I tend to agree that there should be some kind of action brought against the police department. This is just simply police harassment and intimidation of someone who's done nothing wrong. The police are trying to Cover Their Ass by claiming they dropped the charges because they couldn't convince a jury that it was illegal. Strange that they have a mountain of evidence (an actual tape of what went on), but yet they didn't think they'd get a conviction. An obvious admission that this is an unjust law.
We don't really know what went on in the prosecuters office. They might have laughed and laughed at this case, but had to humour the police because the reality is that the prosecutors work with the police all the time. They may have been trying to save face for the police by telling them to drop the matter themselves, rather than play hardball and drop it themselves.
how can anyone really get a feel for the importance of this discovery if they don't post some of the translated texts? Oh, I forgot- We're supposed to accept the fact that it's important because they say so
Well, unless you have a background in Archimedes, mathematics, or ancient greek (all the domain of "they"), I don't think you're going to be able to understand the importance of even a translated work. Despite your protestations, all opinions on this kind of thing aren't equal. People who have these backgrounds are much more qualified to interpret what this stuff means (and no, that certainly doesn't include me by any stretch of the imagination). I find this attitude kind of strange. You don't actually want to learn any of these subjects, but expect to be able to just read a 2200 year old text and instantly understand the context of the work without listening to what other more qualified people have to say. Would you expect someone who doesn't know C++ to be able to instantly know what the source code of a program means without knowing C++?
It's more than a little funny that you're critisizing the researchers for publishing the raw scans of the data, (so anyone in the world can study them), but not instantly freely publishing the fruits of their labor. There is often a quite valid criticism of researchers hoarding the raw data of vitally important pieces for years. I believe the dead sea scrolls are a prime example of this. But that's not the case here. If you really wanted to you could learn greek and translate the thing yourself. That's the only "barrier" that exists here.
There's also another important point to make here. Have you seen the scanned texts? Even with the special x-ray enhanced versions it's a big mess. It's not as if this is a 20 minute job via google translation. This kind of thing is generally done very slowly with groups of people working together. It's also a competition between all these groups to make discoveries. There was a really good Nova special on the text a few months ago, and translating the texts was a very painstaking process. Instead, the passages the translated probably sound boring and so they'll publish it in obscure science journals- All the public will hear about (I fear) is "Look! We're so cool for recovering the pampliset!"
Well, science has long used scientific journals to communicate polished ideas to other people in the field. The papers are written for a specialized audience, so the general public likely wouldn't understand the vast majority of them since it's assumed everyone has a general background in the area of expertise. The main barrier of these journals isn't the obscurity of them. With a little less laziness you could easily go and find the names of them. The main barrier is just expense. It costs a lot of money to subscribe to these journals, so your average Joe just can't afford them. There's a movement to change this because scientists don't like spending thousands of dollars on journals anymore than average Joe does, so many people are moving towards publishing on the internet. True, they are cool for translating this thing, I agree- But why not give the public a better pathway into understanding the meaning of this find by showing us the money? Would it really kill them? Maybe we, the public, can appreciate the inherent value of even some obscure, boring-sounding passages?
Science takes time, and research isn't free. At some point I'm sure that a concensus translation will be available. It might be even made available for free, but I would have no problem with charging money for it. Why should they be expected to give away thousands of hours of work for free? You seem to have this attitude that if it's not published on the front page of the New York Times, then the scientists are trying to hide something. I have the same complaint about PBS and the recent special on "String Theory"- These science programs (which are admittedly better than nothing) work
The article doesn't really explain how we "know" what the moon's orbit was 100 million years ago.
Celestial mechanics is very deterministic. Just add in extra energy the moon gets from tides, and work backwards. It's really not all that complicated. Also, we don't really know exactly how the moon formed. The theory that it was formed out of an immense object striking earth and tearing a chunk out of it is perhaps the currently prevailing theory, but it's not something that we know for absolutely certain.
Well, we know from studying the rocks brought back from the Apollo missions that the moon is made of earth. That means either the impact theory is correct, or both bodies formed from the same collection of material. One of the reasons the collision theory is fairly well accepted is that the moon is mostly made of the same elements in the earths crust. For this theory it doesn't really matter how the moon formed, just when it formed and what kind of stuff it's made of. Also, 100 million years ago wasn't really that long ago.
True, but as someone else pointed out the article says 100 million years after the moon formed. This is important because it's early enough after the moon formed to still be like molasses. Orbits don't just change by themselves, so we need an explanation for what would have changed the orbit.
Also true, but we know (and can measure) that the moons orbit is changing right now do to the tides.
There is a connection between perceived importance and the length of an article. The more important someone thinks a subject is the more they know about it and the more they want to talk about it.
