There is no evidence of pornography being socially distructive. Complaints about pronography whether coming from the right or the feminist left are always based on pure conjecture and most often personal hatred. Frankly it is not worth losing our free speech over this imagined threat. You can say every religion reviles pronography but that is a neither here nor there. First of all half of it is a problem of definition; every religion defines pronography as something to be reviled but particular actions may be considered acceptable or pronographic by different religions. Secondly pretty much every religion out there developed their moral systems in societies that did not have reliable measures of birth control and had a limited ability to support children. It is then not surprising that most religions frown on sexuality. But that provides no reason to carryover such notions in present day where we have access to birth control.
Meanwhile there are some very real threats to our society out there, that do destroy our society and that the fed governemnt would do better to center on. These include increasing poverty even among people with jobs, huge and increasing numbers of americans without health care, many americans having access to only crappy unhealty food, public education eroding even further, etc.
I think as long as we are going to surrender our freedom of speech we might as well crack down on dumbasses that have "mod parent up" links in their signatures in order to try to trick moderators to mod them up. These people should receive additional punishment if the "mod parent link" leads to an apple website as it is well known that apple promotes homosexuality and other deviant community destroying behaviour.
"Somehow I'd expect NASA would be much too arrogant to consider purchasing Russian equipment. "
They are too arrogant. PRoblem is they dont have a choice. The last shuttle flight proved it. They did everything to ensure a safe flight before the shuttle took off... they spent a shitloads of money and what they got is a flight that turned out to be almost safe. That is there was too weeks of worrying, discussions about tiles, spacewalks, in space repairs, etc and then in the end we got lucky and there was no disaster, but everyone recognized there was a significant chance that we might not get lucky. Well, they cant have every single ISS refueling flight be like that. First of all, their budget cannot afford it, and second of all their already shaky reputation cannot afford it either.
So they have to eat some humble pie, buy Russian equipment and realize there is something wrong with the way NASA does business and try to fix it. My opinion is that the problem with nasa is also a problem with the military and pretty much every aspect of high tech government spending. That is that there is prevelant corruption, no free market economics and an eagerness to drive costs up by designing ever more complex and failure prone systems.
"I guess then all innovators are in a sense arrogant because they refuse to do things the same way it has been done."
I don't think Wall Street has a problem with Google being innovators. What they do have a problem is that Google pulled off an IPO without handing over billions to various wall-street investment banks and not only lived to tell about it, but was quite succesful actually.
Now there is something the banks don't like. And what the banks dislike the WSJ dislikes as well.
You are right. And the biggest reason "perfect or perish" does not work, is that you will never get anything perfect until you make all the mistakes. When you fire the people that get something wrong you just delete a bunch of useful experience, and ensure that the next group makes the same mistake.
it is generally a problem with math that teaching it in HS relies way too much on memorization of formulas. I do not know if your method is a good idea, because usually schools teach trig before they teach complex numbers, but I think memorization should be taken out of the high school math curriculum.
Every test should come with a printout of all the relevant formulas. Instead teachers should try to come up with interesting problems that are not obvious plug and chug kind of deals.
"This cost does not include money spent on marketing or development"
And guess what development is the biggest expense in making chips. That statistic is pretty meaningless if used to determine whether intel charges fair prices for their chips.
People must understand what Gnome is trying to do. When you are trying to be a popular GUI you cannot do adventorous things. You have to make people feel safe. You have to make people feel like they already know what to do and present them with the improvements as they are walking along a familiar path.
Why do you think GUI's use little pictures of files to represent files? Why are they called "files" to begin with?
Of course for you it may be much more fun if a GUI is completely different, but that is not true for the average user. And if you want to be popular you have to be safe for the average user. And the average user knows Windows.
No, dumbass, I am thinking of the Comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Although I was not quite correct in saying Bush refused to sign it. He did not refuse to sign it because he did not have an opportunity to refuse, because Clinton signed it. However Clinton could not get it ratified by the then Republican congress. Bush was against the treaty from the begining and still is as are most republicans. The couple of short years of small democratic majority in congress were not sufficient to ratify the treaty as it requires 2/3 of the vote.
So as the test ban treaty is not ratified it is not in force. And of course since the us is not ratifying it a bunch of other countries have decided not to. The treaty will not go into force until all countries that signed it ratify it, and that wont happen while there is 1/3 of republicans in congress.
But I find it very often you need to be lazy in order to be creative. Sometimes I think very hard on a problem and cannot think of a solution, but when I go to lunch or start doing something non-work related the solution appears to me out of thin air.
Fact is if you have to work all the time you cannot be creative. You need to pu tyour brain in different modes.
