So the real issue isn't forcing quality of students, it's a way for the university and a 3rd party to scam a little cash before taking the next 2-6 years of your life. People really don't realize how poorly this test reflects ability - when I first took it, I took it cold and got a 1300 on it. I bought a cheapo study guide and then made a 2200 on it.
Wait. You are wrong here.
Wrong about what? His scores? You should specifically state what you are objecting to.
Dozens and dozens of my friends and acquaintances (and myself) have taken the GRE, and based on their results, I can assert that, given that you study for the test seriously, it reasonably estimates your general aptitude.
So you can "assert" that this is a good test of aptitude based on a sample size of "dozens and dozens", huh? Gees, I sure hope you didn't pass the GRE Statistics test with flying colors...
And that a GRE score is a reasonable measure of your academic skills, which when used along with other application materials, is really useful for admission decisions.
How many grad school admission boards have you served on? How can you make this statement?
Its almost impossible to compare such students coming from schools which the US schools have never even heard of before, let alone having some knowledge about their education quality. The GRE and other standardized tests are most helpful in this area because each and every student across the world has to give the same test, and hence the scores can be used to compare students coming from very different backgrounds.
That's a good point but the rest of your post is pretty lacking. Be a bit more careful in your responses.
I'm not sure if you've already looked at the FDA's When is LASIK not for me? site but you'd better have a look at their suggested restrictions. Among them: your vision has not stabilzed yet and history of autoimmune diseases.
Does this mean that kiddie porn should be allowed because it allows pedophiles to act out their fantasies in "safe" ways.
The problem with kiddie porn is that children have already been violated in the creation of the material. It's pointless to claim that kiddie porn results in fewer pedophiles acting on their impulses because children have already been harmed. One solution is the so-called virtual kiddie porn which would be an outlet for pedophiles and not have actual children being used to produce the material. However, if Ashcroft and his Goon Squad have their way, that will become illegal too.
I'm not picking on you, Rader, I just think you chose a bad example. Let's consider something different: Japanese hentai anime porn. In these movies, young girls are usually raped by evil monsters or demons. Here, actual people are not being harmed and it could be argued that watching such material is a safe outlet for those who enjoy fantasizing about violent, nonconsentual sex (and there are both men and women who have fantasies like this). I think it's important for those of us who defend violent videogames to keep these sexual examples in the back of our minds because sooner or later some "save the children" organization is going to use them against us. A lot of people who might be willing to accept violent videogames as harmless fun will balk at the hentai movies. Then it will be a simple matter for the anti-videogame crowd to say "You're against violent pornography, then you should be against violent videogames as well." And I argue that it's quite possible that that argument will win over some sitting-on-the-fencers.
With any luck, the anti-music-piracy commericals will be as much a scream as those "Today I killed a judge (because I bought drugs)" drug-terrorism ones:
"Today I starved a song writer"
"I just destroyed a pop-star's lifelong dream."
"Hey, it's not like I'm hurting anyone!" (jump cut to a fired record company executive taking out his anger on his wife and child)
They do their bee dance of course. Bees have a very intricate dance that shows other bees where pollen is, I think scientists had learned how to interpret this dance, if the bees returned and did their dance, humans could go and detonate the mine, or the bees could collectivly sting it repeatedly.
A rare video clip of a person trying to imitate the bee dance can be seen here. Although he's a bit heavier than a bee and the dance isn't very intricate, if you saw this happening, it would sure get your attention!
Scientists have found that it takes less than two hours to use sugar-water rewards to condition a hive of honeybees to eschew flowers and instead hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion.
Yeah, well I'd like to see you go on the O'Reilly Factor and make that case against Bill O'Reilly yourself! He'll eat you alive! It's one thing to rant here on slashdot but when you're face to face with one of the most hard-hitting no-hold-barred talk show hosts on TV today, you'll find yourself at a loss for words!
So when marketing (or whoever makes the decisions) determines that there should be an integrated spell-checker, someone will code it up because that's what they're paid to do.
Actually, that's not really true. Microsoft doesn't code many of the nice features you find in their products, they buy out smaller companies who have already done the work. Check out the "About..." dialog box of your favorite Microsoft Office product and read the fine print. There's a hell of a lot of features in there that are copyrighted to a third party.
Since so much of the code in Microsoft's products is developed by third party sources, it sometimes makes me wonder what the hell their army of programmers actually does all day long...
The Visual Studio IDE integrates everything wonderfully, integrating a really slick editor, a world-class debugger, and a high-quality compiler.