Sorry, I don't see that connection. I'm not really certain I see that connection even in the print world. Is a book that's 5000 pages long more important than one that's 100 pages? When comparing two books on the same topic is the longer one more important? Where is it that length equals importance? I'm sure someone will say "why is this article so long?" and will clean it up to the basic necessary facts. And no one will argue because they won't perceive it as important as we do today.
Why would someone "clean it up" and delete information? This strikes me as old thinking where space was limited, and content was static. Wikipedia isn't a book, and there's another option of just creating summaries of the content and hiding everything else in the full article. Even an outdated article that gets the facts wrong might be very interesting to someone. I'd love to read an article about the Aether, or geology pre-plate tectonics (and not a knowing look back, but what the authors actually thought at the time).
Yet the article on Lutheranism is still shorter than the article on Truthiness. The Lutheran movement had a much larger impact on world history than the word 'truthiness'.
Your error is in thinking that the length of an article conveys an idea of how important the topic is. I think that kind of thinking comes from the idea that there's a limited amount of space to print information, so the things that are most important get longer articles. That's not the case on wikipedia. The limitations are really one of editors and interest. It's pretty easy to expand an article on a light topic like Truthiness when you're just repeating what someone has already said (and there's a huge base of obsessed fans). It's much harder to expand on something that has a lot more depth and breadth like Lutheranism. That requires actual research and not just watching a TV show. In 50 years an article about Truthiness might be just one line while the article about Lutheranism will still be the same length, if not longer. Wikipedia only has the "truth of the moment" while the Truth is something timeless.
Now you're confusing Truth with relevance. In 50 years I doubt truthiness will be terrible relevant to anyone, but that doesn't mean it's not something that actually happened. It's still just as "true" as Lutheranism, just of little importance. You're also making the mistake that irrelevant information should be deleted. Why? I could certainly see some kind of tag being added to information we (at the time) consider to be less important, or maybe putting it in an archive of some sort to avoid "clutter". But there's really no reason to delete the information. Personally I think deleting it would be wrong. Who knows what people 200 years from now might be fascinated to read about the current day.
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misttatements and error. Wikipedia practically had to shut itself down after Colbert proved his point.
Wikipedia isn't really the target here. I'll bet the majority of "Report" viewers didn't even know what Wikipedia was before Colbert explained it. The target of the satire is the echo chamber of widespread opinion that becomes "fact" when repeated enough. Wikipedia is merely being used as a foil to illustrate this point. Right wing radio is famous for this kind of thing where there's little to no fact checking and mostly relying on what other people say. For instance, it's now a "fact" that Al Gore said he "invented the internet", even though the actual statement he made had nothing to do with inventing and more to do with funding.
Arguably worthy choices to spend scientific $$$ on.
I agree. However it's not the mission of Nasa to create websites and labs for an aquarium in Maine, or classroom and computers for colleges across the US. I guess I don't understand why you don't think these projects aren't exactly as the article describes, pet projects for individual lawmakers. The fact that these project involve science (and not even directly funding a science program) justifies them receiving NASA funding in no way. Nasa is responsible for space and aerospace projects, not funding museums, planetariums and science labs for colleges.
Make sure the design is being implemented correctly by the contractors, and if it isn't make a huge stink about how the system could fail catestrophically. The engineers are the ones in the best position to know about how implementation of the system will effect it, so they should obviously be heavily involved in working with the contractors to get it right. If the engineers design the thing and then just sit back and drink coffee and expect it to be implemented to the letter, they're in the wrong business.
The basic ethical argument against using experimental treatments (without informed consent) "in cases where option 'b' is die" is that it leads you down a slippery ethical slope in which you test all kinds of stuff on (terminal) patients.
I don't see any slipperly slope here. The cases where this kind of treatment would be used are quite limited. It's essentially only in emergency situations where the patient is going to die without it, you can't reach a parent or spouse to get consent, and there's no other non-experimental treatment available. That slope sounds very non-slip to me.
Financial advisors are there for a reason. You wouldn't ask one of them for advice on buying a computer, why are you asking slashdot for financial advice?
There's a few obvious answers of course. You shouldn't be putting your money in anything where you're risking losing it. You're a poor college student right now, and risk is not something you can afford. That rules out things like mutual funds and stocks. You also need to make decisions about what portion of your money you need immediate access to. All of it? Half of it? Figure out what you really need in terms of money, and then go to a financial advisor and work out a plan. Stop asking for advice from people who don't know your current sitation and don't know all the options available to you.
Are we in fact going to do the same thing with electricity here?