I doubt that it is it though. Although it is possible for an insurance company that provides both healthcare and flood insurance to use higher healthcare premuims in order to compensate for losses in flood insurance, this company would be destroyed in a fluid market place. That is because an insuranse company that does not do flood insurance would be able to undercut it with lower healthcare insurance costs.
I think the real cause of rising healthcare is that the HMO's are increasingly gaining power in government thaks to the likes of senator Frist and more and more able to screw over their clients and avoid responsitbility and competition.
There is a lot of talk and headscratching about the ferocity of nature, etc., but I would like to point out that much a lot of the deaths of New Orleans (and the tsunami as well) are caused by failure of society as well.
In both cases you have a lot of poor people living close by the coast and the governments that do not really care what happens to them.
If Katrina hit Amsterdam, for example, it would still be a disaster but not nearly as bad as NEw Orleans was. Thats because Amsterdam is the biggest city in Holland, and they spent the necessary money to protect themselves and take care of their environment, they make sure they are surrounded by farmland that can soak up flood waters very quickly.
However, it is obvious that New Orleans' levys were a low priority and all kinds of construction projects were being approved which destroyed the wetlands around the city. But what is most amazing is that there was no evacuation plan, there was no emergency response from the state or the federal government for several days after the disaster hit. The only way people could leave was if they had their own cars and money for gas, and the poor did not so they were stuck.
And bush sent the Guard in only four days after the disaster hit and then he sent them "to prevent looting" and not to help the thousands of people that were stuck in the flooded city. The governer could not send the LA Guard in because they are in Iraq.
Now there is a huge debate about whether these huricanes are caused by global warming. But even if we stop activities that contribute to global warming, there would still be natural disasters. That cannot be helped.
But what we can do is organise our society so we are able to prevent damage as much as possible and quickly help the victims if disaster strikes. That was obviously not done in this case.
Who moderates this shit insightful??? If you actually knew anything about Jesus Christ, you'd know that he would never do anything like this.
But hey if you get sick or hit by a car, I will be sure to come by the hospital and tell you that you deserve to die because God obviously made a car hit you.
Evolution does not really help human much anymore. Thats because with today's medical science one can have children even if one is predisposed to diseases.
And evolution will not help with diseases incurred after one has children.
I suppose evolution does help select the genes of those that have lots of children early as oppososed to those that have fewer and later, which is a bit unfortunate, because it is usually the less educated that have a lot of children early. Oh well.
An ad driven magazine urges its readers to spend more money. What a shock!
By the way, parents, you will not be able to make your kids smarter by spending more. The way to do it, is to slowly and patiently encourage them to have good practices -- i.e. to read a lot and watch less TV, solve math and logic puzzles etc.
I am really glad the bible has this text about a mark of satan, because that will prevent any such scheme of succeeding.
Usually a big portion of americans will gladly surrender all of their freedoms in order to "protect them from terror", but I really doubt they will surrender their soul to satan.
Myself I never saw the movie, but I think generally Moore has a reason to be against guns.
It is completely shocking to me that some underage kid can tell his underage girlfriend to pick up a submachine gun for him and she picks it up. She did not have to steal it or trick the salesman or obtain it illegaly, she just buys it like its a tennis racket. She would have had harder time buying a packet of cigarettes or a beer.
Sure there may be a jillion other reasons why the kids did what they did.
But frankly I am sure every body will agree that we will all be alot safer if underage kids are not allowed to buy submachine guns just like that. We keep them away from tobacco and alchohol isnt it obvious that guns are much more dangerous.
The russians as well as the americans before the shuttle have done numerous space walks and various repair missions from capsule like vessels. And it is true that on reentry the vessel is usually wasted, but all the equipment inside of it is not and can be placed inside of another vessel.
The things that make the shuttle problematic and expensive and dangerous -- the fact that it carries its own boosters and its wings are of no help whatsoever for these missions.
Also, I think it is very rational to be against nuclear rockets. You have to keep in mind that every type of rocket crashes into the earth at least once. Some do it many many times. And if you spread a ton of uranium over a huge field or even worse in the ocean you will never be able to clean it up.
you have a good point. Although I do not completely agree re the space station. I think the ISS is necessary as a place to do general experiments in space. If we go on any ambitious space exploration project we will probably need the ISS to do testing and/or in space assembly.
But it can be easily serviced by simple cheap capsules instead of the expensive and dangerous shuttle.
But yeah the main problem with the shuttle is that NASA has too much money. If congress had any balls they would cut funding for the shuttle and tell nasa to find something cheaper.
