your "lifestyle" becomes more important than buying lots of new toys that you never have time to enjoy.
Europeans are free, free to quit their jobs, free to experiment, to take a chance, all because of their great social safety net.
So are Americans. I have taken chances and changed careers several times. I'm in the midst of another change. You're only a slave if you let yourself be made a slave.
Common sense will tell you that muni wifi is a good thing for you and me and a bad thing for the telcos.
Common sense tells me that muni WiFi will result in my taxes going up, the government getting more control over my network access, a large government investment in soon-to-be obsolete technology that they will probably not be quick to replace, a lack of incentives for other WiFi operations to even try setting up in my area, and lots of money wasted on trivial issues as the government implements various (possibly conflicting) provisions on their WiFi network to satisfy special interest groups. Why exactly is this a "good thing"?
Outside of internet forums and colleges, very little transmission of political ideas is going on from person to person.
I think you need to get out a little more. See, there are these things called "conversations", which allow a person-to-person transmission of ideas. And these "conversations" still occur all over the place. Visit your local coffeehouse, cafe, restaurant, or bar sometime, to see what I mean.
We no longer fight for our rights.
"We" (i.e. the great unwashed masses) no longer fight for our rights because we are fat and happy - some of the wealthiest people on the planet. Yes, yes, I know, "we" are not as wealthy as "the elite", but we're still far better off than most of the rest of the world. As a a result, "we" have become complacent and decadent.
Your elite-vs-the-workers class warfare rhetoric is charmingly quaint, but "so 20th Century". The vast majority of Americans are "middle class".
Might help if you looked at the guys resume. This isn't some freshout. His PhD dates from 1977, and he's had a long string of both technical positions and technical publications since then.
For the curious - Gibson is regarded as one of the experts in the field of technology and its effects on human life.
By who? Gibson freely admits that he didn't really use computers until well after he write Neuromancer, and that the technical details of Neuromancer are dodgy at best. "Cyberspace" and "the Matrix", as presented in Gibson's novels, bear little or no resemblance to the internet and the web as they exist today. Nor was Gibson the first writer to envision global computer networks.
I think we can trust his predictions. So far they have been quite accurate.
Really? I don't think so. It's easy to cherrypick many SF authors' novels and find instances in which they were "accurate" - especially if your definition of "accurate" is as loose as the comparison you draw between "the Matrix" and the real internet.
I like Gibson's novels. He's a great writer with some interesting ideas. But he is not some kind of prescient thinker when it comes to the future.
That depends entirely on the reliability of the individual systems that make up your redundant system. A binary-backup system can be as or more reliable than a quad system, if the individual components of the binary system are more reliable than the quad system.
Having a quad backup adds a huge amount of cost, both in terms of buying the extra components, and in terms of the additional complexity involved in switching from one backup to the next. In fact, the more complex switching system can actually *decrease* the overall reliability of the system.
More is not always better. Blindly adding redundancy without doing a real reliability analysis is a poor approach.
Had you RTFA you would see that they claim the real batsuit would cost $300,000+ (at least that's what the movie claims), but it isn't available. So they suggest a bulletproof jacket and kevlar helmet for ~$1500. Lame substitute, but there you go.
No, another interesting project from the Microsoft Research team. Which is somewhat different than the rest of the MS corporation. MS Research is a set of research centers, not unlike those run by other groups in the industry (e.g. IBM). They are devoted to doing research, not creating products.
MS research is messing with all sorts of interesting ideas. They've hired a number of gurus in computer science research (such as Tony Hoare and Leslie Lamport). They publish lots of papers. How many of these things will turn into real products? Who knows. Mostly they just want to play with ideas so that they stay at the cutting edge of things, rather than missing the boat as they did with the Internet boom.
The acceleration produced by a sail is always (ignoring sail imperfections) normal to the sail surface. As a result, solar sails are able to maneuver by varying the angle of between the sail plane and the incident sunlight. Since a solar sail has the ability to produce an acceleration component in the direction of its orbit velocity vector, it can manipulate its orbit.
There's a very nice Java applet that simulates solar sail orbit dynamics available here, if you want to play around with maneuvering a solar sail (I recommend stepping up the "tempo" to 3x, and increasing the sail lightness factor - the slider at the bottom left - so that you can see results in a reasonable amount of time).
Slashdot Mirror
- Chaos
- Discord
- Confusion
- Bureaucracy
- The Aftermath
We are pretty clearly in the 4th age, or "Bureaucracy". The 5th age, or "The Aftermath", cannot be far away. Prepare yourself for an apocalyptic transition back to "Chaos"...The Slashdot summary of this particular article is more than a little misleading and sensationalist.