I doubt it. The effects of radiation on the body 100 years ago was very poorly understood. Low voltage electrical currents by comparison are fairly benign. It's not like the use of electricity in the human body is new. Pacemakers have been around forever, there's been some trials of direct electrical stimulation of the brain to create artificial vision, and many parapalegics use direct muscle stimulation to stand up, etc (maybe even walk?).
Also, the medical community itself has grown up. Years of animal testing is required for any kind of new treatment goes to limited human trials.
That's not to say it's all perfect. You can't dismiss the danger that any new treatment is going to have unforseen side effects that don't show up in human trials. But I think comparing this new treatment to the early days of medicine where anything goes and there's poor understanding isn't terribly valid.
It seems that most of the people who are replying to this story haven't heard the expression "Innocent until proven guilty"
That phrase applies to courts of law, not individual opinion. It simply means that the government has to prove someone is guilty, and not that the accused needs to prove themselves innocent. In many countries it's the job of the accused to prove their innocence.
If you're just saying that accusation isn't really proof of anything, I think you're perfectly right. People should judge innocence or guilt based on evidence and never presume guilt based on accusation. But my point is that it's not necessary for a court to convict someone to have a perfectly valid opinion of guilt based upon evidence.
I think a lot of people are really missing the point of what this robot is supposed to do. There's a lot of comments about how the robot itself isn't autonomous and has no intelligence. That's not at all the role that the robot is supposed to fill.
The robot is supposed to simply project the presence of the professor remotely. Obviously we can do that to some degree with just a two way television hookup, but it's not like being in the room. You can't point at students and interact with them through a flat display. You can't change where the camera is pointing, and the students don't really know what the professor can see.
I think the biggest thing that this robot is missing is "gaze". If you ask me, the single distinguishing feature of presence is making eye contact. As someone pointed out, it doesn't look like there's actually any cameras in the eyes of this robot, so the actual professor can't see what the robot is "looking" at. If the robot could have gaze, reproduce facial expressions, and even replicate hand gestures, I think that would go a long way to having remote presence.
I guess I'm not sure why you think that the word "online" obviously only means the public internet. It certainly didn't used to mean that as recently as 10-12 years ago. Before that "online", just meant electronic communications, sometimes just via a private dialup BBS.
Slashdot only has a few limited categories (which is a mistake IMO), so the category definitions tend to get stretched beyond the literal definitions of them. While this isn't literally "My Rights Online", since I don't have access to private government intelligence websites, it's certainly someones rights online.
Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
Well, I'd agree that the standard shouldn't be "I don't like this". But it sounds like there's much deeper ethical and possible criminal issues here. Was Mark Felt (Deep Throat) justified in revealing classified information to Woodward and Bernstein? I think so. This case is a bit different of course as there were no specifics revealed, and the information was only revealed to others in the intelligence field. I don't know if the scope of wrongdoing here is in the same league as Watergate, but I think that's a question worth asking.
In a previously highly rated post a reader claimed that democracy doesn't guarantee freedom. From a strict standpoint, he's absolutely right. But democracy makes freedom MUCH easier to attain since in general people want freedom and not opression. I think this reversal of the policy nicely illustrates that. As several others have pointed out, contrast this with a country like China where there's no democracy, and the government keeps a tight grip on its citizens. It's like the addage that money doesn't buy happiness, but the corollary is that it makes it whole lot easier.
Given the unusual color of the glass (for the period), it seems quite reasonable that it being formed by "the light of a thousand suns" was the source of its value.
Well, that's assuming that someone saw the meteor strike, wasn't killed by it, and the legend was passed down through the generations. That's quite a lot to swallow with their being no evidence for any of it.
The distinguishing feature of the glass is that it isn't man made. Given that glass beads were common in Egypt in 1500 BC, and Tut ruled around 1300 BC, I'd say they must have known this wasn't just normal man-made glass. Perhaps they found it in the desert, but knew of glass as only a man-made substance. Finding something in the middle of nowhere in large chunks that couldn't possibly be made by a person, but which you've only seen before as being made by a person is pretty amazing. It'd be like finding big chunks of pure iron in the middle of knowhere. You've seen Iron before, but it's something that's created by people. I could easily see that such a find would make this glass special.
In fact, the earliest known uses of Iron around 4000 BCE come from meteorites. From wikipedia:
The first signs of use of iron come from the Sumerians and the Egyptians, where around 4000 BCE, a few items, such as the tips of spears, daggers and ornaments, were being fashioned from iron recovered from meteorites.
Which brings up the possibility that this glass was found before glassmaking became common, so it had a special value assigned to it. The point I'm trying to make is that no one had to see the actual meteor impact to know that this was special glass.
Re:High Fructose Corn Syrup, demon of the far left
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Sorry, but HFCS are table sugar are (as I said) nearly identical. Table sugar is sucrose and glucose bonded together (the body easily breaks them into seperate sucrose and glucose molecules). HFCS is free sucrose and glucose .
