Sokal gets held up as some kind of hero for "exposing" the emptiness of the so-called "anti-science" movement (and in truth, there are some significant problems there). But he hardly comes out smelling like a rose himself. If you read the linked Wikipedia article, first of all, he deliberately set out to deceive the editors of this journal with this hoax piece. Then, the editors of the journal recognize at some level that there are problems with it, and ask for changes. Sokal refuses to make any changes at all, telling them to take it or leave it. The journal caves and publishes the piece as is; feeling that they didn't have significant expertise to question the author. This was a mistake on their part - if you can't validate a piece, you've got no business publishing it.So yes, the journal screwed up.
But whose sin was greater here? The journal that got fooled, or the guy who did the fooling? This was a major exercise in academic dishonesty, and Sokal should have suffered the consequences. But in fact, everyone was having so much fun punching the hippies at the journal that he got a pass.
Sure, elite colleges are quite expensive, and the cost-benefit relationship in a lot of cases is way out of whack. But at least with an elite college you can 1) be reasonably sure you're at least going to get a top-quality education out of the deal, and 2) not worry too much that the university is actively trying to steal from you. The quality of education you get out of, say, ITT Tech or Kaplan is sometimes dubious, and such institutions have been known to use shady tactics like continuing to auto-register you for courses (and charging you for them) after you've withdrawn from the school. In some cases this went on for mulitple semesters before they finally "expelled" the student for non-attendence and then hit them with a giant tuition bill for instruction that they never even received.
So, yes, in a lot of cases elite colleges are not the best value. But they're probably not actively ripping you off.
... is that for-profit colleges have a particularly bad track record of ripping off their students. Some of the horror stories include continuing to auto-register students for classes after they've announced their intent to withdraw, and charging them for it - even though they've long since stopped attending the school. Then the student gets hit with a gigantic bill for an education they haven't even received.
Can non-profit schools rip off students? Sure. But it seems that many for-profit institutions are particularly egregious and horrible about this.
If a Distro has a lot of descendents is because it's evolutive succesfull, just like living beings, if that isn't a measure of it's worthiness, what else???? Mother nature seems to use the same standard to judge their offsprings.Mind you, you're a primate and not a lizard and a long time ago we were tiny, scarcely populated and by every measure the less important animal in the world.
By this measure, beetles are way, way more important than all mammals put together. I agree with the top of this thread - number of descendant distros is not that interesting of a measure.
(Of course, measuring by "installed base", bacteria beat every other species on earth... combined. All of which is to say that maybe the number of evolved species ain't such a good metaphor for linux distros.)
... the NFL players union seems to be structured like this. All their contracts seem to include performance bonuses, more talented players make more money, players can move from team to team rather than being locked into where they're drafted (that one is thanks TO the NFLPA), players can get cut based on poor performance. So it's not like it's impossible to do this. And under this scenario, you negotiate for the same things as usual: salary (in the form of pay bands or whatever), working conditions, benefits, and protection from arbitrary firing.
Yes, unions are human institutions and as such, are somewhat screwed up. So is management.For some reason, it's seen as perfectly reasonable to conclude that because unions are somewhat screwed up, we should get rid of them - but applying that logic to management is seen as nuts.
In IT, it does matter, since many IT workers started IT as a hobby.
A hobby is one thing - these agreements don't keep you from having IT as a hobby. They keep you from doing IT as a business, which is not at all the same thing.
... is that they feel like they will be getting enough work out of their actual job without taking on yet another job at home - so signing away their rights doesn't cost them anything. I was a naval reservist for a number of years, and ended up having to do a lot of reserve admin in my copious spare time. I can't even describe what a drag it was to work all day, come home, help get dinner together, etc... and then be looking at another hour or two of work before I could actually relax.
Seriously, not wanting to take on another job doesn't mean they're lazy, uncreative slobs. Not everyone wants to spend every waking hour on work.
And it doesn't really sound that unreasonable to me. Companies don't want to compete against their own employees - the incentives to steal company ideas, client contact lists, etc, would be pretty high.
The degree to which this is enforced does vary quite a bit - in my outfit you need to get approval to moonlight, but as long as you're not directly competing with the company and the extra hours spent don't drag down your work performance; I've never heard of it getting disapproved.