I'm not sure exactly what compiler you are using but the C++ compiler is truly terrible. Besides that fact that they are using an outdated version of the STL libraries, the compiler will let all sorts of crazy errors through that gcc will catch. For those of you who use VC++, I would encourage you to set aside perhaps 2 weeks where you compile both on VC++ and gcc. You'll be stunned at the number of errors that gcc will catch but VC++ will let slip through. Lord only knows what the VC++ compiled code is actually doing...
While I'm not familiar with Kevin's case, I've been in a similar situation before. Bank A would not patch their holes in their banking websites. I notified them again and again. After months waiting, I went public. Problem was solved the NEXT DAY! It was simply a matter of getting the right people to make it a priority. I feel that this is completely morally justified and I don't think that the bug was exploited, and I don't think that USERS were harmed just because it was public.
Congrats on getting the bank to do something. And your sentence makes it clear that you feel that you deserve the credit for getting the bank to fix this.
Now I am wondering: what if the bank did not fix this problem the next day? And what if some cracker/con-artist used your publically-disclosed exploit to cause significant damage to the accounts of one or more bank's customers? Would you be willing to take the blame for this? Yes, the bank should have fixed the problem and you gave them ample opportunity to solve the problem themselves. But I would argue that, yes, you do bear some responsibility in this case. But that's just my opinion. I am curious what yours is.
You are very eager to take the credit for a case when a public exploit resulted in something beneficial. Would you also be willing to take the blame if your actions had had disasterous consequences? If so, then I salute you as a fair man/woman/slashkitty. If not, I wish I could smack you upside the head.
Facter writes "There is a great article at CNet..." but I wasn't so impressed. This example of Kevin Finisterre isn't really that amazing. Finisterre's employee publically disclosed the vulnerability. You gotta expect to piss off HP when you do something like that. Look, I'm a fan of open-source software and I understand that publically disclosing software bugs is one way of motivating a lazy company to plug those holes but I'm not sure you can really defend this ethically. If you find a bug in Company A's software, then let A know about it. If A decides not to do anything about it (or if they are taking longer to plug the hole than you thought) I don't see how you are morally justified in leaking that info to the world.
Finisterre, who was not hired by HP, now says he'll think twice before voluntarily informing another company of any security holes he finds.
This is just silly. If he had just informed HP, there wouldn't have been a problem. However, his employee decided to inform the entire world and that's what triggered HP's retalliation. If Finisterre and his employees restrict themselves to informing the company, they should be okay.
The rest of the CNET article is okay. But starting off with such a stupid example really weakens the story. They could have started off this story with the Sklyarov example. That would make a stronger case for the idiocy of the DMCA.
GMD
text-to-speech math stuff?
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
reading packets, etc. into electronic text(RTF or Word) that is either going to be fed to a text-to-speech synthesizer or going to be further processed for use in braille devices.
- capability to OCR matematical texts and papers. Currently we hand type math textbooks for students."
I pity the kids who are going to have to listen to "fluid dynamics on tape":
"Partial rho partial t plus rho times left parenthesis partial u partial x plus partial v partial y plus partial w partial z right parenthesis equals zero".
Force her to learn math despite the fact that she hates it. Eventually, she will grow up highly intellegnt and very angry, and take over the world!!
Yeah, and make sure you force her to dress in very ugly, oversized clothes. That way when she does become a supervillaness she'll want to parade around in skin-tight spandex outfits like the ones in the comic books! Catwoman: rrawr!
Hey, you want your daughter to be successful, right? Every time the news reports about how she managed to steal some rare jewel you can get all teary-eyed and tell everyone "That's my little girl. She was always so clever."
Yes! Lucas needed to whittle the Jedi down in a tragic and colorful way. But couldn't he have shown them suffering calamity despite behaving cleverly and well? Doesn't he have peers to workshop this stuff against?
Good question but I suspect that Lucas honestly believes that he has no peers. It's unfortunate because the scripts that came out of his colaboration with Kasdan were pretty good, IMHO. Yes, I know Lucas co-wrote AOTC with someone from Indiana Jones Chronicles but I argue that this guy was just a yes-man for Lucas. Lucas really needs to team up with a good, known writer to come up with an interesting story for Episode 3. Maybe he'll come to his senses and realize that he needs some help in the script department for his final Star Wars film. We can only hope.
