Since you list humorous books, I'm not sure what your definition of "technical" is. I'll assume you meant "non-fiction". Here's a few titles that are recommended for anyone who has a brain and wants to think hard about the state of the world.
Books by Edward Tufte on how graphs, PowerPoint presentations, and other sources of technical information can mislead rather than inform (and how to correct this).
_A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper_ or any other books by John Allen Paulos which focus on how a misunderstanding of mathematics has consequences for our society.
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by West Point psychologist, military historian, and former Army Ranger Lt. Col. Grossman. Anyone who thinks that they would be able to "do what must be done" and kill anyone who threatened their family ought to read this. Also recommended reading for all the hawks out there that are so anxious to send our young out to fight unnecessary wars.
I read two of the links, and nowhere did it actually mention telemarketers. It seemed to indicate it was more related to customer contact things where the customer is calling about their service, and getting frustrated with the voicemail maze or the person on the phone with them.
Yeah, as usual the summary was completely misleading. Some jackass felt the need to add his two cents. Why the editors accept submissions like this while rejecting scores of others, I'll never know.
But getting back on topic, my first thought upon reading the article was remembering Cynthia Breazeal's work (who says girl geeks can't be scalding hot?) at MIT on developing robots that can interact with humans on an emotional level, like her Kismet robot. The idea is that providing robots with the ability to perceive and project emotions will improve the interaction between humans and machines. There's a great deal of interest in improving the man-machine interface as computers become a much more important part of our lives.
The fact that you state "TV has taught me math is hard" and that you have a problem with "numbers" yet are good at logic leads me to believe the problem is in your mind. Mathematics really has very little to do with numbers. It's symbolic logic. Equations are just concise, precise statements. If you can do logic, then you can do math. The only time numbers comes in is at the very end (for engineering and science) when you plug numbers into the final result.
I'm not good with numbers and I have a poor memory but I have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from one of the top institutes of science in the entire world. There's no magic to it and don't let popular culture tell you that mathematicans are somehow different from everyone else. Just take a deep breath and relax a bit.
I'm not going to recommend any books or tell you to meditate or anything else like that. You just need to have some faith in yourself or dig deeper to find out what the real problem is. When you say you're good at logic, what are you basing this on? Are you a whiz at logic puzzles or something? Most of math is logic, a little creativity, and a lot of hard work.
By the way, if you're struggling in a class, here's an idea to try. Go to some of the already-solved example problems in your textbook. Write down the problem on a piece of paper and close the book. Try to solve the problem. Write out all your thoughts, crazy ideas, questions, etc. Struggle with it for a good half an hour at least. Then open the book (assuming you didn't solve it) and look at how they solved it and see if your scribblings were even close. The act of trying to work through the problem will make your subsequent reading of the solution that much more meaningful.
Fuck, a prequel? That's pretty damn sad. Didn't they learn anything from Enterprise?
You know what I want to see (it's there in the subject line so you shouldn't have to guess too hard). That's right, the friggin' Gorn. That was the coolest damn alien in the original series and he only got one episode. Stronger than hell but also very clever. They seem like they would be an interesting species to have as an enemy. There was a ST:TNG comic featuring the gorn that made them sound like just another warrior civilization like the klingons. What a cop-out. The way the gorn captain meticulously made traps for Kirk on that planet suggests to me that there's a lot more to them than head-bashing, adrenaline brutes. I'd wager that Star Trek fans would love to see more Gorn; why else would they have stuck that CGI abomination in the mirror universe episode of Enterprise if not for fan service?
The problem is that gorn makeup probably costs more than the usual bumpy-forehead-of-the-week aliens we're used to seeing in Star Trek so it's probably prohibitive for a TV show. So why not feature the gorn in a movie? This prequel idea sounds like a TV show. Don't waste the movie budget on special effects. Spend it on some interesting aliens.
A prequel featuring Kirk and Spock, even for just a short cameo, just screams of lack of ideas.
How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes? If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?"
Well, you'll need to define what "technology classes" you want before you get the school board or most of us to listen to you. Do you want an "Intro to PowerPoint" class? Programming classes? Computer hardware classes? Actually, 'technology' could mean anything, not just computers. What are your goals? Be more specific.
My school district recently built a brand new football stadium and athletics field-house, both with state of the art electronics; yet when asked about implementing a computer science class district officials reply with, 'This is a property poor school district.' Apparently property poor school districts have 20 foot plasma scoreboards and multi-million dollar athletic training facilities. As a pubescent high school student, I'm not very happy with the way my district spends the money my parents pay for my education.
BTW, whining about money spent on athletics isn't the best way to get the school board to listen to you, although I'm sure you'll get lots of sympathetic responses here. High school football is a really big deal to most kids and parents so it will always be funded at a much higher level than classes. Forget about trying to take money away from athletics and put it into education. Your best bet is to make a compelling case for why your school needs a class on X and bring it to the school board. If they are convinced of its importance, they'll find a way to come up with the money. Trust me on this: complaining about something that is very popular will cause people to stop listening to you.
I'm not trying to be hard on you, but saying you want money allocated for something specific (scoreboard) to be divered to something nebulous (technology classes) just isn't going to work. You need to say exactly what classes are necessary and then provide compelling arguments why they are needed so badly.
Good luck, Kid. I'm not a fan of technology in the classroom at all, but I don't want my personal opinions to get in the way of advising you. If you want to fight for this, fine. Just be a bit more cautious about how you go about it.
They didn't change the definition of a planet; there simply wasn't any precise definition of a planet before. As for all of you who want to keep with tradition, I'll refer you to my previous posting on this.
If you've got a strong case why Pluto should be considered a planet, let's hear it. All this grumbling about "I don't see why they had to change things..." is rediculous. There wasn't an official definition before. That ambiguity had to change and when they drafted criteria, Pluto didn't make the cut.
As s20451 points out, this has been a week full of idiotic bullshit. In a week where the JonBenet thing dominates the news, I think griping out Pluto getting a few minutes of coverage on the nightly news is really that much of a disaster.
But unlike the JonBenet crap, this Pluto case actually touches on something that *is* interesting. I didn't RTFA (c'mon, this is slashdot!) but the summary sounds pretty familiar. As stated above, conservatives see this as one more example of how the pinko-commie-liberals are revising history. Conservatives believe strongly in tradition and the status quo and their belief is that change has to be justified. That is, there has to be a damn good reason to change things. This touches on some timely political issues in an indirect and hidden way.