Dude, if the contract requires an active TS, they can only supply someone with an active TS. It can take months to get someone cleared, and what are they going to pay you to do in the meantime?
I'm a hiring manager for a couple of defense contracts, and I try to discourage the customers from putting those clauses in their contracts for this very reason - it cuts way down on the potential applicant pool. But they don't necessarily listen.
I wouldn't classify problem solving as vague. Hell, I would consider good problem solving as the ability to examine a problem and determine a good course of action to approach it. Even if 90% of the time that approach is doing some Google searching to see if there's already a solution, that's not bad. Entirely too many people run into a problem, have no idea how to solve it, and give up at that point.
Sure, I don't disagree. Problem solving skills really are something a job candidate needs. But how do you, as the interviewer, know whether he/she has them? There's no university coursework in "problem solving". No one thinks they're bad at problem solving, so they won't own up to it in an interview. There's no "problem-solving meter" you can hook up to the candidate to measure his/her ability. Maybe "vague" isn't the right word to use, but problem-solving ability is at least very difficult to measure/quantify.
These types of conferences are typically quite expensive (disclaimer: I've never been to this one so no direct experience) - typically because they expect that you're going to be charging off the exorbitant registration fee, hotel room, etc, to your boss. If you're attending it as a freelancer, the out of pocket costs can be pretty high, and as a college student? I would never have been able to afford it without tapping into Mom & Dad's bank account, and I wouldn't have wanted to ask them.
Can you submit your paper this journal (or others) without having to attend the conference? That might be a good compromise.
They formally moved it out of beta in 2009. You might have an argument if you said it's a free service and they aren't obligated to provide any particular level of service (you'd have to check the TOS to be sure, and I can't be bothered), but it's definitely no longer in beta and hasn't been for quite a while.
While this doesn't happen all that often, it happens often enough that you want to be prepared for it. I've got several years worth of work e-mail archived, and on more than one occasion I've had to reach into the figurative time machine and wave evidence in people's faces. In general I'm not that into administrative warfare, but there's nothing more satisfying than rolling up an old e-mail and sticking in the eye of some dumbass who's trying to blame you for their own mistakes.
While it would be a big problem for me to lose my work e-mail history (done via Exchange) - you'd be surprised how often I need to produce proof that I provided something via e-mail or someone sent me something via email - in my personal life... not so much. I've got a ton of mail in my Gmail account and although I'd just as soon not lose it, if it were to disappear, I doubt I'd notice. I got the account back when you still had to get invited to join, and while I use it quite a lot to this day, I more or less never go back into the history.
I guess it depends on what you're doing with your account.
Yes, of course someone could lock you out and prevent you from (future) POP access. But at least in that scenario you wouldn't have lost all your e-mail history.
I've got a couple of really important directories on my Windows box that I just rsync (via Cygwin) back to my file server. Not quite as good as a versioning backup system like Time Machine, but still pretty handy.
A few things to note. First, that's mass. Sure, we could pay eye-popping sums of money or we could first work on making the trip cheaper (which is currently what's going on). Second, a good portion of that list can be made after they reach Mars.
First, If there's anything "going on" that shows any promise of significantly reducing costs to get to Mars, I'm not aware of it. Got a link? Second, if they're going to make the stuff they need on Mars, then they're going to need the equipment it would take to do that. Water purifiers. Power generation. Electrolyzers for oxygen. CO2 scrubbers. Bulldozers, etc, to build stuff. Mining and refining equipment (sure, Mars is very rich in... hematite. Which needs to be converted to steel to be useful). Capital equipment to make stuff. Lots and lots of people to run all that stuff (or robots, but then you have to, you know, send the robots). All of that is very, very heavy.
Third, even now prices aren't a million dollars per kg. For example, the Mars Exploration Rovers had build and launch costs that added up to roughly a million dollars per kg, but this included a lot of stuff optimized to a ridiculous extreme including an elaborate landing system (heat shield, retrorockets, a tether system that drops the rover below the rocket platform).
Ok, so your argument is that ROBOTS need this really elaborate landing system, but for humans, any old thing will do. Well, who can argue with that? The point being that, yeah, landing squishy bags of water and bone on another planet is going to require pretty ridiculous optimization too. It won't look the same, but it'll be pretty ridiculous(ly expensive) just the same.
but by the time anyone gets around to doing this, they'll have the costs under control and a means to get most of the mass they need from the Martian environment rather than being dragged from Earth.