As for the "uptake profile" being different, got any evidence for that? If it is different, got any evidence that this contributes to obesity and diabetes? If so, how much?
There's a propensity to demonize certain foods, while completely ignoring other foods that are just as bad. It was the same thing many years ago with butter being BAD BAD BAD, but little mention of margarine. So many people switched to margarine even though it had just as much saturated fat. Later on we learn that the trans-fat in many margarines is actually much worse than saturated fat (studies have concluded that trans-fat lowers HDL, or good cholesterol). So the switch to margarine was actually the worst thing people could do.
Re:You are wrong
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and the genes in a plant are VASTLY VASTLY different from the genes in a human.
Some of them are, some of them aren't. We still share MANY of the same genes with plants. Just like a car is vastly different from a bicycle, both have rubber tires. In a very similar sense both cars and bicycles share a common "ancestor", just like plants and humans. tell me how the hell you can believe a human shares genes with a plant
Evolution? You don't have to simply believe it, it's a scientifically proven fact that humans and plants share genes. we don't share brain and heart genes with plants
I'm pretty sure there's no single gene that responsible for producing the heart or brain. Something this complex required many many genes.
Re:That's great and all, but...
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I understand that a cure is viewed as better than a treatment, but you can't just pick to find a cure, or pick to find a treatment.
To some degree what you're saying is true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't directions that are far more likely to lead to a cure, and other directions that are far more likely to lead to better treatments. I think it's pretty obvious that research on producing insulin cheaper is far more likely to produce a better treatment, and pretty unlikely to lead to a cure.
Who knows.. maybe the science needed to put people on Mars will lead to a cure for diabetes. It's just pretty unlikely to do so. The applications and directions that science leads isn't always clear, but that doesn't mean it's blind.
Re:This isnt a breakthrough, it's genetic engineer
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but lets please not mix plants and animals, it's obviously not right.
There's no such thing as a "plant gene" or an "animal gene". It's like saying that taking a spring from a car and putting it in a bicycle makes the bicycle somehow car-like. Sure, if you took an entire engine along with a transmission and fastened it onto a bike that might make the bicycle "car-like", but that's not what we're talking about here. Genes are just building blocks, and assigning plantness or animalness to them doesn't make any sense.
High Fructose Corn Syrup, demon of the far left.
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I'm getting a little tired of the demonization of high fructose corn syrup as some sort of poison on the country. There's nothing inherently wrong with HFCS, it's nearly identical to table sugar. The problem of obesity is one of people eating to many calories, and gaining weight. It's funny that the article you link to talks just as much about eating sugar as it does eating HFCS, but yet the demon is HFCS, not table sugar.
Do you actually have any evidence that HFCS is directly causing obesity, and not just simply eating too much? Why not pick out potatoes as a food and distinguish people that eat too much of it over people who don't? Then it's potatoes that are the problem.
I hear people going nuts because there's HFCS in bread.. but somehow sugar in bread is better. Oh, and honey in bread would be best of all because it's "natural". It's funny that HFCS and honey are very similar chemically though. Both contain a similar ratio of fructose to glucose.
You're not looking at this problem from a realistic perspective. Your solution seems to be "DON'T MAKE ERRORS!!". Well, any system (including even machines) is going to have errors in it that cause problems. Simply wishing that people didn't make errors doesn't change anything. Could different hospitals have a better counting scheme that made sure that the count was accurate? I'm sure they could, but that doesn't diminish the need for something like this RFID system.
You try to minimize errors in each component, and have backup components that will work when the primary system fails. Of course the RFID isn't a perfect solution. It's not going to catch every single problem, but as long as it fails independently with the normal counting system, it's done its job. There is no perfect solution. I suggest if you're looking for life to be perfect and never to experience any failures, you're looking at a very depressing future.
Keeping a count of the instruments is already done, but it's not perfect. Why do you expect any system to be perfect? Any system has flaws in it, and the key to fixing these flaws is to have multiple redundancies so no single component (in this case people keeping counts) will cause a failure of the system. Furthermore, it isn't that hard to look at the opening for shinys before closing it up.
Well, the article says that it's mostly sponges that get left in patients. I've also heard several stories reported in the news of sponges being left in patients, only to be discovered later when the patient complains of pain. Sponges as you may know tend to absorb blood, so they're difficult to see. Between the assistants keeping track of tools and the doctor looking at his work to see if there are any tools left there, there should be no excuse for leaving things in. Period.