What concerns me, however, is that people consider this some sort of big chore to adjust their thinking that Pluto is no longer a planet. The quote from the summary is a prime example of this. The pundit complains "Hey, I've already done all that learning stuff. You mean I still have to continue to think and learn and possibily be open to new ideas once I'm an adult?" Yeah, I'm paraphrasing but I'm troubled by the idea that so many adults seem to have that learning ends once you're out of school. Think about it: it's really trivial to get it through your skull that Pluto isn't considered a planet anymore. But even this absolutely simple example of relearning draws groans from people who have a national stage to pontificate. What kind of example is this setting for our nation's youth? That it sucks to learn new stuff? That changing your mind in the face of new evidence is a chore that should be resisted and even hotly contested?
Don't think about this news story as the simple redefinition of a celestial body. Look at this story as one more facit in the anti-learning, anti-intellectual course that our country is going down. Then it becomes a lot more "news for nerds, stuff that matters." Does it really matter that Pluto has been downgraded. No, probably not for most of us. But it does matter a hell of a lot that there seems to be this outcry to keep things the way they are simply for the sake of tradition.
We've seen science fiction talk about living in bubble/dome cities, but why would this be bad? Can you imagine what life would be like if we did have better control over our local environments? Would a bubbled city offer a better life for millions in the upper north, people who deal with more winter than summer? Would we see better air scrubbers providing better air? Would we see better control over irrigation and drought?
I confess that I'm not 100% sure I understand what the overall point of your post was, so forgive me if I'm taking something out of context. But this was the one paragraph that I did understand enough to reply to.
You're giving human beings a hell of a lot of credit by assuming that we would be able to construct an environment that is "better" than what nature has provided. There's so tremendously many variables and effects that would need to be considered, I have to believe that anything we would come up with -- however impressive it might appear at first glance -- would eventually be found to be seriously lacking. Maybe it would be something as simple as out domed cities not getting enough water now that we can't rely on rainfall. It could be something as insidious as accidently leaving out some species of animal, insect, or plant in our little bio-dome that turns out to be really damn important. I wouldn't want to trust our future to our ability to engineer an environment.
Who knows. I know that I trust that out of the billions of humans today we'll find a few who can find the utility and invention needed to create tomorrow's world. I don't like to think of us living in vaults because that "invention" is based on yesterday's technology. Yesterday's technology came out of need created by the time before yesterday. Tomorrow's technology will come out of need we face today. Don't sell the future short, especially considering how far we've come in the past 1000 years, 200 years, 100 years, 50 years and 10 years. Humanity is not going to go away, it will just find ways to make life better no matter what seems to happen to the world around us.
I think the point (I didn't RTFA due to the registration) is probably that a doomsday catastrophe would cause such a rapid shift in the world that humanity wouldn't be able to adapt in time. Even if I were to agree with your concept that "given enough time, humans will think their way out of any maze" -- which I'm not sure I do -- the timescales of these things need to be considered. A serious reduction in available food supplies would hit the poor first. Since it's largely the rich who are in positions to make policy changes, by the time the problem started affecting them enough to take action, it might be too late for all of us.
Again, if I'm misunderstanding your post, please accept my apology. But it sounds like you have an awfully optimistic view of the capabilities of humans to adapt.
I'd recommend getting ahold of the BBC documentary on this topic and this particular researcher: "An Experiment to Save the World". The documentary does a reasonable job of explaining the concept. It's also pretty clear from watching this episode that this particular scientist knows deep down inside that he's a fraud but his conscious mind isn't allowing him to accept the reality that his career is over. He keeps saying stuff like "A have to believe the data" even though the show does a good job of explaining that his data is inconclusive and that the technology that would generate conclusive proof exists. The BBC ends up hiring a rival researcher to use the superior lab equipment to try to confirm bubble fusion. No dice. Of course, the original researcher then claims that he they weren't doing the experiment correctly, but refuses to help them redo the experiment with his special modifications.
Good documentary. It made me want to reach into the TV and strangle that asshole for wasting everyone's time. I hope he gets what's coming to him.
What? Have you not paid attention to anything going on? The employees lost everything because they were not allowed to divest their interests from Enron into other areas to spread out their risk.
It's not like he held a gun to their head and told them "If I find out you have ever point one dollar into another investment -- including a Savings account or a home -- I will end your life!"
You always have a choice. ALWAYS! If your employer doesn't condone diversification, then you do it outside your retirement account. Or hell, maybe you quit that company and find a better employer. This is the same blog where people routinely advise each other to quit if their boss won't let them install Linux on their desktop, but now everyone is going on about who these people had no choice but to follow Grand Sky Marshall Lay's edicts. Sheesh!
Unless you are President Clinton, then you get impeached.. And which side of the line did you stand on that issue, I wonder...
Why do you wonder? Why does it matter?
I know what you're thinking: I'm a die-hard Republican who loves money above all else. That's why I'm "defending" Kenneth Lay (which I'm not -- I'm simply pointing out that he's no serial killer). Turns out I have never voted Republican -- and probably never will -- in my entire life. Yup, it's possible to be social liberal and still wish people would exercise some personal responsbility. Pretty radical, huh?
Working stiffs need to diversify their portfolio? Sure. How many 9-to-5ers do you think putting away $60 a paycheck had the wherewithal to take investing classes for their $10,000 retirement kitty? How many of them do you imagine had financial consultants on payrool?
Diversification is not some advanced financial concept that requires taking investing classes and you know it.
Please. If I mug you the day you happen to have your laptop, iPod, cellphone, PSP, and engagement ring for your girlfriend on you, is it your fault? All those Cambodians get blamed because they put all of their eggs (i.e. their lives) in one basket by living in Cambodia?
I have no say in whether you mug me or not. The people living in Cambodia have no say in whether they can move or not (because they are too poor to move). The people who lost their life savings -- I'm not saying those who lost any money, I'm talking about those who lost everything -- did have a say in whether this would happen to them. If Ken Lay had forced everyone to put all their money in Enron stock at gunpoint, then you'd have a case. And please, don't tell me about how Enron's 401(k) plan required them to buy Enron stock. If that's the case, then you have to get some investments outside your 401(k) plan, even if the company won't match those funds. That was my original point. These people looked at what would get them the most money in the short term and ignored one of the basic tenets of financial management.
Don't be an apologist stooge. It's unbecoming.
I'm not. Kenneth Lay was a bad man. He was not a serial killer, however, and the people who got hurt by the scam must accept some responsibility for their actions.
Wow you are cold-hearted. You're upset that someone at/. compared him to Ted Bundy, so instead of just disputing it you decided to be an ass and tear down the ex-employees of Enron.
I wouldn't say I'm "upset" but I'm definitely disappointed. This is nothing more than Goodwin's law, slightly modified. Ken Lay is a bad man. We all agree. Why bring Ted Bundy into this?