The Russians have the much cheaper and safer soyuz, not because they are especially smarter, but because they just cannot afford to run their shuttle.
Also internet ads are generally less misleading. That is because they have to use reasoned writing (not soundbites and suggestive imagery as in TV) and if someone is already at the internet, they can easily do a search to check the other side's position.
So your theory is that there is some nefarious secret ultra rich organization that loves the earth so much that they are bribing scientists to alter their studies in favor of environmentalism.
That would be really great but I doubt it.
BTW scientists are trained to describe their studies in detail and ensure they are repeatable. The way to check a scientist's veracity is to repeat the study and see if you come up with the same results.
"Every time a study comes out saying that Windows is more secure, faster and cheaper than Linux, the first thing Slashdotters ask is "Who funded this study?" Which is exactly what the Chairman is attempting to establish."
No that is not what the Chairman is trying to establish, he knows very well which universities the scientists belong to, because that's listed in their by-lines. Any persons or organizations that provided additional funding are generally also listed in scientific papers.
And while I have been reading slashdot for eight years now, I have never read a comment where a slashdoter was seeking personal data on the author of some windows TCO study. At most slashdotters care about proffessional data -- i.e. what other studies that person has participated in what other articles he/she has written. So this is a really bad analogy. BTW if the Chairman wanted to get such data on the scientists he only needs to do a wuick lexis search for their other publications.
And of course there is the usual accusation of bias. That is getting pretty silly in my opinion but hey if that Senator cannot get his voice heard in the "liberal" media (something very hard to believe coming from a US senator) he can always post on slashdot. I will change my filter to -1 just in case slashdot is biased too.
"Suppose that by making the world a better place and encouraging education, intellectual development and tolerance we create the sort of environment in which open research can flourish... would we end up ahead in the long run when we discover more efficient means of exploring space instead of expending all these resources today for minimal gains?"
You have a point. If we enable all the world's poor and almost poor people to reach their full potentials the Earth would be able to generate so much physical and scientific production that we might actually be able to do large scale space exploration and colonization instead of the tiny projects undertaken today.
Just see how much more production and engineering is being generated from india and china, and thats not result of them solving poverty but becoming just slightly less drenched in poverty than they used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no evidence of pornography being socially distructive. Complaints about pronography whether coming from the right or the feminist left are always based on pure conjecture and most often personal hatred. Frankly it is not worth losing our free speech over this imagined threat. You can say every religion reviles pronography but that is a neither here nor there. First of all half of it is a problem of definition; every religion defines pronography as something to be reviled but particular actions may be considered acceptable or pronographic by different religions. Secondly pretty much every religion out there developed their moral systems in societies that did not have reliable measures of birth control and had a limited ability to support children. It is then not surprising that most religions frown on sexuality. But that provides no reason to carryover such notions in present day where we have access to birth control.
Meanwhile there are some very real threats to our society out there, that do destroy our society and that the fed governemnt would do better to center on. These include increasing poverty even among people with jobs, huge and increasing numbers of americans without health care, many americans having access to only crappy unhealty food, public education eroding even further, etc.
I think as long as we are going to surrender our freedom of speech we might as well crack down on dumbasses that have "mod parent up" links in their signatures in order to try to trick moderators to mod them up. These people should receive additional punishment if the "mod parent link" leads to an apple website as it is well known that apple promotes homosexuality and other deviant community destroying behaviour.
"Somehow I'd expect NASA would be much too arrogant to consider purchasing Russian equipment. "
... they spent a shitloads of money and what they got is a flight that turned out to be almost safe. That is there was too weeks of worrying, discussions about tiles, spacewalks, in space repairs, etc and then in the end we got lucky and there was no disaster, but everyone recognized there was a significant chance that we might not get lucky. Well, they cant have every single ISS refueling flight be like that. First of all, their budget cannot afford it, and second of all their already shaky reputation cannot afford it either.
They are too arrogant. PRoblem is they dont have a choice. The last shuttle flight proved it. They did everything to ensure a safe flight before the shuttle took off
So they have to eat some humble pie, buy Russian equipment and realize there is something wrong with the way NASA does business and try to fix it. My opinion is that the problem with nasa is also a problem with the military and pretty much every aspect of high tech government spending. That is that there is prevelant corruption, no free market economics and an eagerness to drive costs up by designing ever more complex and failure prone systems.
"I guess then all innovators are in a sense arrogant because they refuse to do things the same way it has been done." I don't think Wall Street has a problem with Google being innovators. What they do have a problem is that Google pulled off an IPO without handing over billions to various wall-street investment banks and not only lived to tell about it, but was quite succesful actually. Now there is something the banks don't like. And what the banks dislike the WSJ dislikes as well.