Well, I can agree with this much. It's just that I think that it's going to be a long, long time (maybe never) before we get to that point.
That it completely destroys one of the main reasons to go to Mars in the first place - for the science. Oh, you were interested in knowing whether life ever existed on Mars? Sorry, we just resurfaced the planet.
Also, there's the fact that Mars has no magnetic field, whose absence allowed the solar wind to strip the planet of most of its atmosphere in the first place. So unless you want to keep dropping comets on Mars, you'll be back where you started.
And yeah, there's also the energy thing. And the fact that we don't really know how to steer comets even if we had sufficient energy. Etc, etc. Probably safe to say we won't be terraforming first.
Your analogy isn't really getting the job done for you. Sure, the price of air travel has gone down - but it's still not cheap. It's still much, much cheaper, for example, to get something shipped UPS ground than UPS overnight. And for bulk quantities of stuff, forget it. Air's not an option for resupplying your coal fired power plant, for example.
The situation is even worse with respect to space. Prices aren't really coming down at all, and there really aren't any technological breakthroughs on the horizon as far as anyone can tell. Economies of scale, if you can achieve them, will only get you so far. You're going to need something that makes you some money "out there", and so far, no one has any particularly plausible ideas. The terrestrial planets are all made of the same stuff earth is, and no matter how cheap you make space travel, it's never going to be so cheap that mining is more economically done in space. Asteroids are the same deal. Comets: slushballs. Gas giants: hard to even imagine what you could recover or how to do it. And if you can't figure out what can be economically recovered, you probably can't even get the economy of scale.
Somehow we need to break out of that trap
Ok, I'll bite. Why do we need to? We've already established that there's no money in it. Carl Sagan seems to be casting about for a reason to do it in the quote. So why? This is really the heart of the matter. You can't just wave your hands and say "we need to get into space... just because". Someone needs to identify the actual benefits - and so far, they seem pretty slim.
It costs at least a million dollars/kg to get stuff to Mars. And the stuff they'd need would include, at a minimum, some kind of power generation system (nuclear or solar), lighting, heat, water purification equipment, tools & materials needed to do farming, seeds, startup food, air and water for themselves, clothing, tools & materials to build shelters, at least minimal furniture, minimal domestic implements (spoons, dishes, etc), comm and IT gear (presumably they'll need to phone home to earth periodically) bulk quantities of water (or equipment to mine water from Martian soils) for irrigating crops, some sort of capital equipment if they're to manufacture anything (probably heavy)... Are you putting this on your Visa card? Because I'm not keen on shelling out the bucks for it.
Look, folks - if your justification for a Mars mission is economic stimulus, you've already lost. First of all, no one wants to do stimulus. And if you did, there are far more efficient ways to do it - most effective in the short term is just giving money to poor people, who immediately spend it all. Most effective in the long term is infrastructure improvements. Going to Mars? Some substantial portion of your investment is turned into a big freakin' rocket, which gets used once and then burns up. Sure, there's some stimulus - you've put money in some people's pockets, stimulated some increase in demand for educated people, there will be some tech spinoffs, etc. But Mars missions as a stimulus are never going to be effective as stimulus as a stimulus. So you need to justify a Mars mission in terms of its own direct benefits, and it turns out that's kind of hard to do.
Dude, I can't believe I'm even reading this. Here's a hint: all those benefits - the research centers with their important discoveries, etc... we don't need to fly to fucking Mars to do that! In fact, if you plowed all the money you'd be wasting trying to get this stuff going on Mars into our (already existing) research centers on earth, you'd almost certainly make the discoveries quicker and more cheaply!
Another hint: when you're talking about spending literally trillions of dollars of other people's money - yeah, you really need an economic reason for everything. Because they're going to be kind of mad if you just spend it on things because they're cool.
... we used to call this sort of thing a self-licking ice cream cone. Dude, I hate to break this to you (are you sitting down) - there are no people on Mars. And we could save ourselves a fuck-ton of money by not shipping them there.