Well, maybe there's no "excuse", (that is, someone isn't directly responsible for the failure) but blaming people doesn't solve the continuing problem. There's always going to be people who miss-count, or miss a sponge no matter how much of a hard-ass you are. So you build those problems into your larger system and have independent redundant parts that catch failures.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to agree that there should be some kind of action brought against the police department. This is just simply police harassment and intimidation of someone who's done nothing wrong. The police are trying to Cover Their Ass by claiming they dropped the charges because they couldn't convince a jury that it was illegal. Strange that they have a mountain of evidence (an actual tape of what went on), but yet they didn't think they'd get a conviction. An obvious admission that this is an unjust law.
We don't really know what went on in the prosecuters office. They might have laughed and laughed at this case, but had to humour the police because the reality is that the prosecutors work with the police all the time. They may have been trying to save face for the police by telling them to drop the matter themselves, rather than play hardball and drop it themselves.
how can anyone really get a feel for the importance of this discovery if they don't post some of the translated texts? Oh, I forgot- We're supposed to accept the fact that it's important because they say so
Well, unless you have a background in Archimedes, mathematics, or ancient greek (all the domain of "they"), I don't think you're going to be able to understand the importance of even a translated work. Despite your protestations, all opinions on this kind of thing aren't equal. People who have these backgrounds are much more qualified to interpret what this stuff means (and no, that certainly doesn't include me by any stretch of the imagination). I find this attitude kind of strange. You don't actually want to learn any of these subjects, but expect to be able to just read a 2200 year old text and instantly understand the context of the work without listening to what other more qualified people have to say. Would you expect someone who doesn't know C++ to be able to instantly know what the source code of a program means without knowing C++?
It's more than a little funny that you're critisizing the researchers for publishing the raw scans of the data, (so anyone in the world can study them), but not instantly freely publishing the fruits of their labor. There is often a quite valid criticism of researchers hoarding the raw data of vitally important pieces for years. I believe the dead sea scrolls are a prime example of this. But that's not the case here. If you really wanted to you could learn greek and translate the thing yourself. That's the only "barrier" that exists here.
There's also another important point to make here. Have you seen the scanned texts? Even with the special x-ray enhanced versions it's a big mess. It's not as if this is a 20 minute job via google translation. This kind of thing is generally done very slowly with groups of people working together. It's also a competition between all these groups to make discoveries. There was a really good Nova special on the text a few months ago, and translating the texts was a very painstaking process.
Instead, the passages the translated probably sound boring and so they'll publish it in obscure science journals- All the public will hear about (I fear) is "Look! We're so cool for recovering the pampliset!"
Well, science has long used scientific journals to communicate polished ideas to other people in the field. The papers are written for a specialized audience, so the general public likely wouldn't understand the vast majority of them since it's assumed everyone has a general background in the area of expertise. The main barrier of these journals isn't the obscurity of them. With a little less laziness you could easily go and find the names of them. The main barrier is just expense. It costs a lot of money to subscribe to these journals, so your average Joe just can't afford them. There's a movement to change this because scientists don't like spending thousands of dollars on journals anymore than average Joe does, so many people are moving towards publishing on the internet.
True, they are cool for translating this thing, I agree- But why not give the public a better pathway into understanding the meaning of this find by showing us the money? Would it really kill them? Maybe we, the public, can appreciate the inherent value of even some obscure, boring-sounding passages?
Science takes time, and research isn't free. At some point I'm sure that a concensus translation will be available. It might be even made available for free, but I would have no problem with charging money for it. Why should they be expected to give away thousands of hours of work for free? You seem to have this attitude that if it's not published on the front page of the New York Times, then the scientists are trying to hide something.
I have the same complaint about PBS and the recent special on "String Theory"- These science programs (which are admittedly better than nothing) work
The article doesn't really explain how we "know" what the moon's orbit was 100 million years ago.
Celestial mechanics is very deterministic. Just add in extra energy the moon gets from tides, and work backwards. It's really not all that complicated.
Also, we don't really know exactly how the moon formed. The theory that it was formed out of an immense object striking earth and tearing a chunk out of it is perhaps the currently prevailing theory, but it's not something that we know for absolutely certain.
Well, we know from studying the rocks brought back from the Apollo missions that the moon is made of earth. That means either the impact theory is correct, or both bodies formed from the same collection of material. One of the reasons the collision theory is fairly well accepted is that the moon is mostly made of the same elements in the earths crust. For this theory it doesn't really matter how the moon formed, just when it formed and what kind of stuff it's made of.
Also, 100 million years ago wasn't really that long ago.
True, but as someone else pointed out the article says 100 million years after the moon formed. This is important because it's early enough after the moon formed to still be like molasses.
Orbits don't just change by themselves, so we need an explanation for what would have changed the orbit.