You are right. And the biggest reason "perfect or perish" does not work, is that you will never get anything perfect until you make all the mistakes. When you fire the people that get something wrong you just delete a bunch of useful experience, and ensure that the next group makes the same mistake.
it is generally a problem with math that teaching it in HS relies way too much on memorization of formulas. I do not know if your method is a good idea, because usually schools teach trig before they teach complex numbers, but I think memorization should be taken out of the high school math curriculum.
Every test should come with a printout of all the relevant formulas. Instead teachers should try to come up with interesting problems that are not obvious plug and chug kind of deals.
"This cost does not include money spent on marketing or development"
And guess what development is the biggest expense in making chips. That statistic is pretty meaningless if used to determine whether intel charges fair prices for their chips.
"It looks like MS windows."
So whats wrong with that?
People must understand what Gnome is trying to do. When you are trying to be a popular GUI you cannot do adventorous things. You have to make people feel safe. You have to make people feel like they already know what to do and present them with the improvements as they are walking along a familiar path.
Why do you think GUI's use little pictures of files to represent files? Why are they called "files" to begin with?
Of course for you it may be much more fun if a GUI is completely different, but that is not true for the average user. And if you want to be popular you have to be safe for the average user. And the average user knows Windows.
"You're thinking of the Kyoto Accord, dumbass."
No, dumbass, I am thinking of the Comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Although I was not quite correct in saying Bush refused to sign it. He did not refuse to sign it because he did not have an opportunity to refuse, because Clinton signed it. However Clinton could not get it ratified by the then Republican congress. Bush was against the treaty from the begining and still is as are most republicans. The couple of short years of small democratic majority in congress were not sufficient to ratify the treaty as it requires 2/3 of the vote.
So as the test ban treaty is not ratified it is not in force. And of course since the us is not ratifying it a bunch of other countries have decided not to. The treaty will not go into force until all countries that signed it ratify it, and that wont happen while there is 1/3 of republicans in congress.
"Now that we've signed the nuclear test ban treaty," When did that happen? Last thing I heard Bush was refusing to sign it.
But I find it very often you need to be lazy in order to be creative. Sometimes I think very hard on a problem and cannot think of a solution, but when I go to lunch or start doing something non-work related the solution appears to me out of thin air.
Fact is if you have to work all the time you cannot be creative. You need to pu tyour brain in different modes.
I doubt that it is it though. Although it is possible for an insurance company that provides both healthcare and flood insurance to use higher healthcare premuims in order to compensate for losses in flood insurance, this company would be destroyed in a fluid market place. That is because an insuranse company that does not do flood insurance would be able to undercut it with lower healthcare insurance costs.
I think the real cause of rising healthcare is that the HMO's are increasingly gaining power in government thaks to the likes of senator Frist and more and more able to screw over their clients and avoid responsitbility and competition.
There is a lot of talk and headscratching about the ferocity of nature, etc., but I would like to point out that much a lot of the deaths of New Orleans (and the tsunami as well) are caused by failure of society as well.
In both cases you have a lot of poor people living close by the coast and the governments that do not really care what happens to them.
If Katrina hit Amsterdam, for example, it would still be a disaster but not nearly as bad as NEw Orleans was. Thats because Amsterdam is the biggest city in Holland, and they spent the necessary money to protect themselves and take care of their environment, they make sure they are surrounded by farmland that can soak up flood waters very quickly.
However, it is obvious that New Orleans' levys were a low priority and all kinds of construction projects were being approved which destroyed the wetlands around the city. But what is most amazing is that there was no evacuation plan, there was no emergency response from the state or the federal government for several days after the disaster hit. The only way people could leave was if they had their own cars and money for gas, and the poor did not so they were stuck.
And bush sent the Guard in only four days after the disaster hit and then he sent them "to prevent looting" and not to help the thousands of people that were stuck in the flooded city. The governer could not send the LA Guard in because they are in Iraq.
Now there is a huge debate about whether these huricanes are caused by global warming. But even if we stop activities that contribute to global warming, there would still be natural disasters. That cannot be helped.
But what we can do is organise our society so we are able to prevent damage as much as possible and quickly help the victims if disaster strikes. That was obviously not done in this case.
Who moderates this shit insightful??? If you actually knew anything about Jesus Christ, you'd know that he would never do anything like this.
But hey if you get sick or hit by a car, I will be sure to come by the hospital and tell you that you deserve to die because God obviously made a car hit you.