I wouldn't say that I'm "tearing down" the ex-employees of Enron either. I'm pointing out that they aren't 100% innocent and responsibility-free in all this. Don't be so binary.
You should be sick of yourself.
Well, I'm sick to my stomach with a culture in which people are always looking to blame someone else for their problems. Does that count?
Not everyone knows Financial Planning 101.
That's true. Children don't. These people are adults. Part of being an adult is taking precautions to reduce the likelihood of disaster.
You want to see how one lie ruined lifes then go talk to those whose lifes were ruined.
As I stated in my original post, I do feel sorry for these people. But that doesn't mean I have to portray them as completely helpless individuals who had no role in the disaster that befell them.
It wasn't a simple lie, it was a huge con. Purposely blacking out power to raise your companies stock is more than a lie.
A con is a lie. Was it a "simple" lie? Who cares! It was a lie. It doesn't compare to butchering or bludgeoning someone.
Kenneth Lay was obviously not a great humanitarian but comparing him to one of the most notorious serial killers in history is a bit much. He lied, okay? He lied. That's what his crime was. I grow a bit weary of hearing ex-Enron employees wail about how their life-savings are gone thanks to Lay. These poor people need to accept a bit of responsibility for their mess. You never invest all your money in a single company. Diversification is simple Financial Planning 101. Everyone know this. The reason why these people ignored this bedrock of finance is because Enron's stock once did quite well. They figured they'd beat the market, beat the Jones, beat everyone and place their entire bet on the winning horse. Then they could brag to their neighbors about what a financial genius they were. Simply put: these people who were ruined by the Enron scandal got greedy.
Kenneth Lay lied. He didn't destroy the livelihood of scores of people; they did that to themselves. And please spare me the responses about how I'm being cold-hearted. I feel for these people. Losing everything should never happen to anyone. But placing all the blame on one man and comparing him to Ted Bundy sickens me. It's just another example of our victimization culture. No one wants to admit it to themselves that they ruined their lives. They want to believe that some con-man forced them into something and that they had no choice.
Dude, you're doing it all wrong. You don't put all your good dope in one single post. You gotta spread it out. You've got eight questions? That means you can get eight separately up-modded posts if you play your cards right. It pains me to see someone waste an opportunity to milk their ideas for all the karma/recognition they can get. You've obviously never been a post-doc and been under pressure to churn out N papers each year...:)
I think the voiceover is useful when seeing the film for the first time because it helps you get into the story a bit more. There's a lot going on and I think the average movie-goer doesn't pick up on it without a helping hand.
Now that having been said, I think the non-voiceover version is better for later viewings. The problem is that you subconsciously identify with Deckard a bit more because he is narrating and "helping" you along. But Deckard is not really a "hero" in any real sense. He may be the main character but he is a drunk who kills escaped slaves -- hardly a noble profession. My feeling is that the voiceover tends to shift the story more into a good-guy-bad-guy dynamic when the point of the story is really that there aren't any good guys or bad guys -- just guys who do what they can to survive. Batty isn't evil; he's desperate. He does terrible things but that's because he's on the edge and trying to find a way to keep himself and the others (Pris) alive in a society where they are viewed as objects instead of beings. Deckard is much the same way. He knows his job is evil and yet he continues to do it because he can't make a living any other way. Deckard and Batty are remarkably similar and the voiceover prevents you from seeing this since you tend to sympathize with someone who's thoughts you can hear.
I've seen it a couple times on DVD, but a tiny screen does this picture no justice.
I was fortunate enough to first see this as a Midnight Movie when I was a sophomore in college. Jesus, it just blew me away. I've seen in plenty of times since (it's probably my favorite movie) but it's never had quite the same emotional effect on me as it did that first time. I completely agree that a huge screen in a dark room with an awesome sound system is the best way to see this film. Ridley's visuals with the Vangelis score creates a mood that is unsurpassed. You really, truly get a sense of what it would be like to live like Deckard in a burned-out hull of a crumbling world, doing a job that you know is morally wrong. For those of you who have never seen this in the theater, I urge you to pounce on any opportunity to do so. It's an incredible experience.
For all those insipid ads from the MPAA going on about the 'great movie experience', this is the one rare film where it is completely true. Of course, it helps that highschool gangbanger-wannabes aren't going to be attending this film...
Nonsense, life doesn't even begin until 40, at least if you've done it right.
I'm only 35 now (will be 36 this summer) but already I'm starting to believe kfg's assessment. All my life, I've heard this crap about how the 20s are the best years of your life and 40 is when everything goes to hell. I now believe that's a bunch of crap. Actually, I believe that common perception is probably true for common people. For geeks like us, I think the 30s and 40s are much better than our 20s.
Maybe my experience was a little more extreme than most people's since my 20s were dominated with grad school in an institute with a terrible male-female ratio, but I look back on my 20s and think of them as years where I was busy building up my capabilities. My ability to take care of myself. My ability to cook things other than spagetti and ramen noodles. My ability to prove myself capable of independent, in-depth research. All along I thought I knew what I was going to do when I finished my dissertation (become a professor) but that turned out not to be correct at all.
Now midway through my 30s, I've got a much stronger sense of who I truly am and what my strengths are. I'm still struggling to develop new capabilities and broaden my horizon, but I'm starting to take a little more time to appreciate what I've built so far. Financial decisions that I made back in my 20s because I thought they were the right thing to do are starting to pay off for me now. I'm still very busy but I'm starting to see things in a broader scope than I did when I was so fixated on one or two things in my 20s.
I imagine that my 40s is when I'll truly be content. By then, I imagine I'll be pretty damn comfortable with the person I turned out to be. I'll be able to see how everything fits together in my life much better.
People think of 40s as "over the hill" largely because of physical issues. Yeah, perhaps its true that if you don't take care of yourself that age will start to catch up with you then. But if you eat right and exercise, I think your 40s can be some of your best active years. You shouldn't still be putting in 60-hour weeks in your 40s so you'll have more time for exercising, spending time with the family, and just plan enjoying life. Regarding sports, you might have to take a few more days of layoff between workouts or slow down a bit on the court, but you will find that your increased understanding of tactics, planning, and strategy will make up for it. Yes, even for stuff like weight-training. You'll start to realize that going into the gym 4-6 days a week and blasting your muscles to failure every time in a pathetic attempt to put a half-inch on your arms in time for summer just isn't the smartest approach.
Like kfg says, your 40s should be the best years of your life if you've done it right (e.g., made careful financial decisions, ate healthy, gotten plenty of non-destructive exercise, not completely dedicated yourself to your job). That's how I see it anyhow.