Yes, but this wasn't talking about surveys with leading questions. TFA was talking about clinical studies published in medical journals like JAMA and the New england Journal of Medicine.
None of the analogies are good. And in many cases, the analogue scenarios becomes so convoluted (in an attempt to "better represent the situation") that it is either nonsensical, or leads to a conclusion opposite to the intent of the poster.
As the parent post said: Please stop the analogies.
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Aside from that one passage in Mark most of his answers seem pretty cryptic, and amount to "that's what you said". Granted, the fact that are so many contradictory accounts makes it hard to discern the truth (assuming of course that these events actually occurred at all).
To use your analogy: Should we stop prosecuting parking violations? No, I don't think so. But I don't see any reason to set up a massive parking violator sting operation either.
Uh, my memory of the New Testament is a little rusty, but wasn't the conversation in question something along the lines of
Sounds fairly passive to me.Not to mention the fact that you'd think these organizations might have something better to do. Like oh, say, catching "terrorists". Given how much effort the government puts into building up the terrorist threat, I'd be interested to hear how they rationalize wasting so much time and manpower on something so (relatively speaking) trivial. Or does the warez scene secretly finance terrorist groups?
Possibly. But the bad teacher will presumably still be better than they were before the training, so the quality of education provided to students will improve. Does putting tech into the classroom actually improve the quality of education, or is it simply change for the sake of change?
Even if we put money in to raising teacher salaries, hoping to attract better teachers away from other careers, won't we also attract a lot of bad teachers looking for a relatively easy buck?
The point of raising teacher salaries is to make replacing the current crop of bad teachers with good teachers feasible, by increasing the pool of potential teachers. If there are few or no good teachers available, you have little choice but to hire bad teachers in order to fill your staffing requirements. With more candidates to choose from, you can choose to hire only the good ones.
So which is better, the Cathedral or the Bazaar? Probably something somewhere in between (cf Apple's use of a variety of open source products). Apple seems to have found a very good balance. And now they are doing some of the first real innovation to have occurred in the Un*x world for quite a while (things that Linux arguably should have done long ago). For example, with the 10.4 release of OS X they have completely reengineered the traditional Un*x startup process and daemon handling. The new launchd (see here for more) consolidates inetd, init, mach_init, System Starter, cron, and a variety of other traditional Un*x features into one framework. Quoting from the man page:
This approach cleans up and simplifies daemon handling, and makes system startup quite a bit faster. The Apple approach to application installation (via app bundles and frameworks) provides a similarly clean and simplified feel. It would be nice to see Linux making similar efforts at cruft-removal, instead of simply layering on more and more complexity.The same goes for "management speak". Many of these ideas began as useful things that helped a corporation get its act together. Understanding what your "core competencies" are is important. Defining your corporate "mission" really can help. Identifying "key stakeholders" can be a good thing. But only is these things are actually done with a real understanding of what is being done and why. Paying lip service to these principles (such as slapping togther a "mission statement" simply because "everyone else has one") does not yield useful results. That's what leads to these things having a bad name.
Too often people lose sight of the result they are trying to achieve, and simply assume that so long as they follow some prescribed process or template they will automatically be successful. IMHO that's the number one problem in modern corporate (and government) culture: a focus on process rather than results. Having a "good process" is meaningless if the desired results are not achieved. Blindly imitating successful orgranizations is pointless if you don't understand why they were successful, and adapt their methods to fit your situation.
Hahahaha! If anything, OS X is a threat to Linux, not vice versa. Haven't you noticed the number of slashdotters that have "switched" from Linux to OS X? That's a trend in the rest of the world too. Many of the folks switching to OS X are people who want the power and flexibility of Un*x, but want it to "just work".
Given that the existing P2P communication mechanisms exhibit this behavior, what makes you think that adding WiFi will make anything different? Providing "yet another communication mechanism" won't make people actually think instead of simply regurgitating.
But these benefits are due to the steady increase in the accumulation of scientific knowledge, and is not a benefit of the brand of monopoly capitalism that dominates America today.
You make an implicit assumption that scientific innovation is not linked to economic conditions. Having said that, I don't necessarily support "monopoly capitalism" - see below.
Look at Europe. THey have the benefits of technology, ...
Developed by them, or by the US?