Also true, but we know (and can measure) that the moons orbit is changing right now do to the tides.
There is a connection between perceived importance and the length of an article. The more important someone thinks a subject is the more they know about it and the more they want to talk about it.
Sorry, I don't see that connection. I'm not really certain I see that connection even in the print world. Is a book that's 5000 pages long more important than one that's 100 pages? When comparing two books on the same topic is the longer one more important? Where is it that length equals importance?
I'm sure someone will say "why is this article so long?" and will clean it up to the basic necessary facts. And no one will argue because they won't perceive it as important as we do today.
Why would someone "clean it up" and delete information? This strikes me as old thinking where space was limited, and content was static. Wikipedia isn't a book, and there's another option of just creating summaries of the content and hiding everything else in the full article. Even an outdated article that gets the facts wrong might be very interesting to someone. I'd love to read an article about the Aether, or geology pre-plate tectonics (and not a knowing look back, but what the authors actually thought at the time).
Yet the article on Lutheranism is still shorter than the article on Truthiness. The Lutheran movement had a much larger impact on world history than the word 'truthiness'.
Your error is in thinking that the length of an article conveys an idea of how important the topic is. I think that kind of thinking comes from the idea that there's a limited amount of space to print information, so the things that are most important get longer articles. That's not the case on wikipedia. The limitations are really one of editors and interest. It's pretty easy to expand an article on a light topic like Truthiness when you're just repeating what someone has already said (and there's a huge base of obsessed fans). It's much harder to expand on something that has a lot more depth and breadth like Lutheranism. That requires actual research and not just watching a TV show.
In 50 years an article about Truthiness might be just one line while the article about Lutheranism will still be the same length, if not longer. Wikipedia only has the "truth of the moment" while the Truth is something timeless.
Now you're confusing Truth with relevance. In 50 years I doubt truthiness will be terrible relevant to anyone, but that doesn't mean it's not something that actually happened. It's still just as "true" as Lutheranism, just of little importance. You're also making the mistake that irrelevant information should be deleted. Why? I could certainly see some kind of tag being added to information we (at the time) consider to be less important, or maybe putting it in an archive of some sort to avoid "clutter". But there's really no reason to delete the information. Personally I think deleting it would be wrong. Who knows what people 200 years from now might be fascinated to read about the current day.
Wonderfull satire. Are you a writer for the Report?
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misttatements and error. Wikipedia practically had to shut itself down after Colbert proved his point.
Wikipedia isn't really the target here. I'll bet the majority of "Report" viewers didn't even know what Wikipedia was before Colbert explained it. The target of the satire is the echo chamber of widespread opinion that becomes "fact" when repeated enough. Wikipedia is merely being used as a foil to illustrate this point. Right wing radio is famous for this kind of thing where there's little to no fact checking and mostly relying on what other people say. For instance, it's now a "fact" that Al Gore said he "invented the internet", even though the actual statement he made had nothing to do with inventing and more to do with funding.
Arguably worthy choices to spend scientific $$$ on.
I agree. However it's not the mission of Nasa to create websites and labs for an aquarium in Maine, or classroom and computers for colleges across the US. I guess I don't understand why you don't think these projects aren't exactly as the article describes, pet projects for individual lawmakers. The fact that these project involve science (and not even directly funding a science program) justifies them receiving NASA funding in no way. Nasa is responsible for space and aerospace projects, not funding museums, planetariums and science labs for colleges.
So what exactly is an engineer supposed to do?
Make sure the design is being implemented correctly by the contractors, and if it isn't make a huge stink about how the system could fail catestrophically. The engineers are the ones in the best position to know about how implementation of the system will effect it, so they should obviously be heavily involved in working with the contractors to get it right. If the engineers design the thing and then just sit back and drink coffee and expect it to be implemented to the letter, they're in the wrong business.
The basic ethical argument against using experimental treatments (without informed consent) "in cases where option 'b' is die" is that it leads you down a slippery ethical slope in which you test all kinds of stuff on (terminal) patients.
I don't see any slipperly slope here. The cases where this kind of treatment would be used are quite limited. It's essentially only in emergency situations where the patient is going to die without it, you can't reach a parent or spouse to get consent, and there's no other non-experimental treatment available. That slope sounds very non-slip to me.
Financial advisors are there for a reason. You wouldn't ask one of them for advice on buying a computer, why are you asking slashdot for financial advice?
There's a few obvious answers of course. You shouldn't be putting your money in anything where you're risking losing it. You're a poor college student right now, and risk is not something you can afford. That rules out things like mutual funds and stocks. You also need to make decisions about what portion of your money you need immediate access to. All of it? Half of it? Figure out what you really need in terms of money, and then go to a financial advisor and work out a plan. Stop asking for advice from people who don't know your current sitation and don't know all the options available to you.
