So what's the difference? The heat sink is more efficient at it, especially if you're actually using the electricity generated to do any work
So what? So make a better design of the combination of these two devices that can remove heat from a processor at the proper rate. It's not like the only option is to stick this between a CPU and a current heat-sink that hasn't been designed with this device in mind.
Re:I don't think they were Turing complete, but
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But, I still think the looms - the inspiration for all the programmable devices that followed - qualify as programmable devices themselves.
Sure, I'm not saying that the looms aren't very important steps on the path to a device that computers. My only point is that I'm not sure the people that created the loom patterns were really "programmers". In that sense anyone that's created a series of instructions that someone else follows could be considered a programmer. Is an architect who draws up plans for a house a programmer? Sure there's human being following the directions, but is the act of design much different?
They would all restrict the flow of heat from the CPU to the heatsink, rendering it ineffective.
That's why you'd need a different design. I'm not a thermal engineer, and I presume you aren't either. But it's not really that unbelieveable that a cooling design could be implemented that would be able to do both at the same time.
This heat->power chip thingo is designed to convert heat into electricity. Yes it might cool your CPU a little bit, but nowhere near as fast as a good heatsink.
I don't see any reason why you can't do both. The heatsink is really designed to channel heat into the air very quickly. This device isn't exactly a cooling device, it's used to create electricty as 20-30% efficiency. Why not have this thing between the CPU and heat-sink? I'm sure it would call for some different cooling mechanisms than just a normal old heat-sink, but there's no reason why a new design couldn't keep the CPU at the same temperature.
There is nothing that this chip could do that could not be done by simply making current designs more efficient.
On some level, that's true. But this device (assuming it works, is economically viable, etc) can be used in combination with making more efficient designs. Your argument is like saying "I shouldn't save money on buying used clothes because I'm saving money with food coupons". There's no reason you can't do both at the same time. In fact, the use of such a chip necessarily wastes energy.
How can it "waste" energy? If it produces electricty, you could use the electricty to power fans which would otherwise be powered by the system.
if you try to make a solar cell to catch low infrared from objects on our own planet, you'll find that your cell radiates away the photons you are trying to capture, just by being at room temperature.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say it radiates just as many of the same frequency photons as it receives?
In order to make electricity it needs something hot on one side of it and something (relatively) cold on the other. It makes electricity while heat flows through it.
I'm not sure I understand where it says this isn't exactly what's occuring. The hot side is whatever your heat source is, the cold side is the atmosphere, water source, or some other large heat sink. The article references making laptops more efficient (running fans off the heat produced by the processor). There's nothing I read that somehow infers they're violating thermodynamics.
My understanding of natural selection is that genes naturally decay through incremental mutations. If a mutation is detrimental to the organism's survival, then it will not be passed on to future generations. Traits that no longer serve a purpose will decay because there is no pressure to preserve them;
The question is more how long would it take for the human population to evolve to the point where the appendix disapeers? Right now there's some people born without an appendix (I don't know if it's developmental or genetic). Let's assume it's genetic. Unless these people have an advantage over others with an appendix, this trait won't spread very far (about as far as people with an appendix). If what you say is correct, the appendix might fully evolve out of everyone, but it might just take a looong time (even in evolutionary time) since you'd essentially have wait for the genes coding for an appendix to "decay" within the human population.
Yeah, er, that article about the appendix is a bit wrong, or at least misleading;
Ok, that's certainly possible. Then provide a reference that's correct. and you're quoting it out of context by ignoring the beginning paragraph about how the appendix connects.
The context is a discussion about how the appendix may or may not be a vestigial organ, and how people born without an appendix seem to have no impaired immune, or GI functioning. The paragraph I quoted nicely refutes the idea that it's completely decided and accepted that it's NOT a vestigial organ. Again, if you have other evidence or references that refute Wikipedia, present it. I fail to see how describing the structure of the appendix and what it's connected to provide evidence that it serves any purpose.
I would suggest that who ever wrote the first patterns for the Jacquard Loom" deserves more credit than she.