Why the fuck do people insist on putting "Ph.D." after everything they write? Am I supposed to respect his opinion on science fiction more because he has a doctorate in some field? Forget that shit. What if his doctorate was in sociology? I have a Ph.D., too. So what? Do I get bonus mod points if I change my login name to GuyMannDude, Ph.D.?
Come on, all you "Ask Google" critics, fess up -- where do you think people should turn instead of Ask Slashdot?"
Am I the only one who took this as an attack on slashdot readership? It's like he's goading us into a fight. Besides, the question is rediculous. What do you think an "Ask Google" critic is going to suggest? Sheesh.
IMHO, the Ask Slashdot forum should be primarily for questions that do not have a straightfoward, logical, correct answer. This kind of information, such as how to network your 4-in-1 printer, can be obtained through numerous outlets (and, no, I'm not going to list those here -- read the other posts). The Ask Slashdot questions ought to be to stimulate discussion on issues that are not clear-cut and have no "right" answer. Slashdot has an intelligent readership that has a very diverse set of opinions. Asking a question here is likely to get you a wide range of interesting answers. That, my friends is one of the things that differentiates slashdot from a google search. Again, just MHO.
Great premise, likeable characters and good actors.
Boy am I ever stunned to read this. You actually like the characters? I've always thought that the unlikeableness (is that a word? no? oh well...) of the characters it the main reason why I think the show is below average. I'm curious as to which characters you like. I've always liked The Original Series, even with it's hokey elements, because I respected the characters. I would have loved to serve on board the Enterprise under Kirk because I respected the abilities and personalities of the crew. But here's how I see the Enterprise crew under Archer:
Archer: way too anxious to prove the Vulcans wrong. Doesn't stop to think before he does something.
T'Pol: For someone who is supposedly devoid of emotions, she acts like a pouty little child an awful lot.
3rd in command (whatever his name is): Whines a hell of a lot.
Hoshi: Probably competant in her work but you really can't trust her to keep her head when things get rough.
Doctor: Need I say anything here?
Well, I could go on and on. I understand that this show is supposed to be about mankind's first tentative steps into space so please spare me the follow-up posts telling me that the characters ought to be poor at their jobs. It's just that it's not interesting to me to watch people who seem borderline-incompetant representing humanity in space. I would certainly not want to serve aboard Archer's Enterprise. I would fear for my safety and I sure wouldn't be able to take orders from the meatheads in charge.
Honestly, people really like the Enterprise crew? I'm still stunned about this. Is it just me who finds this new group as unpalatable as the Voyager group (and, yes, I realize I'm inviting jokes about 'palatable' and how that word relates to 7of9 or T'Pol)?
Yes because of these TWO examples, the whole body of work from the physics community is a total and complete farce.
Well, this emphasis by the media on fraudulent cases really is a big problem. I would wager that a lot of John and/or Jane Does out there are probably thinking the same thing. You are correct that it's only two high-profile cases but you rarely hear about the successes that physics has. In fact, I bet if you say the words "Hubble Telescope" to most people, they'll respond with something along the lines of "Isn't that the orbital telescope that doesn't work because NASA didn't check the mirrors?" The fact that Hubble has given us incredible images never got the press that the original blunder did.
This can become a real problem if people start lobbying their representative and senators to stop funding science. Rather than screaming at Michael, why don't we all take time to reflect on how unfortunate it is that science fraud makes news while science successes never get more than a brief mention.
It might have been somewhat interesting but it most certainly could have been better. Take this snipit, for example:
Industry studies point out that for every hit the business scores, it loses $6.3 million on albums that tank. Fewer than 5% of signed artists deliver a hit.
These are meaningless statistics because it doesn't say how much money a hit is worth. If every "hit the business scores" is worth $50 million, than that $6.3 million number is quite acceptable. They shouldn't compare apples with oranges -- that doesn't help us understand whether the point being made is valid or not.
Are you kidding? I've seen it so many times that I can close my eyes and see the scene where they make her ride the K-Mart horse thingie.
I was personally happy when she won the Oscar for her work. Let's face it, she's paid her dues in Hollywood. She had to do a lot of borderline-sexploitation stuff when she was younger. I mean, she spends the last third of that movie in a skin-tight white tanktop with no bra on underneath while her co-stars are practically drooling at her chest.
That having been said, I can pretty much replay all her scenes in that movie over in my head, too:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a grueling test that will ruin your day. Takes about 3-4 hours. The best part is that it's on computer and you get your scores instantly.
That way it can ruin your night as well...