The idea of a self-sustaining Martian colony is beyond retarded. It costs something like a million dollars/kg to get stuff to Mars. To get a colony going would require millions of kilograms of stuff. Then anything you manufactured there would have to be transported back to earth to be sold - again with transport costs $1M/kg (or more, as building return rockets on Mars would no doubt be exceedingly expensive). And Mars is made of the same stuff as earth - silicates, iron, etc. What the hell could you possibly produce and sell at a profit? And without any kind of profit potential, this is a non-starter. No one is going to lay out this much money just because off-world colonies are cool.
And regarding the "countless volunteers" willing to go on a one-way trip to Mars? Sure. How many of them are qualified (physically and occupationally) to do anything useful on Mars? And of that rather small subset - how many are psychologically stable enough not to lose their shit on a permanent mission to another planet? Willing. Qualified. Mentally stable. You can pick two.
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Sokal gets held up as some kind of hero for "exposing" the emptiness of the so-called "anti-science" movement (and in truth, there are some significant problems there). But he hardly comes out smelling like a rose himself. If you read the linked Wikipedia article, first of all, he deliberately set out to deceive the editors of this journal with this hoax piece. Then, the editors of the journal recognize at some level that there are problems with it, and ask for changes. Sokal refuses to make any changes at all, telling them to take it or leave it. The journal caves and publishes the piece as is; feeling that they didn't have significant expertise to question the author. This was a mistake on their part - if you can't validate a piece, you've got no business publishing it.So yes, the journal screwed up.
But whose sin was greater here? The journal that got fooled, or the guy who did the fooling? This was a major exercise in academic dishonesty, and Sokal should have suffered the consequences. But in fact, everyone was having so much fun punching the hippies at the journal that he got a pass.
Sure, elite colleges are quite expensive, and the cost-benefit relationship in a lot of cases is way out of whack. But at least with an elite college you can 1) be reasonably sure you're at least going to get a top-quality education out of the deal, and 2) not worry too much that the university is actively trying to steal from you. The quality of education you get out of, say, ITT Tech or Kaplan is sometimes dubious, and such institutions have been known to use shady tactics like continuing to auto-register you for courses (and charging you for them) after you've withdrawn from the school. In some cases this went on for mulitple semesters before they finally "expelled" the student for non-attendence and then hit them with a giant tuition bill for instruction that they never even received.
So, yes, in a lot of cases elite colleges are not the best value. But they're probably not actively ripping you off.
Four year colleges by law have to accept all your credits obtained at accredited state community colleges. This really is a money-saver.
... is that for-profit colleges have a particularly bad track record of ripping off their students. Some of the horror stories include continuing to auto-register students for classes after they've announced their intent to withdraw, and charging them for it - even though they've long since stopped attending the school. Then the student gets hit with a gigantic bill for an education they haven't even received.
Can non-profit schools rip off students? Sure. But it seems that many for-profit institutions are particularly egregious and horrible about this.
By this measure, beetles are way, way more important than all mammals put together. I agree with the top of this thread - number of descendant distros is not that interesting of a measure.
(Of course, measuring by "installed base", bacteria beat every other species on earth... combined. All of which is to say that maybe the number of evolved species ain't such a good metaphor for linux distros.)
... the NFL players union seems to be structured like this. All their contracts seem to include performance bonuses, more talented players make more money, players can move from team to team rather than being locked into where they're drafted (that one is thanks TO the NFLPA), players can get cut based on poor performance. So it's not like it's impossible to do this. And under this scenario, you negotiate for the same things as usual: salary (in the form of pay bands or whatever), working conditions, benefits, and protection from arbitrary firing.
Yes, unions are human institutions and as such, are somewhat screwed up. So is management.For some reason, it's seen as perfectly reasonable to conclude that because unions are somewhat screwed up, we should get rid of them - but applying that logic to management is seen as nuts.
A hobby is one thing - these agreements don't keep you from having IT as a hobby. They keep you from doing IT as a business, which is not at all the same thing.
... is that they feel like they will be getting enough work out of their actual job without taking on yet another job at home - so signing away their rights doesn't cost them anything. I was a naval reservist for a number of years, and ended up having to do a lot of reserve admin in my copious spare time. I can't even describe what a drag it was to work all day, come home, help get dinner together, etc... and then be looking at another hour or two of work before I could actually relax.
Seriously, not wanting to take on another job doesn't mean they're lazy, uncreative slobs. Not everyone wants to spend every waking hour on work.