Gulthek notes that tea is pretty quick and lets you select how much (if any) sweetness to have. One thing to note is that green tea is chock full of healthy stuff. The list of health benefits on that page goes on and on. Of the varieties of tea, green is the least processed which is usually a good indicator that it's the most healthy. Start off by getting some prepackaged stuff just to see if you could like it. If so, then you can start doing your own thing and getting some good-quality stuff.
I know you were asking for a soda substitute that isn't too bad for you. This is one substitute that is actually good for you. Give it a try. You might really like it.
While I agree with most of what you said, I want to call attention to your last point:
Third, while you might not be able to help people with their grammar or spelling, make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed.
With today's modern spell- and grammar-checkers, I'm not so sure that such things are super-important but what *is* important is good writing. That simply means making yourself understandable. I think you will find that someone who is intelligent and who cares about making themselves understood will automatically become a good writer.
I'll take myself as an example. There are lots of comments in this thread about how you have to read a lot and/or write a lot to become a good writer. The only stuff I read was textbooks and I didn't have time to write very much and yet I still came out alright. When I was finishing up my dissertation, I already had a job lined up and they were routinely calling me to hurry up my thesis and graduate so I could start working for them. Needless to say, my first draft of my dissertation was awful. I just threw it together and gave it to my advisor to look over.
He called me into his office and told me "Your thesis is something that you want to do a good job on. This is something that you want to be proud of." I got the message and resolved to clean up my manuscript. What did I do? I went through my thesis sentence by sentence and asked myself "Is there any way that a reasonably intelligent person is NOT going to understand what I'm saying here?" Man, I gotta tell you that was agonizing fraking work. I would literally spend an entire hour rewriting a single page until I could answer "no" to every sentence. But when it was all done and had submitted it to committee, I had at least one of the professors tell me "This thesis is extremely well-written. Most theses don't come to us like this."
I never read "Elements of Style" (of course, I have that book now), never read very much, and didn't write much either. I sure as hell didn't know anything about proper comma usage. But I was able to produce a technical document that was praised for its clarity. My secret? I gave a shit. I tried hard to make it something that I was proud of. That's all there is too good writing. You don't have to know a lot of rules of grammar or be an exceptional speller. The secret to being a good writer is to take the job seriously. If you are half-way intelligent and care about your audience, you'll figure out what to do.
What does my personality have to do with my ability to perform in a job?
Don't want to be insulting here, but the fact that you even need to ask that question shows that you need work in this area.
Should I do it, or just keep looking?
Actually, I found the submitters second question to be much more indicitive of the need for "work in this area". I, too, would prefer not to be insulting here but quite honestly if you are asking slashdot readership whether or not you should take the test, that doesn't bode extremely well for your independence and emotional maturity. "Should I do it?" is really a question that only you should answer. Asking a bunch of people who don't know really baffles me. You need to decide whether you truly object to this type of test and an employer that would make you go through this trial. I can tell you what I would do in that situation, but I have different values, economic situation, etc. than you do so my answer doesn't (or shouldn't, at least) mean jack shit to you.
Let me put it this way: if you decide not to go through with this on the basis of our advice and forfeit your chance at working for this company, and later you realize that joining them would have been a wonderful opportunity, who are you going to be upset with? Us, for telling you to turn away from this company? You, for believing that our advice was worth listening to? This decision is important and you shouldn't be so quick to abdicate responsibility over it to people you don't know. Simply put: you shouldn't need us to tell you how you feel about this (or anything else). And that's what this comes down to in the end: how will you feel working at a company that made you go through this?
The article may have briefly talked about terrorism, but I suspect the real danger comes from state-sponsored cyber-attacks, like from China. Terrorism is just a convenient explanation to use to the public. You can't come out and say you're preparing for an attack by China now, can you?
BTW, for those who think that cyber-warfare is a science-fiction concept, I draw your attention to the following analysis of Operation Allied Force. In particular, the section regarding cyber-attacks on surface-to-air (SAM) missile systems to protect our fighters (F-22, F-35):
Beyond the stealthiness portended by the F-22 and F-35, another promising avenue for dealing with emergent SAM threats may lie in the realm of nonkinetic alternatives. To offer but a glimpse into the more intriguing possibilities in this respect, General Jumper remarked after Allied Force that although information operations remained a highly classified subject about which little could be said, the Kosovo experience suggested that "instead of sitting and talking about great big pods that bash electrons, we should be talking about microchips that manipulate electrons and get into the heart and soul of systems like the SA-10 or the SA-12 and tell it that it is a refrigerator and not a radar." Some of the more cutting-edge variants of first-generation offensive cyber warfare, reportedly tested successfully in Allied Force, suggested the feasibility of taking down enemy SAM and other defense systems in ways that would not require putting a strike package or a HARM on critical nodes to neutralize them. Toward that end, Gen Hal Hornburg, current commander of Air Combat Command, recently reiterated the importance of looking beyond familiar solutions to this looming threat in certain portions of President George W. Bush's "axis of evil," where the United States might find itself engaged militarily: "We don't just need jammers and we don't just need Block 50s. . . . We need an array of capabilities. . . . I am looking for kinetic and non-kinetic solutions. I am looking, for example, for space to be able to get down to an SA-10 and convince it to launch all missiles right now or to deny it from launching their missiles right now."
Information warfare WILL happen, my friends. In fact, it's happening now. No, you won't find that written up in the newspaper. Do a little bit of googling and see what you come up with.:)
While I have to agree with everyone who has posted that she doesn't strike me as particularly ravishing, I'm more annoyed with the fact that the submitter has to make any comment at all about her looks. I don't recall any submitted stories that began "Handsome hunk hacker Joe Blow has an article about...". While I'm used to people in the outside world thinking about looks first and substance second, I'm dismayed to find that seems to hold true for slashdot as well.
It's one thing for comments about people's looks to occur in the comments section. Lord knows there's always tons of comments about that one Mythbusters woman everytime a story about that show gets posted. It's more annoying when some comment about a female geek's looks appears on the front page of slashdot. It's almost as though slashdot is officially condoning that kind of crap.
I'm curious to know what the lady nerds here thought when they read the summary. You gals think I'm making too big of a deal of this or are you equally disappointed to find that female geeks are judged first on looks and second on substance?
The first is the same bread-and-circuses problem that plagued the Roman Empire. As long as they have beer and football, Mountain Dew and XBox, or their cell phones and MTV, most Americans are quite content.
Funny you should mention beer, football, cell phones, mass media, and MTV in your post about why UAV surveillance is evil.
Most people are disgusted by the post-SuperBowl riots that envitably ensue when a few celebrating football fans, drunk with beer, start using the occasion as an opportunity to cause mayhem. UAVs monitoring a crowd can make sure that troublemakers are quickly identified and subdued by police before they incite a violent riot.