Hmm.. I don't know the exact details of the loom, but from the descriptions it sounds like the punchcards were really just data, and not really like a program like we think of it today. (Was there anything like a conditional statement, loop structures, etc?). The "program" sounds more like it was contained in the hardware, and the punchcards were just datasets that the hardware interpreted.
True of the spleen, but at least according to wikipedia it's still controversial whether the appendix serves any real purpose:
One explanation has been that the appendix is a vestigial structure with no current purpose.[citation needed] The appendix is thought to have descended from an organ in our distant herbivorous ancestors called the cecum (or caecum). The cecum is maintained in modern herbivores, where it houses the bacteria that digest cellulose, a chemically tough carbohydrate that these animals could not otherwise utilize. The human appendix contains no significant number of these bacteria, and cellulose is indigestible to us. It seems likely that the appendix lost this function before our ancestors became recognizably human.
Maybe you're thinking of the tonsils?
Statements like that (e.g., the appendix and spleen do not perform necessary functions) make evolutionists look stupid.
From what I understand of evolutionary theory, that's not really accurate. It takes the correct mutations to eliminate organs that no longer serve any purpose. As long as they don't provide any disadvantage, they're not going to be eliminated from the gene pool.
If anything, the existence of vestigial structures make intelligence design/creationists look stupid. Why would an intelligence designer create a structure that serves no purpose, (though the same structure exists in other "lower" animals that the organism and the animal both likely evolved from a common ancestor)?
The problem with the drug industry is that it's more profitable for them to treat/mask sympthoms than to actually cure something. There are various anti-flu pills for example that only mask the sympthoms, so it will take a month or two to recover from a simple cold instead a week or two.
Well, I think this statement implies that they could cure a cold or flu if they really wanted to. The truth is that we've never found a cure for any virus. People have been researching AIDS for 25 years and there's no real hope for a cure. The best we've been able to do for the flu is provide immunizations, or tamiflu. And even tamiflu only shortens the duration of flu. It's your immune system that actually kills the virus.
The point is that it's a lot EASIER to mask the symptoms than it is to cure them. You don't have to cook up some plot by the drug makers to not cure cold or flu, because it's just very very hard to do.
Hmm.. well I think what the GP was asking was more specific to REM sleep. Perhaps what we call "sleep" is really a collection of different processes that serve different purposes (I'm guessing that's already been shown). You've already talked about processing long-term memories. Do we know how low this aspect of sleep goes down into organism complexity? I know dogs dream.. how about birds or reptiles?
Also, what else occurs during sleep to the rest of the body (other than the brain). Is there some greater immune response? Re-charging of different systems? If people didn't sleep and just took this pill to make their minds FELT like they slept, would people be more prone to illness, disease, etc?
you can eventually gain the diplomas of the higher tiers and even go to university later in your life. It might need a bit of hard work (since you probably have a job while working on the diplomas), but it is entirely possible.
Sure. But how often does that happen, and how much of a burden did the system place in the person to make that even harder? According to Wikipedia, there's a big problem with people that went to ditch diggers school being stigmatized. At least in the US if you finished HS, though didn't go on to college you wouldn't have to finish all the three years of schooling you were denied in the German system. I know at least one guy who didn't do great in High School (and probbably not put into the professionals school in Germany), but once he hit college he did very well, got a degree in Chemistry and another in Computer Science. He might have been able to catch-up on his schooling and gone on to college, but then again he might have just said "screw it" and not bothered.
Also, I have to wonder how the people on the high-end turn out having so little exposure to people on the low-end. I'm not saying the American system doesn't have problems too. The original post was a response to someone thinking the German system educated everyone to a high level (and we should do the same thing here).
Given the facts in this case- do you REALLY think RK's the only one out there?
Had an un-recognized medical emergency? Very likely. Been beaten up by the Rent-a-cop who probbably works somewhere else? Probbably not. A lawsuit with a bunch of kids that got beat up by the wacko-cop might get some money out of them, but would it really affect the rent-a-cop who's likely doing something totally different now?
