I think it's probbably safer to say that seti@home has a huge surplus of computational power, and uses it to verify each result (though it's not strictly necessary to do so). With only one data source (Aerecibo) you can only produce data so quickly, and once you have enough computational power to do the analysis in real time any extra is just surplus that can be used to verify. They did, however later add some extra analysis to the data to take better advantage of the huge surplus of computing power they have.
The important point though, is that for seti@home each individual workunit, while important isn't critical to the whole project. If a small percentage of workunits aren't computed perfectly it's not catastrophic. In other words there's a certain amount of tolerance for innacuracy. For a project like the OGR (Optimum Golomb Ruler) by distributed.net each workunit must be calculated perfectly, as the goal is to prove which ruler is the optimum one. If workunit isn't verified you haven't really proven anything, since it's possible (and probbably likely) that hardware failure produced an innaccurate result somewhere in the millions of workunits calculated. (Or perhaps a modified client produced innacurate results).
Other distributed computing tasks have different amounts of tolerance for innacurate results.
Your underlying point is a good one though. For some projects the need for integrity of the results is very high, so larger computing power may be necessary to verify each result.
He removed anyone from receiving the emails if they asked to be removed. Generally to be considered harassment you have to ask the offending party to stop their harassing behavior, and they have to ignore your request. The court mentions this in their statement, so it seems to be a well established fact. This "electronic tresspass" business is fairly scary, and I'm glad it was struck down.
Yah, I figured they misspelled "ya vol", but I was too lazy to go look it up somewhere. It does make it all the more funny that they couldn't even get that right;).
Did anyone else find it extremely funny that the "Try Communism" sign has a penguin doing a sig heil and saying "ya vol"? Maybe if you're going to make a protest sign you should at least get your major points of history right;).
Unless they're employed by RedHat or IBM or similar, linux coders aren't expected to be paid. The software is also free, so I don't think anyone is too upset missing out on 12% of $0.
As far as the rest of your comparison, most commercial software is produced by large teams of people, built up from libraries written by even more people, etc. Music is produced by the singer and/or band and a producer. Yeah, there are sound engineers and what not, but I'd argue that the band and maybe the producer are the main "artists" of the music. The point being that it takes a lot fewer people to create commercial music than it does to create (most) commercial software. Obviously for software there are exceptions to this, and many of these programmers have become wildly successfull.
No big deal, except that motherboards that support USB 2.0 have come to mean it supports the 480 Mb/sec data rate in the eyes of the consumer. Maybe because it actually DID mean that before December (if this article is correct).
I don't really care if my mouse or keyboard talks at 1.5 mb/sec, 12 mb/sec, or even.5 mb/sec as it'll never send data at anything approaching those rates. However, If I buy a new computer that says it supports USB2, I expect to be able to buy an external CD-RW that supports USB2 and burn a CD-R at the full rated 16x or 32x. If I can't do this, I'm going to return the damn computer and claim there's something wrong with it.
I'm still a little skeptical though as the source is the Bangkok Post, and not a more reliable form of tech news. Journalists are notoriously bad at understanding technology, so I'd feel a little more comfortable in believing this if it came from something like Toms Hardware or The Register.
curious questions for anyone that might know...
on
42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 1
I'm more interested in what this means for the batteries themselves. Would 36/42 V batteries last as long as the 12V ones? At the very least batteries would have 3 times as many cells, i.e. more points of failure.
How would cold weather starting be affected? Would this benefit cold weather starts, or would cold weather make starts more difficult?
I find it rather sad that this gets posted as news on slashdot, given that slashdot is supposed to be run by geeks. I'd expect this from my local newspaper, but CowboyNeal should know better.
Having said that, what happens when the people of Laos decide they want to use their TLD? I know it's a small mountainous country with very little technology, but I just heard a story yesterday about how the small country of Bhutan just got cable TV (a country where Buddhist monks outnumber soldiers). Point being it'll probbably happen eventually.
More like you can pay $unknown for the FlexPlay DVD at your local supermarket or Target. Then play it for two days after you break the seal and never have to return it. I'd say that's worth more than $3, probbably not more than $4.