MTV and other youth-oriented mass media are fairly blatant in their encouragement of young people to protest the G8 summit or the meeting of the World Bank by going ape shit. Gone are the days of peaceful protests. Leaders of political groups have realized that causing mayhem is one sure-fire way of attracting attention (positive or negative -- it doesn't matter) to their cause and making life tough for their political enemies. Attempts by police to remove troublemakers from the crowd of mostly-peaceful demonstrators is foiled as highly-organized groups use cell phones to adapt to police movements in real-time.
It's a multifaceted problem, and no solution is readily available.
Oh, indeed it is a multifaceted problem. It's not clear to me, however, that you have considered the other facet of surveillance and what it means in today's society. Technology is a tool. It can be used for good or for evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you list humorous books, I'm not sure what your definition of "technical" is. I'll assume you meant "non-fiction". Here's a few titles that are recommended for anyone who has a brain and wants to think hard about the state of the world.
GMD
I read two of the links, and nowhere did it actually mention telemarketers. It seemed to indicate it was more related to customer contact things where the customer is calling about their service, and getting frustrated with the voicemail maze or the person on the phone with them.
Yeah, as usual the summary was completely misleading. Some jackass felt the need to add his two cents. Why the editors accept submissions like this while rejecting scores of others, I'll never know.
But getting back on topic, my first thought upon reading the article was remembering Cynthia Breazeal's work (who says girl geeks can't be scalding hot?) at MIT on developing robots that can interact with humans on an emotional level, like her Kismet robot. The idea is that providing robots with the ability to perceive and project emotions will improve the interaction between humans and machines. There's a great deal of interest in improving the man-machine interface as computers become a much more important part of our lives.
GMD
The fact that you state "TV has taught me math is hard" and that you have a problem with "numbers" yet are good at logic leads me to believe the problem is in your mind. Mathematics really has very little to do with numbers. It's symbolic logic. Equations are just concise, precise statements. If you can do logic, then you can do math. The only time numbers comes in is at the very end (for engineering and science) when you plug numbers into the final result.
I'm not good with numbers and I have a poor memory but I have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from one of the top institutes of science in the entire world. There's no magic to it and don't let popular culture tell you that mathematicans are somehow different from everyone else. Just take a deep breath and relax a bit.
I'm not going to recommend any books or tell you to meditate or anything else like that. You just need to have some faith in yourself or dig deeper to find out what the real problem is. When you say you're good at logic, what are you basing this on? Are you a whiz at logic puzzles or something? Most of math is logic, a little creativity, and a lot of hard work.
By the way, if you're struggling in a class, here's an idea to try. Go to some of the already-solved example problems in your textbook. Write down the problem on a piece of paper and close the book. Try to solve the problem. Write out all your thoughts, crazy ideas, questions, etc. Struggle with it for a good half an hour at least. Then open the book (assuming you didn't solve it) and look at how they solved it and see if your scribblings were even close. The act of trying to work through the problem will make your subsequent reading of the solution that much more meaningful.
GMD
Fuck, a prequel? That's pretty damn sad. Didn't they learn anything from Enterprise?
You know what I want to see (it's there in the subject line so you shouldn't have to guess too hard). That's right, the friggin' Gorn. That was the coolest damn alien in the original series and he only got one episode. Stronger than hell but also very clever. They seem like they would be an interesting species to have as an enemy. There was a ST:TNG comic featuring the gorn that made them sound like just another warrior civilization like the klingons. What a cop-out. The way the gorn captain meticulously made traps for Kirk on that planet suggests to me that there's a lot more to them than head-bashing, adrenaline brutes. I'd wager that Star Trek fans would love to see more Gorn; why else would they have stuck that CGI abomination in the mirror universe episode of Enterprise if not for fan service?
The problem is that gorn makeup probably costs more than the usual bumpy-forehead-of-the-week aliens we're used to seeing in Star Trek so it's probably prohibitive for a TV show. So why not feature the gorn in a movie? This prequel idea sounds like a TV show. Don't waste the movie budget on special effects. Spend it on some interesting aliens.
A prequel featuring Kirk and Spock, even for just a short cameo, just screams of lack of ideas.
GMD
How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes? If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?"
Well, you'll need to define what "technology classes" you want before you get the school board or most of us to listen to you. Do you want an "Intro to PowerPoint" class? Programming classes? Computer hardware classes? Actually, 'technology' could mean anything, not just computers. What are your goals? Be more specific.
My school district recently built a brand new football stadium and athletics field-house, both with state of the art electronics; yet when asked about implementing a computer science class district officials reply with, 'This is a property poor school district.' Apparently property poor school districts have 20 foot plasma scoreboards and multi-million dollar athletic training facilities. As a pubescent high school student, I'm not very happy with the way my district spends the money my parents pay for my education.
BTW, whining about money spent on athletics isn't the best way to get the school board to listen to you, although I'm sure you'll get lots of sympathetic responses here. High school football is a really big deal to most kids and parents so it will always be funded at a much higher level than classes. Forget about trying to take money away from athletics and put it into education. Your best bet is to make a compelling case for why your school needs a class on X and bring it to the school board. If they are convinced of its importance, they'll find a way to come up with the money. Trust me on this: complaining about something that is very popular will cause people to stop listening to you.
I'm not trying to be hard on you, but saying you want money allocated for something specific (scoreboard) to be divered to something nebulous (technology classes) just isn't going to work. You need to say exactly what classes are necessary and then provide compelling arguments why they are needed so badly.
Good luck, Kid. I'm not a fan of technology in the classroom at all, but I don't want my personal opinions to get in the way of advising you. If you want to fight for this, fine. Just be a bit more cautious about how you go about it.
GMD
They didn't change the definition of a planet; there simply wasn't any precise definition of a planet before. As for all of you who want to keep with tradition, I'll refer you to my previous posting on this.
If you've got a strong case why Pluto should be considered a planet, let's hear it. All this grumbling about "I don't see why they had to change things..." is rediculous. There wasn't an official definition before. That ambiguity had to change and when they drafted criteria, Pluto didn't make the cut.
GMD
As s20451 points out, this has been a week full of idiotic bullshit. In a week where the JonBenet thing dominates the news, I think griping out Pluto getting a few minutes of coverage on the nightly news is really that much of a disaster.
But unlike the JonBenet crap, this Pluto case actually touches on something that *is* interesting. I didn't RTFA (c'mon, this is slashdot!) but the summary sounds pretty familiar. As stated above, conservatives see this as one more example of how the pinko-commie-liberals are revising history. Conservatives believe strongly in tradition and the status quo and their belief is that change has to be justified. That is, there has to be a damn good reason to change things. This touches on some timely political issues in an indirect and hidden way.