You'd also need a lawyer to take the case. Lawyers either work for money up front (nice if you have a lot of money to burn) or for a part of the settlement. This doesn't sound like a big money maker to me. No broken bones, no permanent injuries. How much would a jury really award? Probbably not enough to attract a lawyer to work for a cut of the settlement. All it takes for evil to win is for good to do nothing.
Actually I think the quote is "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."* I think you need to choose your battles, as there's always a limited amount of resources. That's could be either money, emotional energy, time, or whatever. Not all battles are worth fighting.
*(no I'm not saying you're dumb, it's just a quote from Spaceballs.)
Concentrate instead on the school nurses who failed to pay attention to your original symptoms- or better yet, the fact that the school was letting a bunch of 16-year-olds sit around *completely unsupervised* for a period every day.
The thing about a lawsuit is you have to prove damages. What damages can be shown from delaying her hospital trip? and like I said before, as the Roman Catholic Church is finding out, child abuse is illegal and actionable for *several* decades after the fact.
Which only happened after a huge scandal broke out and the collective weight of all the abused kids came crashing down on the Church. It's easy for 10 people all claiming the same thing to win a lawsuit against one person. But it's quite different when it's one persons word against another.
You seem to have a belief that the good guys always win, and the bad guys will be punished. The system doesn't work like that most of the time. Ordinary people get burned all the time and there's not a damn thing they can do about it other than try to get past it.
If you're not willing to do the bare minimum of what it takes to get through high school, I don't care how smart you are, I don't want you working for me. If I'm an employer looking to hire someone, there's a pretty good chance that they'll be bored to tears at some point with their job. I don't want them skipping out on me just because they have to be amused and entertained the whole time I'm paying them.
What a reactionary jerk you must be. You can really tell THAT much about a person based on the way they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago? I guess you don't believe in the capacity for change, and highly believe in voodoo indicators that accurately predict behavior.
I also find it interesting that you have some amazing ability to extrapolate the GPs entire work attitude based upon unrelated fact that posted on slashdot.
I always find these posts on Slashdot by people claiming "I'd never hire a person that did thing X!" amusing. My guess is half these guys all have employees that do thing X, but would never admit it to the boss because they've expressed this baseless prejudice before.
Had our school system taught to grade levels commensurate with Japan or Germany I would have had good grades because I would have been engaged. I don't care if half the class fails every grade, we need to step up our expectations of everyone. Race? BS!, Family status? BS! Income? BS!
Well, what a LOT of Americans don't know about the German schools is there's three "tiers", and you get put into one of the tiers after age 10. I forget the actual names, but I've termed them "professionals school", "secretaries school" and "ditch diggers school". (My GF spent her sophmore year in HS in Germany as an exchange student in the "professionals school", so she's told me a little about the educational system there). The "professionals school" goes 13 years and is of course filled with the top students and is geared towards university preparation. The "secretaries school" goes 10 years and is more of an office worker track (not college track). "Ditch diggers school" goes only 9 years, and obviously doesn't provide much education. I think you can do some kind of job training after attending secretaries, or ditch diggers school.
So while the top students in Germany certainly get a better education than most Americans, it's at least partially at the cost of the people who get put into ditch diggers and secretaries schools who get a worse education. I don't think anything like this could ever fly in the US where where we have a strong belief in equal education, opportunity, etc. Being an American I think it's irresponsible to not educate all your citizens, especially the people thrown into the ditch diggers school.
Also, one of the dirty-little-secrets of all those "US students behind students in Country X" is that at least in Germany, they take the scores from the "professionals school", and compare that to US High Schools (completely ignoring the ditch digger and secretaries schools).
I have no knowledge of the Japanese educational system, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar.
Why don't you understand this? My argument was that the statement was biased!
Biased? The description wasn't totally complete, but it wasn't innacurate. Here's the two sentences where this "bias" is supposed to exist:
Also, notice how this idiot cop doesn't tell her she's under arrest. He just YELLS at her to get out of the car, then fires
Let's look at the first OP in detail: "Also, notice how this idiot cop". Maybe that's bias. Of course it's pretty obvious this is an opinion as we all know calling someone an idiot is just an insult and opinion here.