Are we in fact going to do the same thing with electricity here?
I doubt it. The effects of radiation on the body 100 years ago was very poorly understood. Low voltage electrical currents by comparison are fairly benign. It's not like the use of electricity in the human body is new. Pacemakers have been around forever, there's been some trials of direct electrical stimulation of the brain to create artificial vision, and many parapalegics use direct muscle stimulation to stand up, etc (maybe even walk?).
Also, the medical community itself has grown up. Years of animal testing is required for any kind of new treatment goes to limited human trials.
That's not to say it's all perfect. You can't dismiss the danger that any new treatment is going to have unforseen side effects that don't show up in human trials. But I think comparing this new treatment to the early days of medicine where anything goes and there's poor understanding isn't terribly valid.
It seems that most of the people who are replying to this story haven't heard the expression "Innocent until proven guilty"
That phrase applies to courts of law, not individual opinion. It simply means that the government has to prove someone is guilty, and not that the accused needs to prove themselves innocent. In many countries it's the job of the accused to prove their innocence.
If you're just saying that accusation isn't really proof of anything, I think you're perfectly right. People should judge innocence or guilt based on evidence and never presume guilt based on accusation. But my point is that it's not necessary for a court to convict someone to have a perfectly valid opinion of guilt based upon evidence.
I think a lot of people are really missing the point of what this robot is supposed to do. There's a lot of comments about how the robot itself isn't autonomous and has no intelligence. That's not at all the role that the robot is supposed to fill.
The robot is supposed to simply project the presence of the professor remotely. Obviously we can do that to some degree with just a two way television hookup, but it's not like being in the room. You can't point at students and interact with them through a flat display. You can't change where the camera is pointing, and the students don't really know what the professor can see.
I think the biggest thing that this robot is missing is "gaze". If you ask me, the single distinguishing feature of presence is making eye contact. As someone pointed out, it doesn't look like there's actually any cameras in the eyes of this robot, so the actual professor can't see what the robot is "looking" at. If the robot could have gaze, reproduce facial expressions, and even replicate hand gestures, I think that would go a long way to having remote presence.
I guess I'm not sure why you think that the word "online" obviously only means the public internet. It certainly didn't used to mean that as recently as 10-12 years ago. Before that "online", just meant electronic communications, sometimes just via a private dialup BBS.
Slashdot only has a few limited categories (which is a mistake IMO), so the category definitions tend to get stretched beyond the literal definitions of them. While this isn't literally "My Rights Online", since I don't have access to private government intelligence websites, it's certainly someones rights online.
Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
Well, I'd agree that the standard shouldn't be "I don't like this". But it sounds like there's much deeper ethical and possible criminal issues here. Was Mark Felt (Deep Throat) justified in revealing classified information to Woodward and Bernstein? I think so. This case is a bit different of course as there were no specifics revealed, and the information was only revealed to others in the intelligence field. I don't know if the scope of wrongdoing here is in the same league as Watergate, but I think that's a question worth asking.
In a previously highly rated post a reader claimed that democracy doesn't guarantee freedom. From a strict standpoint, he's absolutely right. But democracy makes freedom MUCH easier to attain since in general people want freedom and not opression. I think this reversal of the policy nicely illustrates that. As several others have pointed out, contrast this with a country like China where there's no democracy, and the government keeps a tight grip on its citizens. It's like the addage that money doesn't buy happiness, but the corollary is that it makes it whole lot easier.
Given the unusual color of the glass (for the period), it seems quite reasonable that it being formed by "the light of a thousand suns" was the source of its value.
Well, that's assuming that someone saw the meteor strike, wasn't killed by it, and the legend was passed down through the generations. That's quite a lot to swallow with their being no evidence for any of it.
The distinguishing feature of the glass is that it isn't man made. Given that glass beads were common in Egypt in 1500 BC, and Tut ruled around 1300 BC, I'd say they must have known this wasn't just normal man-made glass. Perhaps they found it in the desert, but knew of glass as only a man-made substance. Finding something in the middle of nowhere in large chunks that couldn't possibly be made by a person, but which you've only seen before as being made by a person is pretty amazing. It'd be like finding big chunks of pure iron in the middle of knowhere. You've seen Iron before, but it's something that's created by people. I could easily see that such a find would make this glass special.
In fact, the earliest known uses of Iron around 4000 BCE come from meteorites. From wikipedia:
Which brings up the possibility that this glass was found before glassmaking became common, so it had a special value assigned to it. The point I'm trying to make is that no one had to see the actual meteor impact to know that this was special glass.