Uh, the "power of the megacorporations" is the power of government. Corporations are a legal fiction created by governments. They have little or nothing to do with real free market capitalism (although they appear to be a strong component of the "monopoly capitalism" that we both seem to object to). The problem is fundamentally one of government control over people's lives. Governments (and by extension corporations) are run by "the elites" that you are so worked up about. They make sure that the rules of the game are rigged in their favor. Stripping power from corporations only to hand it to governments is not the answer - the rules will continue to be rigged. Better to take back power for individuals and cooperatives.
We Americans have increased productivity greatly, but we are not reaping the benefits of our work. Our lifestyles have declined because we do not have the great labor laws and social safety net of europe. THey have the best of both worlds. We do not, because we do not rein in our elite.
No, we do not because we become absorbed in gratuitous consumption and jealousy of "the elite". It's entirely feasible to have a good lifestyle without killing yourself at work. It simply requires a reprioritization in which your "lifestyle" becomes more important than buying lots of new toys that you never have time to enjoy.
Europeans are free, free to quit their jobs, free to experiment, to take a chance, all because of their great social safety net.
So are Americans. I have taken chances and changed careers several times. I'm in the midst of another change. You're only a slave if you let yourself be made a slave.
Common sense tells me that muni WiFi will result in my taxes going up, the government getting more control over my network access, a large government investment in soon-to-be obsolete technology that they will probably not be quick to replace, a lack of incentives for other WiFi operations to even try setting up in my area, and lots of money wasted on trivial issues as the government implements various (possibly conflicting) provisions on their WiFi network to satisfy special interest groups. Why exactly is this a "good thing"?
I think you need to get out a little more. See, there are these things called "conversations", which allow a person-to-person transmission of ideas. And these "conversations" still occur all over the place. Visit your local coffeehouse, cafe, restaurant, or bar sometime, to see what I mean.
We no longer fight for our rights.
"We" (i.e. the great unwashed masses) no longer fight for our rights because we are fat and happy - some of the wealthiest people on the planet. Yes, yes, I know, "we" are not as wealthy as "the elite", but we're still far better off than most of the rest of the world. As a a result, "we" have become complacent and decadent.
Your elite-vs-the-workers class warfare rhetoric is charmingly quaint, but "so 20th Century". The vast majority of Americans are "middle class".
Wait, which pointlessly divisive question were you asking again?
Might help if you looked at the guys resume. This isn't some freshout. His PhD dates from 1977, and he's had a long string of both technical positions and technical publications since then.
By who? Gibson freely admits that he didn't really use computers until well after he write Neuromancer, and that the technical details of Neuromancer are dodgy at best. "Cyberspace" and "the Matrix", as presented in Gibson's novels, bear little or no resemblance to the internet and the web as they exist today. Nor was Gibson the first writer to envision global computer networks.
I think we can trust his predictions. So far they have been quite accurate.
Really? I don't think so. It's easy to cherrypick many SF authors' novels and find instances in which they were "accurate" - especially if your definition of "accurate" is as loose as the comparison you draw between "the Matrix" and the real internet.
I like Gibson's novels. He's a great writer with some interesting ideas. But he is not some kind of prescient thinker when it comes to the future.
No doubt. That's why you should do an actual risk and reliability analysis, in order to determine what the best compromise would be.
Having a quad backup adds a huge amount of cost, both in terms of buying the extra components, and in terms of the additional complexity involved in switching from one backup to the next. In fact, the more complex switching system can actually *decrease* the overall reliability of the system.
More is not always better. Blindly adding redundancy without doing a real reliability analysis is a poor approach.
Had you RTFA you would see that they claim the real batsuit would cost $300,000+ (at least that's what the movie claims), but it isn't available. So they suggest a bulletproof jacket and kevlar helmet for ~$1500. Lame substitute, but there you go.
MS research is messing with all sorts of interesting ideas. They've hired a number of gurus in computer science research (such as Tony Hoare and Leslie Lamport). They publish lots of papers. How many of these things will turn into real products? Who knows. Mostly they just want to play with ideas so that they stay at the cutting edge of things, rather than missing the boat as they did with the Internet boom.
Hope they don't trash the mythos established in the old Brian Daley 'Han Solo' novels when the do their interstitial TV series.
The acceleration produced by a sail is always (ignoring sail imperfections) normal to the sail surface. As a result, solar sails are able to maneuver by varying the angle of between the sail plane and the incident sunlight. Since a solar sail has the ability to produce an acceleration component in the direction of its orbit velocity vector, it can manipulate its orbit.
There's a very nice Java applet that simulates solar sail orbit dynamics available here, if you want to play around with maneuvering a solar sail (I recommend stepping up the "tempo" to 3x, and increasing the sail lightness factor - the slider at the bottom left - so that you can see results in a reasonable amount of time).