"doesn't tell her she's under arrest". True. He doesn't state that, so far nothing innacurate.
"He just YELLS at her to get out of the car". Also true. He does yell.
"then fires". Largely true. There's very little time between the "get out of the car", and actually tazering her.
Not ALL of the details are here of course, but what do you want for an off-the-cuff summary of a video that the submitter fully intended people to watch for themselves? I'd say for a two sentence summary of a complicated indicent it's largely accurate. Are you really saying the average person is going to read that and get an innacurate picture of what went on (and be satisfied enough from a two sentence very brief description of it)? The two sentence description is a teaser to get you to watch the video, not a complete description of what went on.
Bias isn't some magic word you can apply to anything that has a perspective you disagree with and it makes someone elses values disapeer. If you think tazering unarmed, non-violent people who aren't following orders is just fine, then go with that. But don't call people who disagree with your value system "biased".
I still don't know what the hell "liberal bias" is. Maybe when you use a word and don't provide any explanation to it, others will assume it means the same thing they've heard 99% of the time elsewhere. In this case a baseless insult.
My point isn't so much that this fits perfectly into the category of public works projects, but more so that it doesn't fit exclusively into the category of science. If you're going to evaluate this project based on the public good, or public interest, then that opens up a whole world of other things that are a LOT more useless to fund than this one. (Thus my comparison to the Iraq war). Stuffing it in the science box exclusively isn't fair, as it's not really pure science.
You seem to make the assumption that this project is taking away dollars from science funding. Is that really true? From what I understand at least in the US there's not a set amount of money pooled into science that then has to fight for the dollars. Maybe that's not the case in the other countries funding this, but I wouldn't just assume that this project is in competition with science dollars as it is in competition for funding in general.
No. Hyperbole leads to slant and bias. That "nifty new toy" comment,
Well many cops certainly are treating it like a toy. How is that innacurate? I guess when I see a video of person A telling person B to do something, person B doesn't comply, and then person A says to himself "Hmm.. what I really should do here is inflict a large amount of pain and suffering on person B to the point where they scream out in agony so they do what they're told" and then goes and does that. I guess I think person A is a total monster and should be removed from any position of responsibility. I guess you could call that bias. I'll freely admit that I'm biased against people that will freely inflict physical harm on others when there's better options available.
That's treating a powerfull weapon like a toy, not a tool of last resort. It's as if the tazer is just a little "compliance button". Press again if ineffective. You can call that "slant" I guess, but I really don't see how. I guess it's a different perspective, but slant seems to imply some kind of dishonesty. Honestly, I'm really quite offended that I was compared to Fox News in this case
Well, I've seen people on the right just whip out terms like bias without further explanation all the time. Honestly, what does saying something has a "liberal slant" add to the argument? It's really used as just a bad word to call someone or something disguised as an argument. I really don't even know what a "liberal slant" means. If the facts are in error, point them out. But I really see little relevent facts that have been presented that are in error.
Money is equal and $12bln can be spend financing many projects of greater scientific interest and more likely to yield practical results.
Well, maybe we shouldn't be comparing this to science spending, but public works projects? Science often produces no public good, and that isn't it's direct goal. Science produces knowledge, which sometimes leads to applications. Othertimes it just produces knowledge. The ultimate goal of this project is to produce a public good, not knowledge (though obviously that's a side product). Ultimately if by some accident fusion worked, was reproduceable and cheap, but we had no idea WHY it worked, the project would be a complete success. Maybe later we figure out WHY it works. The point is that this project while based on science is probbably more engineering than science.
Using solar and wind energy is already reasonably cheap.
Solar and wind energy are already being developed by private industry. They'd never fund fusion research though because it's too risky, too long-term, and they don't get most of the benefits from it. Nuclear energy is also quite cheap
True, but as you say there's the waste problem. Also it's not a very good solution to a large portion of the world because of the potential to construct nuclear weapons. I sure as hell don't want every nutjob country in Africa to have a fission plant in it that some evil dictator can either use to build nuclear weapons, or sell plutonium to anyone that wants it.