The other thing may be that the movie studio might make more money off this deal, since they get paid for each "rental", which I don't think they do right now.
Actually, changing the size of the bills probbably would thwart counterfeiting. According to the article one common method now used is to bleach the ink out of low denomination bills and re-print them with higher denominations. If larger valued bills were larger in size you wouldn't be able to do this.
I know the unix file hierarchy well, but I've always thought it was arranged haphazardly. Why are there six different places for system executables? (/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin,/usr/local/bin,/usr/local/sbin)? That's not even counting the alternative directories that some programs like to be installed under like/opt, or X11 programs.
The one thing I don't like is that they renamed root to gobo. While root doesn't have much inherent meaning to it, gobo has even less. If you're going to rename root, why not pick something more meaningfull like administrator, admin, superuser, BigManWithTheTopHat, etc? I guess I haven't checked recently, but is linux still limited to 8 characters for the username?
I thought the reason cases were made of metal was to shield RFI generated inside your computer from disturbing peoples radio or TV reception. (The FCC has limits on how much RFI a device can emit). A cardboard case would obviously not provide any shielding.
I thought the same thing. The only thing I can think of is the guy has a patent on putting advertisements in popups. It's as if someone invented television, and then someone else came along and patented the idea of putting advertisements on TV.
Even though the side effect of this patent being enforceable would be nice (less popups), the precedent set for trivial patents would be worse.
Well I'm not a lawyer so I can't interpret the actual law (and I did find it, it's quite complicated), but at least according to the HUD the Fair Housing Act applies to:
The Fair Housing Act covers most housing. In some circumstances, the Act exempts owner-occupied buildings with no more than four units, single-family housing sold or rented without the use of a broker, and housing operated by organizations and private clubs that limit occupancy to members.
So if I'm reading this right if you live in your house, and sell it yourself you may be able to discriminate. The vast majority of people use brokers to sell houses, so effectively most housing is protected by this law.
I'm pretty sure most of what you said is wrong, with the exception of private clubs. (I believe the discrimination laws make a distinction between public, and private businesses/clubs/etc). I'm almost positive that you're wrong about housing discrimination laws, so let's start there.
You can't refuse to sell your house to someone for racial reasons
Again, YES, YOU CAN. It's against the law for a publicly funded loan organization to deny someone a loan because of their race, color, creed, sex, age, or national origin, but a private owner of a home can choose to sell to whomever he or she wishes. What kind of society would you have? One that forces someone to sell their property or services, regardless of that person's wishes? Not a very free society.
Hmm.. a quick Google search turns up something called the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. I found a good summary here. , but here's a quote of the relevant parts (emphasis mine):
Protected Classes
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin or sex. The March 12, 1989 amendment expands the protected class to include the handicapped and families with children. ("Handicapped" is defined in the amendment to include any person who has a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more major life activities, a record of having such a impairment or being regarded as having such an impairment.)
Prohibited Practices
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits the following practices:
1. Refusal to sell, rent or otherwise deal with any person
2. Discrimination against any person in establishing terms or conditions for the sale or rented of housing
3. Discrimination in any advertising for the sale or rental of a dwelling
4. Denying that housing is available when it is
5. Panic Selling- attempting to influence any individual to sell or rent with threats that persons of a particular protected class status are entering the neighborhood.
6. Channeling- showing members of a protected class property in neighborhoods made up predominantly of the same minority background while not showing comparable properties in other neighborhoods.
I really don't have the time, or interest to find laws on every point you're trying to make, I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader. The point is that there are federal laws that protect against racial discrimination. Do you really think racial discrimination at lunch counters and the like ended for economic reasons?
As for "high minded liberalism", sorry, but laws against discrimnation for things like jobs, housing, and sitting at lunch counters isn't restricted to the "high minded liberal" camp anymore, it's a mainstream belief.
If it is for display only, is it really a sword?
I'll let you answer that question after I use the "sword" to cut off your arm;). Don't get lost in words. Words are merely a way to describe reality, not reality itself.
the question isn't "is it art?", it's "do I care?"
on
HTML: Is it Art?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I honestly don't understand why people assign so much value to calling something art. It's as if calling something art assigns it to a higher plane where it can't be questioned.