What concerns me, however, is that people consider this some sort of big chore to adjust their thinking that Pluto is no longer a planet. The quote from the summary is a prime example of this. The pundit complains "Hey, I've already done all that learning stuff. You mean I still have to continue to think and learn and possibily be open to new ideas once I'm an adult?" Yeah, I'm paraphrasing but I'm troubled by the idea that so many adults seem to have that learning ends once you're out of school. Think about it: it's really trivial to get it through your skull that Pluto isn't considered a planet anymore. But even this absolutely simple example of relearning draws groans from people who have a national stage to pontificate. What kind of example is this setting for our nation's youth? That it sucks to learn new stuff? That changing your mind in the face of new evidence is a chore that should be resisted and even hotly contested?
Don't think about this news story as the simple redefinition of a celestial body. Look at this story as one more facit in the anti-learning, anti-intellectual course that our country is going down. Then it becomes a lot more "news for nerds, stuff that matters." Does it really matter that Pluto has been downgraded. No, probably not for most of us. But it does matter a hell of a lot that there seems to be this outcry to keep things the way they are simply for the sake of tradition.
GMD
Don't forget this classic from The Onion.
GMD
We've seen science fiction talk about living in bubble/dome cities, but why would this be bad? Can you imagine what life would be like if we did have better control over our local environments? Would a bubbled city offer a better life for millions in the upper north, people who deal with more winter than summer? Would we see better air scrubbers providing better air? Would we see better control over irrigation and drought?
I confess that I'm not 100% sure I understand what the overall point of your post was, so forgive me if I'm taking something out of context. But this was the one paragraph that I did understand enough to reply to.
You're giving human beings a hell of a lot of credit by assuming that we would be able to construct an environment that is "better" than what nature has provided. There's so tremendously many variables and effects that would need to be considered, I have to believe that anything we would come up with -- however impressive it might appear at first glance -- would eventually be found to be seriously lacking. Maybe it would be something as simple as out domed cities not getting enough water now that we can't rely on rainfall. It could be something as insidious as accidently leaving out some species of animal, insect, or plant in our little bio-dome that turns out to be really damn important. I wouldn't want to trust our future to our ability to engineer an environment.
Who knows. I know that I trust that out of the billions of humans today we'll find a few who can find the utility and invention needed to create tomorrow's world. I don't like to think of us living in vaults because that "invention" is based on yesterday's technology. Yesterday's technology came out of need created by the time before yesterday. Tomorrow's technology will come out of need we face today. Don't sell the future short, especially considering how far we've come in the past 1000 years, 200 years, 100 years, 50 years and 10 years. Humanity is not going to go away, it will just find ways to make life better no matter what seems to happen to the world around us.
I think the point (I didn't RTFA due to the registration) is probably that a doomsday catastrophe would cause such a rapid shift in the world that humanity wouldn't be able to adapt in time. Even if I were to agree with your concept that "given enough time, humans will think their way out of any maze" -- which I'm not sure I do -- the timescales of these things need to be considered. A serious reduction in available food supplies would hit the poor first. Since it's largely the rich who are in positions to make policy changes, by the time the problem started affecting them enough to take action, it might be too late for all of us.
Again, if I'm misunderstanding your post, please accept my apology. But it sounds like you have an awfully optimistic view of the capabilities of humans to adapt.
GMD
I'd recommend getting ahold of the BBC documentary on this topic and this particular researcher: "An Experiment to Save the World". The documentary does a reasonable job of explaining the concept. It's also pretty clear from watching this episode that this particular scientist knows deep down inside that he's a fraud but his conscious mind isn't allowing him to accept the reality that his career is over. He keeps saying stuff like "A have to believe the data" even though the show does a good job of explaining that his data is inconclusive and that the technology that would generate conclusive proof exists. The BBC ends up hiring a rival researcher to use the superior lab equipment to try to confirm bubble fusion. No dice. Of course, the original researcher then claims that he they weren't doing the experiment correctly, but refuses to help them redo the experiment with his special modifications.
Good documentary. It made me want to reach into the TV and strangle that asshole for wasting everyone's time. I hope he gets what's coming to him.
GMD
What? Have you not paid attention to anything going on? The employees lost everything because they were not allowed to divest their interests from Enron into other areas to spread out their risk.
It's not like he held a gun to their head and told them "If I find out you have ever point one dollar into another investment -- including a Savings account or a home -- I will end your life!"
You always have a choice. ALWAYS! If your employer doesn't condone diversification, then you do it outside your retirement account. Or hell, maybe you quit that company and find a better employer. This is the same blog where people routinely advise each other to quit if their boss won't let them install Linux on their desktop, but now everyone is going on about who these people had no choice but to follow Grand Sky Marshall Lay's edicts. Sheesh!
GMD
Unless you are President Clinton, then you get impeached.. And which side of the line did you stand on that issue, I wonder...
Why do you wonder? Why does it matter?
I know what you're thinking: I'm a die-hard Republican who loves money above all else. That's why I'm "defending" Kenneth Lay (which I'm not -- I'm simply pointing out that he's no serial killer). Turns out I have never voted Republican -- and probably never will -- in my entire life. Yup, it's possible to be social liberal and still wish people would exercise some personal responsbility. Pretty radical, huh?
GMD
Working stiffs need to diversify their portfolio? Sure. How many 9-to-5ers do you think putting away $60 a paycheck had the wherewithal to take investing classes for their $10,000 retirement kitty? How many of them do you imagine had financial consultants on payrool?
Diversification is not some advanced financial concept that requires taking investing classes and you know it.
Please. If I mug you the day you happen to have your laptop, iPod, cellphone, PSP, and engagement ring for your girlfriend on you, is it your fault? All those Cambodians get blamed because they put all of their eggs (i.e. their lives) in one basket by living in Cambodia?
I have no say in whether you mug me or not. The people living in Cambodia have no say in whether they can move or not (because they are too poor to move). The people who lost their life savings -- I'm not saying those who lost any money, I'm talking about those who lost everything -- did have a say in whether this would happen to them. If Ken Lay had forced everyone to put all their money in Enron stock at gunpoint, then you'd have a case. And please, don't tell me about how Enron's 401(k) plan required them to buy Enron stock. If that's the case, then you have to get some investments outside your 401(k) plan, even if the company won't match those funds. That was my original point. These people looked at what would get them the most money in the short term and ignored one of the basic tenets of financial management.
Don't be an apologist stooge. It's unbecoming.