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So what's the difference? The heat sink is more efficient at it, especially if you're actually using the electricity generated to do any work
So what? So make a better design of the combination of these two devices that can remove heat from a processor at the proper rate. It's not like the only option is to stick this between a CPU and a current heat-sink that hasn't been designed with this device in mind.
But, I still think the looms - the inspiration for all the programmable devices that followed - qualify as programmable devices themselves.
Sure, I'm not saying that the looms aren't very important steps on the path to a device that computers. My only point is that I'm not sure the people that created the loom patterns were really "programmers". In that sense anyone that's created a series of instructions that someone else follows could be considered a programmer. Is an architect who draws up plans for a house a programmer? Sure there's human being following the directions, but is the act of design much different?
They would all restrict the flow of heat from the CPU to the heatsink, rendering it ineffective.
That's why you'd need a different design. I'm not a thermal engineer, and I presume you aren't either. But it's not really that unbelieveable that a cooling design could be implemented that would be able to do both at the same time.
This heat->power chip thingo is designed to convert heat into electricity. Yes it might cool your CPU a little bit, but nowhere near as fast as a good heatsink.
I don't see any reason why you can't do both. The heatsink is really designed to channel heat into the air very quickly. This device isn't exactly a cooling device, it's used to create electricty as 20-30% efficiency. Why not have this thing between the CPU and heat-sink? I'm sure it would call for some different cooling mechanisms than just a normal old heat-sink, but there's no reason why a new design couldn't keep the CPU at the same temperature.
The application of this chip will push the temp of the device being cooled up even higher.
I don't see any reason why this has to be true. Can you explain why this chip would increase the temperature of the device being cooled?
There is nothing that this chip could do that could not be done by simply making current designs more efficient.
On some level, that's true. But this device (assuming it works, is economically viable, etc) can be used in combination with making more efficient designs. Your argument is like saying "I shouldn't save money on buying used clothes because I'm saving money with food coupons". There's no reason you can't do both at the same time.
In fact, the use of such a chip necessarily wastes energy.
How can it "waste" energy? If it produces electricty, you could use the electricty to power fans which would otherwise be powered by the system.
if you try to make a solar cell to catch low infrared from objects on our own planet, you'll find that your cell radiates away the photons you are trying to capture, just by being at room temperature.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say it radiates just as many of the same frequency photons as it receives?
In order to make electricity it needs something hot on one side of it and something (relatively) cold on the other. It makes electricity while heat flows through it.
I'm not sure I understand where it says this isn't exactly what's occuring. The hot side is whatever your heat source is, the cold side is the atmosphere, water source, or some other large heat sink. The article references making laptops more efficient (running fans off the heat produced by the processor). There's nothing I read that somehow infers they're violating thermodynamics.
My understanding of natural selection is that genes naturally decay through incremental mutations. If a mutation is detrimental to the organism's survival, then it will not be passed on to future generations. Traits that no longer serve a purpose will decay because there is no pressure to preserve them;
The question is more how long would it take for the human population to evolve to the point where the appendix disapeers? Right now there's some people born without an appendix (I don't know if it's developmental or genetic). Let's assume it's genetic. Unless these people have an advantage over others with an appendix, this trait won't spread very far (about as far as people with an appendix). If what you say is correct, the appendix might fully evolve out of everyone, but it might just take a looong time (even in evolutionary time) since you'd essentially have wait for the genes coding for an appendix to "decay" within the human population.
Yeah, er, that article about the appendix is a bit wrong, or at least misleading;
Ok, that's certainly possible. Then provide a reference that's correct.
and you're quoting it out of context by ignoring the beginning paragraph about how the appendix connects.
The context is a discussion about how the appendix may or may not be a vestigial organ, and how people born without an appendix seem to have no impaired immune, or GI functioning. The paragraph I quoted nicely refutes the idea that it's completely decided and accepted that it's NOT a vestigial organ. Again, if you have other evidence or references that refute Wikipedia, present it. I fail to see how describing the structure of the appendix and what it's connected to provide evidence that it serves any purpose.