I guess I wasn't all that impressed by the sites mentioned in the NYT article. IMO superbad.com is far more cool than the jodi sites. Futhermore superbad has been around for years, so I don't see how these people have created anything all that original or special. For those of you who don't know, superbad is a... surrealistic website where you don't really feel in control of the website since it's never really very apparent just how each page works. I'm sure there's many other people that've created strange websites like this as well.
As far as the "you're not in control of your computer" theme goes, there's lots of sites (mostly porn) that have all kinds of annoying javascript tricks to open up new windows when you try to kill the old window. Seems like that's the same idea as this. Sure, I guess the sites the NYT talks about are "art", but so is the tracing of my hand I did when I was 5. I think the NYT has missed the boat on this one, and perhaps should have done a bit more homework on what other people have done in this field.
I don't like the word progress. To me at least it implies that whatever direction we happen to be headed towards is progress. Most of the time what we're progressing towards isn't defined, and therein lies the problem. I must admit that science discovering things that challenge us is unavoidable.
As far as letting people choose the genes their kids have, I'll give you one example that'd pose a big problem, sex selection. In many parts of the world it's VERY important to have a boy. If sex selection became widespread the male/female ratio would very likely become very skewed toward men. Obviously that means there will be a good percentage of the male population without a female mate. This is already true (for reasons I've never been able to track down) in Saudi Arabia where the m/f ratio for people of ages 15-64 is 1.39/1. Anyone know any really pissed off guys from Saudi Arabia that've caused us some problems lately... perhaps about 15 of them? Yah, I know correlation doesn't show causation and it's obviously more complicated that just sex ratio imbalance, but I find it a disturbing fact.
The general idea is that selecting very important factors like sex, and probbably intelligence and other traits, can create an imbalance in the society. Sex selection hasn't become a problem yet since I think it's still relatively expensive and only people living in developed nations can afford it. In addition prefering one sex over another in developed nations isn't widely considered important. If this became cheap, and widely available I think you'd start seeing sex ratio imbalances in a lot of undeveloped countries, and this would pose big problems.
Parents selecting traits that later become a problem for society isn't necessarily something that's decades away, it really has the potential to become a problem now.
I saw the Nova special, and found it to be extremely biased.
If Franklin had not died of cancer (probably due to working so much with radiation) at such a young age she would have undoubtedly presented the discovery of the helix nature of DNA
Franklin died 4 or 5 years after the publication of the Nature article, so she had plenty of time to publish anything related to her DNA work.
Watson went on to write The Double Helix, which slandered Franklin, to which even Crick objected.
Crick objected to how he was portrayed in the book, so I don't see how this applies. As far has
Watsons portrayal of Franklin, I think it only shows he's a sexist dick. (And reportedly still is). Should Watson have cleaned everything up and not been honest about his attitudes toward Franklin? At least now we have a historical picture from one persons perspective about the atmosphere surrounding the discovery of DNAs structure. Taken in context it's a great book that I'd recommend to anyone.
After being made so miserable working at the same lab with Watson and Crick, she went on to other things briefly virus research, in which her partner, surprise again, also won a Nobel prize.
Well, I don't know anything about her being made miserable, but she died before she was able to confirm her virus work. Nobel prizes are always awarded many years after someone has done the work and after it's been widely accepted by the scientific community. It's also only awarded to living people, and only shared by three. Franklink died in 1958. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel in 1962. I don't know which nobel prize was awarded to her colleague, but my guess is she was dead by the time it was awarded.
I'm actually surprised at how biased the Nova episode was. It made it sound like Franklin did all the work, while Watson and Crick came along took her research, cobbled together a model and published it. Franklin is portrayed as this poor innocent women taken advantage of by the evil Watson and Crick. Especially ridiculous is the line at the end: Franklin died "with no sense of having been edged out in a race that only Watson and Crick knew was a race." There were many people researching the DNA structure around the world, including two time Nobel winner Linus Pauling. If Franklin didn't know this was a race, she was either delusional, or stupid. I don't think she was either, which makes me extremely suspicious of the motives of the author of the book on which this Nova was based. Franklin probbably deserves more credit than she got, but the Nova special was out to make a martyr of her for sexism in science. This is made quite a bit easier because of her early death.