GMD
So the real issue isn't forcing quality of students, it's a way for the university and a 3rd party to scam a little cash before taking the next 2-6 years of your life. People really don't realize how poorly this test reflects ability - when I first took it, I took it cold and got a 1300 on it. I bought a cheapo study guide and then made a 2200 on it.
Wait. You are wrong here.
Wrong about what? His scores? You should specifically state what you are objecting to.
Dozens and dozens of my friends and acquaintances (and myself) have taken the GRE, and based on their results, I can assert that, given that you study for the test seriously, it reasonably estimates your general aptitude.
So you can "assert" that this is a good test of aptitude based on a sample size of "dozens and dozens", huh? Gees, I sure hope you didn't pass the GRE Statistics test with flying colors...
And that a GRE score is a reasonable measure of your academic skills, which when used along with other application materials, is really useful for admission decisions.
How many grad school admission boards have you served on? How can you make this statement?
Its almost impossible to compare such students coming from schools which the US schools have never even heard of before, let alone having some knowledge about their education quality. The GRE and other standardized tests are most helpful in this area because each and every student across the world has to give the same test, and hence the scores can be used to compare students coming from very different backgrounds.
That's a good point but the rest of your post is pretty lacking. Be a bit more careful in your responses.
GMD
I'm not sure if you've already looked at the FDA's When is LASIK not for me? site but you'd better have a look at their suggested restrictions. Among them: your vision has not stabilzed yet and history of autoimmune diseases.
GMD
The attacks on SEPTEMBER 11 have AFFECTED ME VERY DEEPLY. If this ASS HOLE is ALLOWED to KEEP THIS TITLE, I will kill myself.
Society's loss, I guess...
GMD
Does this mean that kiddie porn should be allowed because it allows pedophiles to act out their fantasies in "safe" ways.
The problem with kiddie porn is that children have already been violated in the creation of the material. It's pointless to claim that kiddie porn results in fewer pedophiles acting on their impulses because children have already been harmed. One solution is the so-called virtual kiddie porn which would be an outlet for pedophiles and not have actual children being used to produce the material. However, if Ashcroft and his Goon Squad have their way, that will become illegal too.
I'm not picking on you, Rader, I just think you chose a bad example. Let's consider something different: Japanese hentai anime porn. In these movies, young girls are usually raped by evil monsters or demons. Here, actual people are not being harmed and it could be argued that watching such material is a safe outlet for those who enjoy fantasizing about violent, nonconsentual sex (and there are both men and women who have fantasies like this). I think it's important for those of us who defend violent videogames to keep these sexual examples in the back of our minds because sooner or later some "save the children" organization is going to use them against us. A lot of people who might be willing to accept violent videogames as harmless fun will balk at the hentai movies. Then it will be a simple matter for the anti-videogame crowd to say "You're against violent pornography, then you should be against violent videogames as well." And I argue that it's quite possible that that argument will win over some sitting-on-the-fencers.
GMD
With any luck, the anti-music-piracy commericals will be as much a scream as those "Today I killed a judge (because I bought drugs)" drug-terrorism ones:
GMD
They do their bee dance of course. Bees have a very intricate dance that shows other bees where pollen is, I think scientists had learned how to interpret this dance, if the bees returned and did their dance, humans could go and detonate the mine, or the bees could collectivly sting it repeatedly.
A rare video clip of a person trying to imitate the bee dance can be seen here. Although he's a bit heavier than a bee and the dance isn't very intricate, if you saw this happening, it would sure get your attention!
GMD
Scientists have found that it takes less than two hours to use sugar-water rewards to condition a hive of honeybees to eschew flowers and instead hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion.
Taken from a previous NYT article (mirror 1, mirror 2)
GMD
Yeah, well I'd like to see you go on the O'Reilly Factor and make that case against Bill O'Reilly yourself! He'll eat you alive! It's one thing to rant here on slashdot but when you're face to face with one of the most hard-hitting no-hold-barred talk show hosts on TV today, you'll find yourself at a loss for words!
Oh wait...
GMD
So when marketing (or whoever makes the decisions) determines that there should be an integrated spell-checker, someone will code it up because that's what they're paid to do.
Actually, that's not really true. Microsoft doesn't code many of the nice features you find in their products, they buy out smaller companies who have already done the work. Check out the "About..." dialog box of your favorite Microsoft Office product and read the fine print. There's a hell of a lot of features in there that are copyrighted to a third party.
Since so much of the code in Microsoft's products is developed by third party sources, it sometimes makes me wonder what the hell their army of programmers actually does all day long...