I'm not. Kenneth Lay was a bad man. He was not a serial killer, however, and the people who got hurt by the scam must accept some responsibility for their actions.
GMD
Wow you are cold-hearted. You're upset that someone at /. compared him to Ted Bundy, so instead of just disputing it you decided to be an ass and tear down the ex-employees of Enron.
I wouldn't say I'm "upset" but I'm definitely disappointed. This is nothing more than Goodwin's law, slightly modified. Ken Lay is a bad man. We all agree. Why bring Ted Bundy into this?
I wouldn't say that I'm "tearing down" the ex-employees of Enron either. I'm pointing out that they aren't 100% innocent and responsibility-free in all this. Don't be so binary.
You should be sick of yourself.
Well, I'm sick to my stomach with a culture in which people are always looking to blame someone else for their problems. Does that count?
Not everyone knows Financial Planning 101.
That's true. Children don't. These people are adults. Part of being an adult is taking precautions to reduce the likelihood of disaster.
You want to see how one lie ruined lifes then go talk to those whose lifes were ruined.
As I stated in my original post, I do feel sorry for these people. But that doesn't mean I have to portray them as completely helpless individuals who had no role in the disaster that befell them.
It wasn't a simple lie, it was a huge con. Purposely blacking out power to raise your companies stock is more than a lie.
A con is a lie. Was it a "simple" lie? Who cares! It was a lie. It doesn't compare to butchering or bludgeoning someone.
GMD
Ted Bundy was polite and charming too.
Kenneth Lay was obviously not a great humanitarian but comparing him to one of the most notorious serial killers in history is a bit much. He lied, okay? He lied. That's what his crime was. I grow a bit weary of hearing ex-Enron employees wail about how their life-savings are gone thanks to Lay. These poor people need to accept a bit of responsibility for their mess. You never invest all your money in a single company. Diversification is simple Financial Planning 101. Everyone know this. The reason why these people ignored this bedrock of finance is because Enron's stock once did quite well. They figured they'd beat the market, beat the Jones, beat everyone and place their entire bet on the winning horse. Then they could brag to their neighbors about what a financial genius they were. Simply put: these people who were ruined by the Enron scandal got greedy.
Kenneth Lay lied. He didn't destroy the livelihood of scores of people; they did that to themselves. And please spare me the responses about how I'm being cold-hearted. I feel for these people. Losing everything should never happen to anyone. But placing all the blame on one man and comparing him to Ted Bundy sickens me. It's just another example of our victimization culture. No one wants to admit it to themselves that they ruined their lives. They want to believe that some con-man forced them into something and that they had no choice.
GMD
Dude, you're doing it all wrong. You don't put all your good dope in one single post. You gotta spread it out. You've got eight questions? That means you can get eight separately up-modded posts if you play your cards right. It pains me to see someone waste an opportunity to milk their ideas for all the karma/recognition they can get. You've obviously never been a post-doc and been under pressure to churn out N papers each year... :)
GMD
I think the voiceover is useful when seeing the film for the first time because it helps you get into the story a bit more. There's a lot going on and I think the average movie-goer doesn't pick up on it without a helping hand.
Now that having been said, I think the non-voiceover version is better for later viewings. The problem is that you subconsciously identify with Deckard a bit more because he is narrating and "helping" you along. But Deckard is not really a "hero" in any real sense. He may be the main character but he is a drunk who kills escaped slaves -- hardly a noble profession. My feeling is that the voiceover tends to shift the story more into a good-guy-bad-guy dynamic when the point of the story is really that there aren't any good guys or bad guys -- just guys who do what they can to survive. Batty isn't evil; he's desperate. He does terrible things but that's because he's on the edge and trying to find a way to keep himself and the others (Pris) alive in a society where they are viewed as objects instead of beings. Deckard is much the same way. He knows his job is evil and yet he continues to do it because he can't make a living any other way. Deckard and Batty are remarkably similar and the voiceover prevents you from seeing this since you tend to sympathize with someone who's thoughts you can hear.
GMD
I've seen it a couple times on DVD, but a tiny screen does this picture no justice.
I was fortunate enough to first see this as a Midnight Movie when I was a sophomore in college. Jesus, it just blew me away. I've seen in plenty of times since (it's probably my favorite movie) but it's never had quite the same emotional effect on me as it did that first time. I completely agree that a huge screen in a dark room with an awesome sound system is the best way to see this film. Ridley's visuals with the Vangelis score creates a mood that is unsurpassed. You really, truly get a sense of what it would be like to live like Deckard in a burned-out hull of a crumbling world, doing a job that you know is morally wrong. For those of you who have never seen this in the theater, I urge you to pounce on any opportunity to do so. It's an incredible experience.
For all those insipid ads from the MPAA going on about the 'great movie experience', this is the one rare film where it is completely true. Of course, it helps that highschool gangbanger-wannabes aren't going to be attending this film...
GMD
Nonsense, life doesn't even begin until 40, at least if you've done it right.
I'm only 35 now (will be 36 this summer) but already I'm starting to believe kfg's assessment. All my life, I've heard this crap about how the 20s are the best years of your life and 40 is when everything goes to hell. I now believe that's a bunch of crap. Actually, I believe that common perception is probably true for common people. For geeks like us, I think the 30s and 40s are much better than our 20s.
Maybe my experience was a little more extreme than most people's since my 20s were dominated with grad school in an institute with a terrible male-female ratio, but I look back on my 20s and think of them as years where I was busy building up my capabilities. My ability to take care of myself. My ability to cook things other than spagetti and ramen noodles. My ability to prove myself capable of independent, in-depth research. All along I thought I knew what I was going to do when I finished my dissertation (become a professor) but that turned out not to be correct at all.
Now midway through my 30s, I've got a much stronger sense of who I truly am and what my strengths are. I'm still struggling to develop new capabilities and broaden my horizon, but I'm starting to take a little more time to appreciate what I've built so far. Financial decisions that I made back in my 20s because I thought they were the right thing to do are starting to pay off for me now. I'm still very busy but I'm starting to see things in a broader scope than I did when I was so fixated on one or two things in my 20s.
I imagine that my 40s is when I'll truly be content. By then, I imagine I'll be pretty damn comfortable with the person I turned out to be. I'll be able to see how everything fits together in my life much better.
People think of 40s as "over the hill" largely because of physical issues. Yeah, perhaps its true that if you don't take care of yourself that age will start to catch up with you then. But if you eat right and exercise, I think your 40s can be some of your best active years. You shouldn't still be putting in 60-hour weeks in your 40s so you'll have more time for exercising, spending time with the family, and just plan enjoying life. Regarding sports, you might have to take a few more days of layoff between workouts or slow down a bit on the court, but you will find that your increased understanding of tactics, planning, and strategy will make up for it. Yes, even for stuff like weight-training. You'll start to realize that going into the gym 4-6 days a week and blasting your muscles to failure every time in a pathetic attempt to put a half-inch on your arms in time for summer just isn't the smartest approach.