I would suggest that who ever wrote the first patterns for the Jacquard Loom" deserves more credit than she.
Hmm.. I don't know the exact details of the loom, but from the descriptions it sounds like the punchcards were really just data, and not really like a program like we think of it today. (Was there anything like a conditional statement, loop structures, etc?). The "program" sounds more like it was contained in the hardware, and the punchcards were just datasets that the hardware interpreted.
Playing devil's advocate here: And the problem with this is?
Well there's always the possibility of turning into these guys.
The appendix and spleen are NOT vestigial organs.
True of the spleen, but at least according to wikipedia it's still controversial whether the appendix serves any real purpose:
Maybe you're thinking of the tonsils?
Statements like that (e.g., the appendix and spleen do not perform necessary functions) make evolutionists look stupid.
From what I understand of evolutionary theory, that's not really accurate. It takes the correct mutations to eliminate organs that no longer serve any purpose. As long as they don't provide any disadvantage, they're not going to be eliminated from the gene pool.
If anything, the existence of vestigial structures make intelligence design/creationists look stupid. Why would an intelligence designer create a structure that serves no purpose, (though the same structure exists in other "lower" animals that the organism and the animal both likely evolved from a common ancestor)?
The problem with the drug industry is that it's more profitable for them to treat/mask sympthoms than to actually cure something. There are various anti-flu pills for example that only mask the sympthoms, so it will take a month or two to recover from a simple cold instead a week or two.
Well, I think this statement implies that they could cure a cold or flu if they really wanted to. The truth is that we've never found a cure for any virus. People have been researching AIDS for 25 years and there's no real hope for a cure. The best we've been able to do for the flu is provide immunizations, or tamiflu. And even tamiflu only shortens the duration of flu. It's your immune system that actually kills the virus.
The point is that it's a lot EASIER to mask the symptoms than it is to cure them. You don't have to cook up some plot by the drug makers to not cure cold or flu, because it's just very very hard to do.
Hmm.. well I think what the GP was asking was more specific to REM sleep. Perhaps what we call "sleep" is really a collection of different processes that serve different purposes (I'm guessing that's already been shown). You've already talked about processing long-term memories. Do we know how low this aspect of sleep goes down into organism complexity? I know dogs dream.. how about birds or reptiles?
Also, what else occurs during sleep to the rest of the body (other than the brain). Is there some greater immune response? Re-charging of different systems? If people didn't sleep and just took this pill to make their minds FELT like they slept, would people be more prone to illness, disease, etc?
you can eventually gain the diplomas of the higher tiers and even go to university later in your life. It might need a bit of hard work (since you probably have a job while working on the diplomas), but it is entirely possible.
Sure. But how often does that happen, and how much of a burden did the system place in the person to make that even harder? According to Wikipedia, there's a big problem with people that went to ditch diggers school being stigmatized. At least in the US if you finished HS, though didn't go on to college you wouldn't have to finish all the three years of schooling you were denied in the German system. I know at least one guy who didn't do great in High School (and probbably not put into the professionals school in Germany), but once he hit college he did very well, got a degree in Chemistry and another in Computer Science. He might have been able to catch-up on his schooling and gone on to college, but then again he might have just said "screw it" and not bothered.
Also, I have to wonder how the people on the high-end turn out having so little exposure to people on the low-end. I'm not saying the American system doesn't have problems too. The original post was a response to someone thinking the German system educated everyone to a high level (and we should do the same thing here).
Given the facts in this case- do you REALLY think RK's the only one out there?
Had an un-recognized medical emergency? Very likely. Been beaten up by the Rent-a-cop who probbably works somewhere else? Probbably not. A lawsuit with a bunch of kids that got beat up by the wacko-cop might get some money out of them, but would it really affect the rent-a-cop who's likely doing something totally different now?