GMD
The Visual Studio IDE integrates everything wonderfully, integrating a really slick editor, a world-class debugger, and a high-quality compiler.
I'm not sure exactly what compiler you are using but the C++ compiler is truly terrible. Besides that fact that they are using an outdated version of the STL libraries, the compiler will let all sorts of crazy errors through that gcc will catch. For those of you who use VC++, I would encourage you to set aside perhaps 2 weeks where you compile both on VC++ and gcc. You'll be stunned at the number of errors that gcc will catch but VC++ will let slip through. Lord only knows what the VC++ compiled code is actually doing...
GMD
GMD
While I'm not familiar with Kevin's case, I've been in a similar situation before. Bank A would not patch their holes in their banking websites. I notified them again and again. After months waiting, I went public. Problem was solved the NEXT DAY! It was simply a matter of getting the right people to make it a priority. I feel that this is completely morally justified and I don't think that the bug was exploited, and I don't think that USERS were harmed just because it was public.
Congrats on getting the bank to do something. And your sentence makes it clear that you feel that you deserve the credit for getting the bank to fix this.
Now I am wondering: what if the bank did not fix this problem the next day? And what if some cracker/con-artist used your publically-disclosed exploit to cause significant damage to the accounts of one or more bank's customers? Would you be willing to take the blame for this? Yes, the bank should have fixed the problem and you gave them ample opportunity to solve the problem themselves. But I would argue that, yes, you do bear some responsibility in this case. But that's just my opinion. I am curious what yours is.
You are very eager to take the credit for a case when a public exploit resulted in something beneficial. Would you also be willing to take the blame if your actions had had disasterous consequences? If so, then I salute you as a fair man/woman/slashkitty. If not, I wish I could smack you upside the head.
GMD
Facter writes "There is a great article at CNet..." but I wasn't so impressed. This example of Kevin Finisterre isn't really that amazing. Finisterre's employee publically disclosed the vulnerability. You gotta expect to piss off HP when you do something like that. Look, I'm a fan of open-source software and I understand that publically disclosing software bugs is one way of motivating a lazy company to plug those holes but I'm not sure you can really defend this ethically. If you find a bug in Company A's software, then let A know about it. If A decides not to do anything about it (or if they are taking longer to plug the hole than you thought) I don't see how you are morally justified in leaking that info to the world.
Finisterre, who was not hired by HP, now says he'll think twice before voluntarily informing another company of any security holes he finds.
This is just silly. If he had just informed HP, there wouldn't have been a problem. However, his employee decided to inform the entire world and that's what triggered HP's retalliation. If Finisterre and his employees restrict themselves to informing the company, they should be okay.
The rest of the CNET article is okay. But starting off with such a stupid example really weakens the story. They could have started off this story with the Sklyarov example. That would make a stronger case for the idiocy of the DMCA.
GMD
reading packets, etc. into electronic text(RTF or Word) that is either going to be fed to a text-to-speech synthesizer or going to be further processed for use in braille devices.
- capability to OCR matematical texts and papers. Currently we hand type math textbooks for students."
I pity the kids who are going to have to listen to "fluid dynamics on tape":
"Partial rho partial t plus rho times left parenthesis partial u partial x plus partial v partial y plus partial w partial z right parenthesis equals zero".GMD
Force her to learn math despite the fact that she hates it. Eventually, she will grow up highly intellegnt and very angry, and take over the world!!
Yeah, and make sure you force her to dress in very ugly, oversized clothes. That way when she does become a supervillaness she'll want to parade around in skin-tight spandex outfits like the ones in the comic books! Catwoman: rrawr!
Hey, you want your daughter to be successful, right? Every time the news reports about how she managed to steal some rare jewel you can get all teary-eyed and tell everyone "That's my little girl. She was always so clever."
GMD
The man worked hard to get his doctorate, and you bitch about him showing his accomplishments on his sleeve? Bugger off, mate.
That's "Dr. Mate" to you, A.C.!
GMD, Ph.D.
Yes! Lucas needed to whittle the Jedi down in a tragic and colorful way. But couldn't he have shown them suffering calamity despite behaving cleverly and well? Doesn't he have peers to workshop this stuff against?
Good question but I suspect that Lucas honestly believes that he has no peers. It's unfortunate because the scripts that came out of his colaboration with Kasdan were pretty good, IMHO. Yes, I know Lucas co-wrote AOTC with someone from Indiana Jones Chronicles but I argue that this guy was just a yes-man for Lucas. Lucas really needs to team up with a good, known writer to come up with an interesting story for Episode 3. Maybe he'll come to his senses and realize that he needs some help in the script department for his final Star Wars film. We can only hope.