And it doesn't really sound that unreasonable to me. Companies don't want to compete against their own employees - the incentives to steal company ideas, client contact lists, etc, would be pretty high.
The degree to which this is enforced does vary quite a bit - in my outfit you need to get approval to moonlight, but as long as you're not directly competing with the company and the extra hours spent don't drag down your work performance; I've never heard of it getting disapproved.
Dude, if the contract requires an active TS, they can only supply someone with an active TS. It can take months to get someone cleared, and what are they going to pay you to do in the meantime?
I'm a hiring manager for a couple of defense contracts, and I try to discourage the customers from putting those clauses in their contracts for this very reason - it cuts way down on the potential applicant pool. But they don't necessarily listen.
Sure, I don't disagree. Problem solving skills really are something a job candidate needs. But how do you, as the interviewer, know whether he/she has them? There's no university coursework in "problem solving". No one thinks they're bad at problem solving, so they won't own up to it in an interview. There's no "problem-solving meter" you can hook up to the candidate to measure his/her ability. Maybe "vague" isn't the right word to use, but problem-solving ability is at least very difficult to measure/quantify.
These types of conferences are typically quite expensive (disclaimer: I've never been to this one so no direct experience) - typically because they expect that you're going to be charging off the exorbitant registration fee, hotel room, etc, to your boss. If you're attending it as a freelancer, the out of pocket costs can be pretty high, and as a college student? I would never have been able to afford it without tapping into Mom & Dad's bank account, and I wouldn't have wanted to ask them.
Can you submit your paper this journal (or others) without having to attend the conference? That might be a good compromise.
They formally moved it out of beta in 2009. You might have an argument if you said it's a free service and they aren't obligated to provide any particular level of service (you'd have to check the TOS to be sure, and I can't be bothered), but it's definitely no longer in beta and hasn't been for quite a while.
While this doesn't happen all that often, it happens often enough that you want to be prepared for it. I've got several years worth of work e-mail archived, and on more than one occasion I've had to reach into the figurative time machine and wave evidence in people's faces. In general I'm not that into administrative warfare, but there's nothing more satisfying than rolling up an old e-mail and sticking in the eye of some dumbass who's trying to blame you for their own mistakes.
While it would be a big problem for me to lose my work e-mail history (done via Exchange) - you'd be surprised how often I need to produce proof that I provided something via e-mail or someone sent me something via email - in my personal life... not so much. I've got a ton of mail in my Gmail account and although I'd just as soon not lose it, if it were to disappear, I doubt I'd notice. I got the account back when you still had to get invited to join, and while I use it quite a lot to this day, I more or less never go back into the history.
I guess it depends on what you're doing with your account.
Yes, of course someone could lock you out and prevent you from (future) POP access. But at least in that scenario you wouldn't have lost all your e-mail history.
I've got a couple of really important directories on my Windows box that I just rsync (via Cygwin) back to my file server. Not quite as good as a versioning backup system like Time Machine, but still pretty handy.
First, If there's anything "going on" that shows any promise of significantly reducing costs to get to Mars, I'm not aware of it. Got a link? Second, if they're going to make the stuff they need on Mars, then they're going to need the equipment it would take to do that. Water purifiers. Power generation. Electrolyzers for oxygen. CO2 scrubbers. Bulldozers, etc, to build stuff. Mining and refining equipment (sure, Mars is very rich in... hematite. Which needs to be converted to steel to be useful). Capital equipment to make stuff. Lots and lots of people to run all that stuff (or robots, but then you have to, you know, send the robots). All of that is very, very heavy.
Ok, so your argument is that ROBOTS need this really elaborate landing system, but for humans, any old thing will do. Well, who can argue with that? The point being that, yeah, landing squishy bags of water and bone on another planet is going to require pretty ridiculous optimization too. It won't look the same, but it'll be pretty ridiculous(ly expensive) just the same.
Well, I can agree with this much. It's just that I think that it's going to be a long, long time (maybe never) before we get to that point.
That it completely destroys one of the main reasons to go to Mars in the first place - for the science. Oh, you were interested in knowing whether life ever existed on Mars? Sorry, we just resurfaced the planet.
Also, there's the fact that Mars has no magnetic field, whose absence allowed the solar wind to strip the planet of most of its atmosphere in the first place. So unless you want to keep dropping comets on Mars, you'll be back where you started.