The article doesn't mention why ultra-short duration lasers are so much more attractive for surgery. The reason is that one of the problems with lasers is they heat the area around what you're trying to remove, and thus damage it and make imprecise cuts. Femto second lasers have such a short duration that there's not enough time to heat the surrounding area.
I don't know anything about aerospace, but I have to wonder why you think this plane was such a great design? The designer looks like he makes pretty designs, but is that the only redeeming quality?
Frank Lloyd Wright made pretty buildings, but he was also famous for making things that weren't functional, and sometimes were just broken. His house on the waterfall is a classic example. The damn thing is falling over now because he valued pretty over solid design. (IIRC the engineer who built it told him the design would fail, and now many years later they have to spend millions to try to retrofit the house so it doesn't collapse).
I get the feeling this guy is the same way. So here's your chance to defend him. Is it all about the thing being pretty, or is it just an all around great design?
Except there's one problem with your argument. Leaded gas has only recently, or just this year been fazed out for use in many European countries. France and the UK were supposed to have done it in 2000, and Italy is only slated to do it this year. If leaded gas makes people stupid, then you should look toward Europe for the largest effect.
Lead may have some effect, I don't dispute that. Your error is trying to make this into some sort of "this is why Americans are stupid" argument. I don't think anyone has even done any studies comparing IQ between the US and other developed countries. If someone has, I'd be interested in seeing them. You posted this in the science section, and we expect a little more than "boy, the people around me in the US are dumb, must be because of lead".
You aren't excused from saying biggoted things about Americans just because you are one. I think we're quite rightly offened at anyone that makes comparisons of Americans to Homer Simpson. This seems especially true when it's not just a matter of being a loudmouth, or saying brash things, or not being as educated about world affairs, but when you're saying Americans are just plain stupider than the rest of the world.
1. I've been reading slashdot for at least 3-4 years, and the dupes have noticeably increased in the past year or so.
2. Yes, newspapers and magazines often have sensational headlines. That's not really an excuse, since they all don't resort to that kind of crap. I don't think slashdot becoming the equivalant of Fox is a Good Thing.
3. Yah, every article has a "slashdot sucks" thread, but since it's down at -1 no one reads it or replies to it, so it tends to be a bad discussion. Hell, even magazines publish a damn "letters to the editor section", and slashdot doesn't even have that. Journals are nice I guess, but it'd be like tacking up paper on my front door, and hoping everyone people just start talking about the issue at hand. A few people talking about this in a hidden away corner of slashdot isn't very effective at anything. I guess I think Journal entries are more about mental masturbation than anything else. That's all well and good, but it doesn't solve anything.
No, I don't "hate" slashdot, but I think there's real problems which just aren't that hard to solve. The problem is the editors just stick their head in the sand and refuse to even acknowledge them. I guess that might be OK if you run a private newspaper that's fairly disconnected from its readership, but this is supposed to be something of a community where (at least ideally) we learn from each other. At the VERY least the editors could post a few "letters to the editor" about complaints about Slashdot, and there could be a real discussion about what people think is wrong or right about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's probbably safer to say that seti@home has a huge surplus of computational power, and uses it to verify each result (though it's not strictly necessary to do so). With only one data source (Aerecibo) you can only produce data so quickly, and once you have enough computational power to do the analysis in real time any extra is just surplus that can be used to verify. They did, however later add some extra analysis to the data to take better advantage of the huge surplus of computing power they have.
The important point though, is that for seti@home each individual workunit, while important isn't critical to the whole project. If a small percentage of workunits aren't computed perfectly it's not catastrophic. In other words there's a certain amount of tolerance for innacuracy. For a project like the OGR (Optimum Golomb Ruler) by distributed.net each workunit must be calculated perfectly, as the goal is to prove which ruler is the optimum one. If workunit isn't verified you haven't really proven anything, since it's possible (and probbably likely) that hardware failure produced an innaccurate result somewhere in the millions of workunits calculated. (Or perhaps a modified client produced innacurate results). Other distributed computing tasks have different amounts of tolerance for innacurate results.