Like kfg says, your 40s should be the best years of your life if you've done it right (e.g., made careful financial decisions, ate healthy, gotten plenty of non-destructive exercise, not completely dedicated yourself to your job). That's how I see it anyhow.
GMD
Gulthek notes that tea is pretty quick and lets you select how much (if any) sweetness to have. One thing to note is that green tea is chock full of healthy stuff. The list of health benefits on that page goes on and on. Of the varieties of tea, green is the least processed which is usually a good indicator that it's the most healthy. Start off by getting some prepackaged stuff just to see if you could like it. If so, then you can start doing your own thing and getting some good-quality stuff.
I know you were asking for a soda substitute that isn't too bad for you. This is one substitute that is actually good for you. Give it a try. You might really like it.
GMD
While I agree with most of what you said, I want to call attention to your last point:
Third, while you might not be able to help people with their grammar or spelling, make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed.
With today's modern spell- and grammar-checkers, I'm not so sure that such things are super-important but what *is* important is good writing. That simply means making yourself understandable. I think you will find that someone who is intelligent and who cares about making themselves understood will automatically become a good writer.
I'll take myself as an example. There are lots of comments in this thread about how you have to read a lot and/or write a lot to become a good writer. The only stuff I read was textbooks and I didn't have time to write very much and yet I still came out alright. When I was finishing up my dissertation, I already had a job lined up and they were routinely calling me to hurry up my thesis and graduate so I could start working for them. Needless to say, my first draft of my dissertation was awful. I just threw it together and gave it to my advisor to look over.
He called me into his office and told me "Your thesis is something that you want to do a good job on. This is something that you want to be proud of." I got the message and resolved to clean up my manuscript. What did I do? I went through my thesis sentence by sentence and asked myself "Is there any way that a reasonably intelligent person is NOT going to understand what I'm saying here?" Man, I gotta tell you that was agonizing fraking work. I would literally spend an entire hour rewriting a single page until I could answer "no" to every sentence. But when it was all done and had submitted it to committee, I had at least one of the professors tell me "This thesis is extremely well-written. Most theses don't come to us like this."
I never read "Elements of Style" (of course, I have that book now), never read very much, and didn't write much either. I sure as hell didn't know anything about proper comma usage. But I was able to produce a technical document that was praised for its clarity. My secret? I gave a shit. I tried hard to make it something that I was proud of. That's all there is too good writing. You don't have to know a lot of rules of grammar or be an exceptional speller. The secret to being a good writer is to take the job seriously. If you are half-way intelligent and care about your audience, you'll figure out what to do.
GMD
Actually, I found the submitters second question to be much more indicitive of the need for "work in this area". I, too, would prefer not to be insulting here but quite honestly if you are asking slashdot readership whether or not you should take the test, that doesn't bode extremely well for your independence and emotional maturity. "Should I do it?" is really a question that only you should answer. Asking a bunch of people who don't know really baffles me. You need to decide whether you truly object to this type of test and an employer that would make you go through this trial. I can tell you what I would do in that situation, but I have different values, economic situation, etc. than you do so my answer doesn't (or shouldn't, at least) mean jack shit to you.
Let me put it this way: if you decide not to go through with this on the basis of our advice and forfeit your chance at working for this company, and later you realize that joining them would have been a wonderful opportunity, who are you going to be upset with? Us, for telling you to turn away from this company? You, for believing that our advice was worth listening to? This decision is important and you shouldn't be so quick to abdicate responsibility over it to people you don't know. Simply put: you shouldn't need us to tell you how you feel about this (or anything else). And that's what this comes down to in the end: how will you feel working at a company that made you go through this?
GMD
The article may have briefly talked about terrorism, but I suspect the real danger comes from state-sponsored cyber-attacks, like from China. Terrorism is just a convenient explanation to use to the public. You can't come out and say you're preparing for an attack by China now, can you?
BTW, for those who think that cyber-warfare is a science-fiction concept, I draw your attention to the following analysis of Operation Allied Force. In particular, the section regarding cyber-attacks on surface-to-air (SAM) missile systems to protect our fighters (F-22, F-35):
Information warfare WILL happen, my friends. In fact, it's happening now. No, you won't find that written up in the newspaper. Do a little bit of googling and see what you come up with. :)
GMD
While I have to agree with everyone who has posted that she doesn't strike me as particularly ravishing, I'm more annoyed with the fact that the submitter has to make any comment at all about her looks. I don't recall any submitted stories that began "Handsome hunk hacker Joe Blow has an article about...". While I'm used to people in the outside world thinking about looks first and substance second, I'm dismayed to find that seems to hold true for slashdot as well.
It's one thing for comments about people's looks to occur in the comments section. Lord knows there's always tons of comments about that one Mythbusters woman everytime a story about that show gets posted. It's more annoying when some comment about a female geek's looks appears on the front page of slashdot. It's almost as though slashdot is officially condoning that kind of crap.
I'm curious to know what the lady nerds here thought when they read the summary. You gals think I'm making too big of a deal of this or are you equally disappointed to find that female geeks are judged first on looks and second on substance?
GMD
The first is the same bread-and-circuses problem that plagued the Roman Empire. As long as they have beer and football, Mountain Dew and XBox, or their cell phones and MTV, most Americans are quite content.
Funny you should mention beer, football, cell phones, mass media, and MTV in your post about why UAV surveillance is evil.
Most people are disgusted by the post-SuperBowl riots that envitably ensue when a few celebrating football fans, drunk with beer, start using the occasion as an opportunity to cause mayhem. UAVs monitoring a crowd can make sure that troublemakers are quickly identified and subdued by police before they incite a violent riot.
MTV and other youth-oriented mass media are fairly blatant in their encouragement of young people to protest the G8 summit or the meeting of the World Bank by going ape shit. Gone are the days of peaceful protests. Leaders of political groups have realized that causing mayhem is one sure-fire way of attracting attention (positive or negative -- it doesn't matter) to their cause and making life tough for their political enemies. Attempts by police to remove troublemakers from the crowd of mostly-peaceful demonstrators is foiled as highly-organized groups use cell phones to adapt to police movements in real-time.
It's a multifaceted problem, and no solution is readily available.
Oh, indeed it is a multifaceted problem. It's not clear to me, however, that you have considered the other facet of surveillance and what it means in today's society. Technology is a tool. It can be used for good or for evil.
GMD