And yeah, there's also the energy thing. And the fact that we don't really know how to steer comets even if we had sufficient energy. Etc, etc. Probably safe to say we won't be terraforming first.
Your analogy isn't really getting the job done for you. Sure, the price of air travel has gone down - but it's still not cheap. It's still much, much cheaper, for example, to get something shipped UPS ground than UPS overnight. And for bulk quantities of stuff, forget it. Air's not an option for resupplying your coal fired power plant, for example.
The situation is even worse with respect to space. Prices aren't really coming down at all, and there really aren't any technological breakthroughs on the horizon as far as anyone can tell. Economies of scale, if you can achieve them, will only get you so far. You're going to need something that makes you some money "out there", and so far, no one has any particularly plausible ideas. The terrestrial planets are all made of the same stuff earth is, and no matter how cheap you make space travel, it's never going to be so cheap that mining is more economically done in space. Asteroids are the same deal. Comets: slushballs. Gas giants: hard to even imagine what you could recover or how to do it. And if you can't figure out what can be economically recovered, you probably can't even get the economy of scale.
Ok, I'll bite. Why do we need to? We've already established that there's no money in it. Carl Sagan seems to be casting about for a reason to do it in the quote. So why? This is really the heart of the matter. You can't just wave your hands and say "we need to get into space... just because". Someone needs to identify the actual benefits - and so far, they seem pretty slim.
It costs at least a million dollars/kg to get stuff to Mars. And the stuff they'd need would include, at a minimum, some kind of power generation system (nuclear or solar), lighting, heat, water purification equipment, tools & materials needed to do farming, seeds, startup food, air and water for themselves, clothing, tools & materials to build shelters, at least minimal furniture, minimal domestic implements (spoons, dishes, etc), comm and IT gear (presumably they'll need to phone home to earth periodically) bulk quantities of water (or equipment to mine water from Martian soils) for irrigating crops, some sort of capital equipment if they're to manufacture anything (probably heavy)... Are you putting this on your Visa card? Because I'm not keen on shelling out the bucks for it.
Look, folks - if your justification for a Mars mission is economic stimulus, you've already lost. First of all, no one wants to do stimulus. And if you did, there are far more efficient ways to do it - most effective in the short term is just giving money to poor people, who immediately spend it all. Most effective in the long term is infrastructure improvements. Going to Mars? Some substantial portion of your investment is turned into a big freakin' rocket, which gets used once and then burns up. Sure, there's some stimulus - you've put money in some people's pockets, stimulated some increase in demand for educated people, there will be some tech spinoffs, etc. But Mars missions as a stimulus are never going to be effective as stimulus as a stimulus. So you need to justify a Mars mission in terms of its own direct benefits, and it turns out that's kind of hard to do.
Dude, I can't believe I'm even reading this. Here's a hint: all those benefits - the research centers with their important discoveries, etc... we don't need to fly to fucking Mars to do that! In fact, if you plowed all the money you'd be wasting trying to get this stuff going on Mars into our (already existing) research centers on earth, you'd almost certainly make the discoveries quicker and more cheaply!
Another hint: when you're talking about spending literally trillions of dollars of other people's money - yeah, you really need an economic reason for everything. Because they're going to be kind of mad if you just spend it on things because they're cool.
... we used to call this sort of thing a self-licking ice cream cone. Dude, I hate to break this to you (are you sitting down) - there are no people on Mars. And we could save ourselves a fuck-ton of money by not shipping them there.
The idea of a self-sustaining Martian colony is beyond retarded. It costs something like a million dollars/kg to get stuff to Mars. To get a colony going would require millions of kilograms of stuff. Then anything you manufactured there would have to be transported back to earth to be sold - again with transport costs $1M/kg (or more, as building return rockets on Mars would no doubt be exceedingly expensive). And Mars is made of the same stuff as earth - silicates, iron, etc. What the hell could you possibly produce and sell at a profit? And without any kind of profit potential, this is a non-starter. No one is going to lay out this much money just because off-world colonies are cool.
And regarding the "countless volunteers" willing to go on a one-way trip to Mars? Sure. How many of them are qualified (physically and occupationally) to do anything useful on Mars? And of that rather small subset - how many are psychologically stable enough not to lose their shit on a permanent mission to another planet? Willing. Qualified. Mentally stable. You can pick two.