Your underlying point is a good one though. For some projects the need for integrity of the results is very high, so larger computing power may be necessary to verify each result.
He removed anyone from receiving the emails if they asked to be removed. Generally to be considered harassment you have to ask the offending party to stop their harassing behavior, and they have to ignore your request. The court mentions this in their statement, so it seems to be a well established fact. This "electronic tresspass" business is fairly scary, and I'm glad it was struck down.
Yah, I figured they misspelled "ya vol", but I was too lazy to go look it up somewhere. It does make it all the more funny that they couldn't even get that right ;).
Did anyone else find it extremely funny that the "Try Communism" sign has a penguin doing a sig heil and saying "ya vol"? Maybe if you're going to make a protest sign you should at least get your major points of history right ;).
Unless they're employed by RedHat or IBM or similar, linux coders aren't expected to be paid. The software is also free, so I don't think anyone is too upset missing out on 12% of $0.
As far as the rest of your comparison, most commercial software is produced by large teams of people, built up from libraries written by even more people, etc. Music is produced by the singer and/or band and a producer. Yeah, there are sound engineers and what not, but I'd argue that the band and maybe the producer are the main "artists" of the music. The point being that it takes a lot fewer people to create commercial music than it does to create (most) commercial software. Obviously for software there are exceptions to this, and many of these programmers have become wildly successfull.
No big deal, except that motherboards that support USB 2.0 have come to mean it supports the 480 Mb/sec data rate in the eyes of the consumer. Maybe because it actually DID mean that before December (if this article is correct).
.5 mb/sec as it'll never send data at anything approaching those rates. However, If I buy a new computer that says it supports USB2, I expect to be able to buy an external CD-RW that supports USB2 and burn a CD-R at the full rated 16x or 32x. If I can't do this, I'm going to return the damn computer and claim there's something wrong with it.
I don't really care if my mouse or keyboard talks at 1.5 mb/sec, 12 mb/sec, or even
I'm still a little skeptical though as the source is the Bangkok Post, and not a more reliable form of tech news. Journalists are notoriously bad at understanding technology, so I'd feel a little more comfortable in believing this if it came from something like Toms Hardware or The Register.
I'm more interested in what this means for the batteries themselves. Would 36/42 V batteries last as long as the 12V ones? At the very least batteries would have 3 times as many cells, i.e. more points of failure.
How would cold weather starting be affected? Would this benefit cold weather starts, or would cold weather make starts more difficult?
Maybe it's time to get a new wife. Sounds pretty callous to me, but then I'm an unemployed GenXer ;).
I find it rather sad that this gets posted as news on slashdot, given that slashdot is supposed to be run by geeks. I'd expect this from my local newspaper, but CowboyNeal should know better.
Having said that, what happens when the people of Laos decide they want to use their TLD? I know it's a small mountainous country with very little technology, but I just heard a story yesterday about how the small country of Bhutan just got cable TV (a country where Buddhist monks outnumber soldiers). Point being it'll probbably happen eventually.
More like you can pay $unknown for the FlexPlay DVD at your local supermarket or Target. Then play it for two days after you break the seal and never have to return it. I'd say that's worth more than $3, probbably not more than $4.
The other thing may be that the movie studio might make more money off this deal, since they get paid for each "rental", which I don't think they do right now.
Actually, changing the size of the bills probbably would thwart counterfeiting. According to the article one common method now used is to bleach the ink out of low denomination bills and re-print them with higher denominations. If larger valued bills were larger in size you wouldn't be able to do this.
I know the unix file hierarchy well, but I've always thought it was arranged haphazardly. Why are there six different places for system executables? (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin,/usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin)? That's not even counting the alternative directories that some programs like to be installed under like /opt, or X11 programs.
The one thing I don't like is that they renamed root to gobo. While root doesn't have much inherent meaning to it, gobo has even less. If you're going to rename root, why not pick something more meaningfull like administrator, admin, superuser, BigManWithTheTopHat, etc? I guess I haven't checked recently, but is linux still limited to 8 characters for the username?