Evolution does not really help human much anymore. Thats because with today's medical science one can have children even if one is predisposed to diseases. And evolution will not help with diseases incurred after one has children. I suppose evolution does help select the genes of those that have lots of children early as oppososed to those that have fewer and later, which is a bit unfortunate, because it is usually the less educated that have a lot of children early. Oh well.
No dude it was a sci-fi flick with a hot chick ... i think it was the phantom menace.
An ad driven magazine urges its readers to spend more money. What a shock!
By the way, parents, you will not be able to make your kids smarter by spending more. The way to do it, is to slowly and patiently encourage them to have good practices -- i.e. to read a lot and watch less TV, solve math and logic puzzles etc.
I am really glad the bible has this text about a mark of satan, because that will prevent any such scheme of succeeding.
Usually a big portion of americans will gladly surrender all of their freedoms in order to "protect them from terror", but I really doubt they will surrender their soul to satan.
Myself I never saw the movie, but I think generally Moore has a reason to be against guns.
It is completely shocking to me that some underage kid can tell his underage girlfriend to pick up a submachine gun for him and she picks it up. She did not have to steal it or trick the salesman or obtain it illegaly, she just buys it like its a tennis racket. She would have had harder time buying a packet of cigarettes or a beer.
Sure there may be a jillion other reasons why the kids did what they did.
But frankly I am sure every body will agree that we will all be alot safer if underage kids are not allowed to buy submachine guns just like that. We keep them away from tobacco and alchohol isnt it obvious that guns are much more dangerous.
The russians as well as the americans before the shuttle have done numerous space walks and various repair missions from capsule like vessels. And it is true that on reentry the vessel is usually wasted, but all the equipment inside of it is not and can be placed inside of another vessel.
The things that make the shuttle problematic and expensive and dangerous -- the fact that it carries its own boosters and its wings are of no help whatsoever for these missions.
Also, I think it is very rational to be against nuclear rockets. You have to keep in mind that every type of rocket crashes into the earth at least once. Some do it many many times. And if you spread a ton of uranium over a huge field or even worse in the ocean you will never be able to clean it up.
you have a good point. Although I do not completely agree re the space station. I think the ISS is necessary as a place to do general experiments in space. If we go on any ambitious space exploration project we will probably need the ISS to do testing and/or in space assembly.
But it can be easily serviced by simple cheap capsules instead of the expensive and dangerous shuttle.
But yeah the main problem with the shuttle is that NASA has too much money. If congress had any balls they would cut funding for the shuttle and tell nasa to find something cheaper.
The Russians have the much cheaper and safer soyuz, not because they are especially smarter, but because they just cannot afford to run their shuttle.
not really. You can block internet adds.
Also internet ads are generally less misleading. That is because they have to use reasoned writing (not soundbites and suggestive imagery as in TV) and if someone is already at the internet, they can easily do a search to check the other side's position.
So your theory is that there is some nefarious secret ultra rich organization that loves the earth so much that they are bribing scientists to alter their studies in favor of environmentalism.
That would be really great but I doubt it.
BTW scientists are trained to describe their studies in detail and ensure they are repeatable. The way to check a scientist's veracity is to repeat the study and see if you come up with the same results.
"Every time a study comes out saying that Windows is more secure, faster and cheaper than Linux, the first thing Slashdotters ask is "Who funded this study?" Which is exactly what the Chairman is attempting to establish."
No that is not what the Chairman is trying to establish, he knows very well which universities the scientists belong to, because that's listed in their by-lines. Any persons or organizations that provided additional funding are generally also listed in scientific papers.
And while I have been reading slashdot for eight years now, I have never read a comment where a slashdoter was seeking personal data on the author of some windows TCO study. At most slashdotters care about proffessional data -- i.e. what other studies that person has participated in what other articles he/she has written. So this is a really bad analogy. BTW if the Chairman wanted to get such data on the scientists he only needs to do a wuick lexis search for their other publications.
And of course there is the usual accusation of bias. That is getting pretty silly in my opinion but hey if that Senator cannot get his voice heard in the "liberal" media (something very hard to believe coming from a US senator) he can always post on slashdot. I will change my filter to -1 just in case slashdot is biased too.
"Suppose that by making the world a better place and encouraging education, intellectual development and tolerance we create the sort of environment in which open research can flourish... would we end up ahead in the long run when we discover more efficient means of exploring space instead of expending all these resources today for minimal gains?"
You have a point. If we enable all the world's poor and almost poor people to reach their full potentials the Earth would be able to generate so much physical and scientific production that we might actually be able to do large scale space exploration and colonization instead of the tiny projects undertaken today.
Just see how much more production and engineering is being generated from india and china, and thats not result of them solving poverty but becoming just slightly less drenched in poverty than they used to be.