Sorry, but HFCS are table sugar are (as I said) nearly identical. Table sugar is sucrose and glucose bonded together (the body easily breaks them into seperate sucrose and glucose molecules). HFCS is free sucrose and glucose .
As for the "uptake profile" being different, got any evidence for that? If it is different, got any evidence that this contributes to obesity and diabetes? If so, how much?
There's a propensity to demonize certain foods, while completely ignoring other foods that are just as bad. It was the same thing many years ago with butter being BAD BAD BAD, but little mention of margarine. So many people switched to margarine even though it had just as much saturated fat. Later on we learn that the trans-fat in many margarines is actually much worse than saturated fat (studies have concluded that trans-fat lowers HDL, or good cholesterol). So the switch to margarine was actually the worst thing people could do.
and the genes in a plant are VASTLY VASTLY different from the genes in a human.
Some of them are, some of them aren't. We still share MANY of the same genes with plants. Just like a car is vastly different from a bicycle, both have rubber tires. In a very similar sense both cars and bicycles share a common "ancestor", just like plants and humans.
tell me how the hell you can believe a human shares genes with a plant
Evolution? You don't have to simply believe it, it's a scientifically proven fact that humans and plants share genes.
we don't share brain and heart genes with plants
I'm pretty sure there's no single gene that responsible for producing the heart or brain. Something this complex required many many genes.
I understand that a cure is viewed as better than a treatment, but you can't just pick to find a cure, or pick to find a treatment.
To some degree what you're saying is true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't directions that are far more likely to lead to a cure, and other directions that are far more likely to lead to better treatments. I think it's pretty obvious that research on producing insulin cheaper is far more likely to produce a better treatment, and pretty unlikely to lead to a cure.
Who knows.. maybe the science needed to put people on Mars will lead to a cure for diabetes. It's just pretty unlikely to do so. The applications and directions that science leads isn't always clear, but that doesn't mean it's blind.
but lets please not mix plants and animals, it's obviously not right.
There's no such thing as a "plant gene" or an "animal gene". It's like saying that taking a spring from a car and putting it in a bicycle makes the bicycle somehow car-like. Sure, if you took an entire engine along with a transmission and fastened it onto a bike that might make the bicycle "car-like", but that's not what we're talking about here. Genes are just building blocks, and assigning plantness or animalness to them doesn't make any sense.
I'm getting a little tired of the demonization of high fructose corn syrup as some sort of poison on the country. There's nothing inherently wrong with HFCS, it's nearly identical to table sugar. The problem of obesity is one of people eating to many calories, and gaining weight. It's funny that the article you link to talks just as much about eating sugar as it does eating HFCS, but yet the demon is HFCS, not table sugar.
Do you actually have any evidence that HFCS is directly causing obesity, and not just simply eating too much? Why not pick out potatoes as a food and distinguish people that eat too much of it over people who don't? Then it's potatoes that are the problem.
I hear people going nuts because there's HFCS in bread.. but somehow sugar in bread is better. Oh, and honey in bread would be best of all because it's "natural". It's funny that HFCS and honey are very similar chemically though. Both contain a similar ratio of fructose to glucose.
You're not looking at this problem from a realistic perspective. Your solution seems to be "DON'T MAKE ERRORS!!". Well, any system (including even machines) is going to have errors in it that cause problems. Simply wishing that people didn't make errors doesn't change anything. Could different hospitals have a better counting scheme that made sure that the count was accurate? I'm sure they could, but that doesn't diminish the need for something like this RFID system.
You try to minimize errors in each component, and have backup components that will work when the primary system fails. Of course the RFID isn't a perfect solution. It's not going to catch every single problem, but as long as it fails independently with the normal counting system, it's done its job. There is no perfect solution. I suggest if you're looking for life to be perfect and never to experience any failures, you're looking at a very depressing future.
Keeping a count of the instruments is already done, but it's not perfect. Why do you expect any system to be perfect? Any system has flaws in it, and the key to fixing these flaws is to have multiple redundancies so no single component (in this case people keeping counts) will cause a failure of the system.
Furthermore, it isn't that hard to look at the opening for shinys before closing it up.
Well, the article says that it's mostly sponges that get left in patients. I've also heard several stories reported in the news of sponges being left in patients, only to be discovered later when the patient complains of pain. Sponges as you may know tend to absorb blood, so they're difficult to see.
Between the assistants keeping track of tools and the doctor looking at his work to see if there are any tools left there, there should be no excuse for leaving things in. Period.
Well, maybe there's no "excuse", (that is, someone isn't directly responsible for the failure) but blaming people doesn't solve the continuing problem. There's always going to be people who miss-count, or miss a sponge no matter how much of a hard-ass you are. So you build those problems into your larger system and have independent redundant parts that catch failures.