You'd also need a lawyer to take the case. Lawyers either work for money up front (nice if you have a lot of money to burn) or for a part of the settlement. This doesn't sound like a big money maker to me. No broken bones, no permanent injuries. How much would a jury really award? Probbably not enough to attract a lawyer to work for a cut of the settlement.
All it takes for evil to win is for good to do nothing.
Actually I think the quote is "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."* I think you need to choose your battles, as there's always a limited amount of resources. That's could be either money, emotional energy, time, or whatever. Not all battles are worth fighting.
*(no I'm not saying you're dumb, it's just a quote from Spaceballs.)
Concentrate instead on the school nurses who failed to pay attention to your original symptoms- or better yet, the fact that the school was letting a bunch of 16-year-olds sit around *completely unsupervised* for a period every day.
The thing about a lawsuit is you have to prove damages. What damages can be shown from delaying her hospital trip?
and like I said before, as the Roman Catholic Church is finding out, child abuse is illegal and actionable for *several* decades after the fact.
Which only happened after a huge scandal broke out and the collective weight of all the abused kids came crashing down on the Church. It's easy for 10 people all claiming the same thing to win a lawsuit against one person. But it's quite different when it's one persons word against another.
You seem to have a belief that the good guys always win, and the bad guys will be punished. The system doesn't work like that most of the time. Ordinary people get burned all the time and there's not a damn thing they can do about it other than try to get past it.
That the taser hadn't become wildy popular back then, otherwise you might have been stopped through, ugh.. persuasion.
If you're not willing to do the bare minimum of what it takes to get through high school, I don't care how smart you are, I don't want you working for me. If I'm an employer looking to hire someone, there's a pretty good chance that they'll be bored to tears at some point with their job. I don't want them skipping out on me just because they have to be amused and entertained the whole time I'm paying them.
What a reactionary jerk you must be. You can really tell THAT much about a person based on the way they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago? I guess you don't believe in the capacity for change, and highly believe in voodoo indicators that accurately predict behavior.
I also find it interesting that you have some amazing ability to extrapolate the GPs entire work attitude based upon unrelated fact that posted on slashdot.
I always find these posts on Slashdot by people claiming "I'd never hire a person that did thing X!" amusing. My guess is half these guys all have employees that do thing X, but would never admit it to the boss because they've expressed this baseless prejudice before.
Had our school system taught to grade levels commensurate with Japan or Germany I would have had good grades because I would have been engaged. I don't care if half the class fails every grade, we need to step up our expectations of everyone. Race? BS!, Family status? BS! Income? BS!
Well, what a LOT of Americans don't know about the German schools is there's three "tiers", and you get put into one of the tiers after age 10. I forget the actual names, but I've termed them "professionals school", "secretaries school" and "ditch diggers school". (My GF spent her sophmore year in HS in Germany as an exchange student in the "professionals school", so she's told me a little about the educational system there). The "professionals school" goes 13 years and is of course filled with the top students and is geared towards university preparation. The "secretaries school" goes 10 years and is more of an office worker track (not college track). "Ditch diggers school" goes only 9 years, and obviously doesn't provide much education. I think you can do some kind of job training after attending secretaries, or ditch diggers school.
So while the top students in Germany certainly get a better education than most Americans, it's at least partially at the cost of the people who get put into ditch diggers and secretaries schools who get a worse education. I don't think anything like this could ever fly in the US where where we have a strong belief in equal education, opportunity, etc. Being an American I think it's irresponsible to not educate all your citizens, especially the people thrown into the ditch diggers school.
Also, one of the dirty-little-secrets of all those "US students behind students in Country X" is that at least in Germany, they take the scores from the "professionals school", and compare that to US High Schools (completely ignoring the ditch digger and secretaries schools).
I have no knowledge of the Japanese educational system, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar.
Why don't you understand this? My argument was that the statement was biased!
Biased? The description wasn't totally complete, but it wasn't innacurate. Here's the two sentences where this "bias" is supposed to exist:
Let's look at the first OP in detail:
"Also, notice how this idiot cop". Maybe that's bias. Of course it's pretty obvious this is an opinion as we all know calling someone an idiot is just an insult and opinion here.