GMD
Why the fuck do people insist on putting "Ph.D." after everything they write? Am I supposed to respect his opinion on science fiction more because he has a doctorate in some field? Forget that shit. What if his doctorate was in sociology? I have a Ph.D., too. So what? Do I get bonus mod points if I change my login name to GuyMannDude, Ph.D.?
GMD
Come on, all you "Ask Google" critics, fess up -- where do you think people should turn instead of Ask Slashdot?"
Am I the only one who took this as an attack on slashdot readership? It's like he's goading us into a fight. Besides, the question is rediculous. What do you think an "Ask Google" critic is going to suggest? Sheesh.
IMHO, the Ask Slashdot forum should be primarily for questions that do not have a straightfoward, logical, correct answer. This kind of information, such as how to network your 4-in-1 printer, can be obtained through numerous outlets (and, no, I'm not going to list those here -- read the other posts). The Ask Slashdot questions ought to be to stimulate discussion on issues that are not clear-cut and have no "right" answer. Slashdot has an intelligent readership that has a very diverse set of opinions. Asking a question here is likely to get you a wide range of interesting answers. That, my friends is one of the things that differentiates slashdot from a google search. Again, just MHO.
GMD
Great premise, likeable characters and good actors.
Boy am I ever stunned to read this. You actually like the characters? I've always thought that the unlikeableness (is that a word? no? oh well...) of the characters it the main reason why I think the show is below average. I'm curious as to which characters you like. I've always liked The Original Series, even with it's hokey elements, because I respected the characters. I would have loved to serve on board the Enterprise under Kirk because I respected the abilities and personalities of the crew. But here's how I see the Enterprise crew under Archer:
Well, I could go on and on. I understand that this show is supposed to be about mankind's first tentative steps into space so please spare me the follow-up posts telling me that the characters ought to be poor at their jobs. It's just that it's not interesting to me to watch people who seem borderline-incompetant representing humanity in space. I would certainly not want to serve aboard Archer's Enterprise. I would fear for my safety and I sure wouldn't be able to take orders from the meatheads in charge.
Honestly, people really like the Enterprise crew? I'm still stunned about this. Is it just me who finds this new group as unpalatable as the Voyager group (and, yes, I realize I'm inviting jokes about 'palatable' and how that word relates to 7of9 or T'Pol)?
GMD
Yes because of these TWO examples, the whole body of work from the physics community is a total and complete farce.
Well, this emphasis by the media on fraudulent cases really is a big problem. I would wager that a lot of John and/or Jane Does out there are probably thinking the same thing. You are correct that it's only two high-profile cases but you rarely hear about the successes that physics has. In fact, I bet if you say the words "Hubble Telescope" to most people, they'll respond with something along the lines of "Isn't that the orbital telescope that doesn't work because NASA didn't check the mirrors?" The fact that Hubble has given us incredible images never got the press that the original blunder did.
This can become a real problem if people start lobbying their representative and senators to stop funding science. Rather than screaming at Michael, why don't we all take time to reflect on how unfortunate it is that science fraud makes news while science successes never get more than a brief mention.
GMD
An interesting article by all means.
It might have been somewhat interesting but it most certainly could have been better. Take this snipit, for example:
Industry studies point out that for every hit the business scores, it loses $6.3 million on albums that tank. Fewer than 5% of signed artists deliver a hit.
These are meaningless statistics because it doesn't say how much money a hit is worth. If every "hit the business scores" is worth $50 million, than that $6.3 million number is quite acceptable. They shouldn't compare apples with oranges -- that doesn't help us understand whether the point being made is valid or not.
GMD
All movies, even light-hearted comic romances, should have Joe Peschi beaten severely and buried alive.
You mis-spelled his name. It's P-a-u-l-y S-h-o-r-e.
GMD
Are you kidding? I've seen it so many times that I can close my eyes and see the scene where they make her ride the K-Mart horse thingie.
I was personally happy when she won the Oscar for her work. Let's face it, she's paid her dues in Hollywood. She had to do a lot of borderline-sexploitation stuff when she was younger. I mean, she spends the last third of that movie in a skin-tight white tanktop with no bra on underneath while her co-stars are practically drooling at her chest.
That having been said, I can pretty much replay all her scenes in that movie over in my head, too :)
GMD