I thought the reason cases were made of metal was to shield RFI generated inside your computer from disturbing peoples radio or TV reception. (The FCC has limits on how much RFI a device can emit). A cardboard case would obviously not provide any shielding.
I thought the same thing. The only thing I can think of is the guy has a patent on putting advertisements in popups. It's as if someone invented television, and then someone else came along and patented the idea of putting advertisements on TV.
Even though the side effect of this patent being enforceable would be nice (less popups), the precedent set for trivial patents would be worse.
So if I'm reading this right if you live in your house, and sell it yourself you may be able to discriminate. The vast majority of people use brokers to sell houses, so effectively most housing is protected by this law.
I really don't have the time, or interest to find laws on every point you're trying to make, I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader. The point is that there are federal laws that protect against racial discrimination. Do you really think racial discrimination at lunch counters and the like ended for economic reasons?
As for "high minded liberalism", sorry, but laws against discrimnation for things like jobs, housing, and sitting at lunch counters isn't restricted to the "high minded liberal" camp anymore, it's a mainstream belief.
If it is for display only, is it really a sword? ;). Don't get lost in words. Words are merely a way to describe reality, not reality itself.
I'll let you answer that question after I use the "sword" to cut off your arm
I honestly don't understand why people assign so much value to calling something art. It's as if calling something art assigns it to a higher plane where it can't be questioned.
I guess I wasn't all that impressed by the sites mentioned in the NYT article. IMO superbad.com is far more cool than the jodi sites. Futhermore superbad has been around for years, so I don't see how these people have created anything all that original or special. For those of you who don't know, superbad is a... surrealistic website where you don't really feel in control of the website since it's never really very apparent just how each page works. I'm sure there's many other people that've created strange websites like this as well.
As far as the "you're not in control of your computer" theme goes, there's lots of sites (mostly porn) that have all kinds of annoying javascript tricks to open up new windows when you try to kill the old window. Seems like that's the same idea as this. Sure, I guess the sites the NYT talks about are "art", but so is the tracing of my hand I did when I was 5. I think the NYT has missed the boat on this one, and perhaps should have done a bit more homework on what other people have done in this field.
I don't like the word progress. To me at least it implies that whatever direction we happen to be headed towards is progress. Most of the time what we're progressing towards isn't defined, and therein lies the problem. I must admit that science discovering things that challenge us is unavoidable.
As far as letting people choose the genes their kids have, I'll give you one example that'd pose a big problem, sex selection. In many parts of the world it's VERY important to have a boy. If sex selection became widespread the male/female ratio would very likely become very skewed toward men. Obviously that means there will be a good percentage of the male population without a female mate. This is already true (for reasons I've never been able to track down) in Saudi Arabia where the m/f ratio for people of ages 15-64 is 1.39/1. Anyone know any really pissed off guys from Saudi Arabia that've caused us some problems lately... perhaps about 15 of them? Yah, I know correlation doesn't show causation and it's obviously more complicated that just sex ratio imbalance, but I find it a disturbing fact.
The general idea is that selecting very important factors like sex, and probbably intelligence and other traits, can create an imbalance in the society. Sex selection hasn't become a problem yet since I think it's still relatively expensive and only people living in developed nations can afford it. In addition prefering one sex over another in developed nations isn't widely considered important. If this became cheap, and widely available I think you'd start seeing sex ratio imbalances in a lot of undeveloped countries, and this would pose big problems.
Parents selecting traits that later become a problem for society isn't necessarily something that's decades away, it really has the potential to become a problem now.
Franklin died 4 or 5 years after the publication of the Nature article, so she had plenty of time to publish anything related to her DNA work.
Crick objected to how he was portrayed in the book, so I don't see how this applies. As far has Watsons portrayal of Franklin, I think it only shows he's a sexist dick. (And reportedly still is). Should Watson have cleaned everything up and not been honest about his attitudes toward Franklin? At least now we have a historical picture from one persons perspective about the atmosphere surrounding the discovery of DNAs structure. Taken in context it's a great book that I'd recommend to anyone.