"doesn't tell her she's under arrest". True. He doesn't state that, so far nothing innacurate.
"He just YELLS at her to get out of the car". Also true. He does yell.
"then fires". Largely true. There's very little time between the "get out of the car", and actually tazering her.
Not ALL of the details are here of course, but what do you want for an off-the-cuff summary of a video that the submitter fully intended people to watch for themselves? I'd say for a two sentence summary of a complicated indicent it's largely accurate. Are you really saying the average person is going to read that and get an innacurate picture of what went on (and be satisfied enough from a two sentence very brief description of it)? The two sentence description is a teaser to get you to watch the video, not a complete description of what went on.
Bias isn't some magic word you can apply to anything that has a perspective you disagree with and it makes someone elses values disapeer. If you think tazering unarmed, non-violent people who aren't following orders is just fine, then go with that. But don't call people who disagree with your value system "biased".
I still don't know what the hell "liberal bias" is. Maybe when you use a word and don't provide any explanation to it, others will assume it means the same thing they've heard 99% of the time elsewhere. In this case a baseless insult.
My point isn't so much that this fits perfectly into the category of public works projects, but more so that it doesn't fit exclusively into the category of science. If you're going to evaluate this project based on the public good, or public interest, then that opens up a whole world of other things that are a LOT more useless to fund than this one. (Thus my comparison to the Iraq war). Stuffing it in the science box exclusively isn't fair, as it's not really pure science.
You seem to make the assumption that this project is taking away dollars from science funding. Is that really true? From what I understand at least in the US there's not a set amount of money pooled into science that then has to fight for the dollars. Maybe that's not the case in the other countries funding this, but I wouldn't just assume that this project is in competition with science dollars as it is in competition for funding in general.
No. Hyperbole leads to slant and bias. That "nifty new toy" comment,
Well many cops certainly are treating it like a toy. How is that innacurate? I guess when I see a video of person A telling person B to do something, person B doesn't comply, and then person A says to himself "Hmm.. what I really should do here is inflict a large amount of pain and suffering on person B to the point where they scream out in agony so they do what they're told" and then goes and does that. I guess I think person A is a total monster and should be removed from any position of responsibility. I guess you could call that bias. I'll freely admit that I'm biased against people that will freely inflict physical harm on others when there's better options available.
That's treating a powerfull weapon like a toy, not a tool of last resort. It's as if the tazer is just a little "compliance button". Press again if ineffective. You can call that "slant" I guess, but I really don't see how. I guess it's a different perspective, but slant seems to imply some kind of dishonesty.
Honestly, I'm really quite offended that I was compared to Fox News in this case
Well, I've seen people on the right just whip out terms like bias without further explanation all the time. Honestly, what does saying something has a "liberal slant" add to the argument? It's really used as just a bad word to call someone or something disguised as an argument. I really don't even know what a "liberal slant" means. If the facts are in error, point them out. But I really see little relevent facts that have been presented that are in error.
Money is equal and $12bln can be spend financing many projects of greater scientific interest and more likely to yield practical results.
Well, maybe we shouldn't be comparing this to science spending, but public works projects? Science often produces no public good, and that isn't it's direct goal. Science produces knowledge, which sometimes leads to applications. Othertimes it just produces knowledge. The ultimate goal of this project is to produce a public good, not knowledge (though obviously that's a side product). Ultimately if by some accident fusion worked, was reproduceable and cheap, but we had no idea WHY it worked, the project would be a complete success. Maybe later we figure out WHY it works. The point is that this project while based on science is probbably more engineering than science.
Using solar and wind energy is already reasonably cheap.
Solar and wind energy are already being developed by private industry. They'd never fund fusion research though because it's too risky, too long-term, and they don't get most of the benefits from it.
Nuclear energy is also quite cheap
True, but as you say there's the waste problem. Also it's not a very good solution to a large portion of the world because of the potential to construct nuclear weapons. I sure as hell don't want every nutjob country in Africa to have a fission plant in it that some evil dictator can either use to build nuclear weapons, or sell plutonium to anyone that wants it.