Well, I don't know anything about her being made miserable, but she died before she was able to confirm her virus work. Nobel prizes are always awarded many years after someone has done the work and after it's been widely accepted by the scientific community. It's also only awarded to living people, and only shared by three. Franklink died in 1958. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel in 1962. I don't know which nobel prize was awarded to her colleague, but my guess is she was dead by the time it was awarded.
I'm actually surprised at how biased the Nova episode was. It made it sound like Franklin did all the work, while Watson and Crick came along took her research, cobbled together a model and published it. Franklin is portrayed as this poor innocent women taken advantage of by the evil Watson and Crick. Especially ridiculous is the line at the end: Franklin died "with no sense of having been edged out in a race that only Watson and Crick knew was a race." There were many people researching the DNA structure around the world, including two time Nobel winner Linus Pauling. If Franklin didn't know this was a race, she was either delusional, or stupid. I don't think she was either, which makes me extremely suspicious of the motives of the author of the book on which this Nova was based. Franklin probbably deserves more credit than she got, but the Nova special was out to make a martyr of her for sexism in science. This is made quite a bit easier because of her early death.
The article doesn't mention why ultra-short duration lasers are so much more attractive for surgery. The reason is that one of the problems with lasers is they heat the area around what you're trying to remove, and thus damage it and make imprecise cuts. Femto second lasers have such a short duration that there's not enough time to heat the surrounding area.
This isn't a debate about abortion, and the bateing going on is just way off topic.
I don't know anything about aerospace, but I have to wonder why you think this plane was such a great design? The designer looks like he makes pretty designs, but is that the only redeeming quality?
Frank Lloyd Wright made pretty buildings, but he was also famous for making things that weren't functional, and sometimes were just broken. His house on the waterfall is a classic example. The damn thing is falling over now because he valued pretty over solid design. (IIRC the engineer who built it told him the design would fail, and now many years later they have to spend millions to try to retrofit the house so it doesn't collapse).
I get the feeling this guy is the same way. So here's your chance to defend him. Is it all about the thing being pretty, or is it just an all around great design?
Except there's one problem with your argument. Leaded gas has only recently, or just this year been fazed out for use in many European countries. France and the UK were supposed to have done it in 2000, and Italy is only slated to do it this year. If leaded gas makes people stupid, then you should look toward Europe for the largest effect.
Lead may have some effect, I don't dispute that. Your error is trying to make this into some sort of "this is why Americans are stupid" argument. I don't think anyone has even done any studies comparing IQ between the US and other developed countries. If someone has, I'd be interested in seeing them. You posted this in the science section, and we expect a little more than "boy, the people around me in the US are dumb, must be because of lead".
You aren't excused from saying biggoted things about Americans just because you are one. I think we're quite rightly offened at anyone that makes comparisons of Americans to Homer Simpson. This seems especially true when it's not just a matter of being a loudmouth, or saying brash things, or not being as educated about world affairs, but when you're saying Americans are just plain stupider than the rest of the world.
1. I've been reading slashdot for at least 3-4 years, and the dupes have noticeably increased in the past year or so.
2. Yes, newspapers and magazines often have sensational headlines. That's not really an excuse, since they all don't resort to that kind of crap. I don't think slashdot becoming the equivalant of Fox is a Good Thing.
3. Yah, every article has a "slashdot sucks" thread, but since it's down at -1 no one reads it or replies to it, so it tends to be a bad discussion. Hell, even magazines publish a damn "letters to the editor section", and slashdot doesn't even have that. Journals are nice I guess, but it'd be like tacking up paper on my front door, and hoping everyone people just start talking about the issue at hand. A few people talking about this in a hidden away corner of slashdot isn't very effective at anything. I guess I think Journal entries are more about mental masturbation than anything else. That's all well and good, but it doesn't solve anything.
No, I don't "hate" slashdot, but I think there's real problems which just aren't that hard to solve. The problem is the editors just stick their head in the sand and refuse to even acknowledge them. I guess that might be OK if you run a private newspaper that's fairly disconnected from its readership, but this is supposed to be something of a community where (at least ideally) we learn from each other. At the VERY least the editors could post a few "letters to the editor" about complaints about Slashdot, and there could be a real discussion about what people think is wrong or right about it.