An excellent post. Were I currently in possession of mod points, they would be yours.
I think the religious lobby pushing this 'controversy' are perhaps smarter (or at least better manipulators) than we give them credit for. They know that we (and by 'we' in this context I mean the general scientific community) would be negating our own arguments if we were not to accept objective facts. Those on the religious side of the argument have realised that if they hit us with facts (such as that evolution is a simplification), however out-of-context or irrelevant they may be, we will always be willing to concede to those facts - our logical integrity gives no other option - but in a political environment, conceding that the opposition's point is valid (whether or not it supports their overall argument) is almost seen as tantamount to endorsing their viewpoint.
So don't always dismiss imposed diversity as sexism, because it's not.
Perhaps a nit-pick, but it is by definition sexism - the treatment of otherwise identical participants is varied based on gender. The question is whether it is valid to balance 'bad sexism' with 'good sexism' or not.
What you say about Wikipedia's structure and ingrained problems seems reasonable, if unnecessarily combative, but to draw from that the conclusion that it's "a lousy resource for documentation of anything that happened prior to 1990" is absolutely asinine. For all its problems, Wikipedia still provides excellent information on anything from particle physics to historical figures to linguistics. It might not be as deep as an expensive specialist textbook, and the work that goes into articles that many people consider pointless may well outweigh the work that goes into 'useful' articles, but those by no means negate the value of the site as a whole. I don't care what percentage of it's articles are 'worthwhile', I care that in absolute terms there are many thousands of accurate, well-referenced and coherent articles on a wide array of topics.
I'm a miserable bastard, I know, but my take on this would be that your actions as an individual are insignificant to the point of being negligible, and history shows that your chances of influencing others by your example are also near zero. Realistically the chances are that you're not assisting those worse off than yourself, you're just giving another opportunity for gain to the self-serving asshats who exploit the system for all it's worth.
Yes, it can be a problem, but the 1 watt laser like is found as a driver for a fiber optic communications link is generally quite harmless. If a science "kit" has one of them, you don't have to panic merely because of the word "laser".
Although I'm certainly no expert, I've done enough work in optics labs to know a bit about the tech - I assure you that I'm not just going on gut feeling and declaring that lasers in general are dangerous.
As another poster said, a 1W visible light laser is plenty to cause retinal damage even from diffuse reflections at close range. A blue beam of that power exceeds the maximum safe skin exposure by a factor of about 75 - it's quite capable of causing burns or potentially even skin cancer; that's a relatively low risk, but it's good for a sense of perspective (no pun intended) when considering what it could do to your eyes. Specular reflection, depending on range, can cause permanent retinal burns before the blink reflex can kick in.
I'd say a kid would be safer with a bag of thermite and an ignition source than a Class 4 laser. The risks of the former are obvious and well contained, the risks of the latter are not.
Talk about "sensible legal systems" all that you want. That's just not the reality, however.
As I pointed out, it is in some countries. There's no real reason the US system couldn't be reformed somewhat; given the widespread support it would garner (even those who abuse the system don't like to think they're doing so) I doubt it'd even be that politically difficult.
Why should a doctor go unpaid after rendering medical services to your son, just because you were an irresponsible parent? Why should your neighbor have to cover the cost of damage that your son inflicted?
They shouldn't. Why should the chemistry set manufacturer have to?
When you're suddenly facing a $650,000 medical bill because your child splashed acid in his eyes or crushed his genitals with a "supermagnet"
Medical insurance doesn't cover accidents?
and then you're facing a further $300,000 in repairs to your neighbor's house and property due to damage that his "science" caused
If the kid can cause $300k in damage with the basic ingredients from a science set, they deserve a job with the DoD. I guess they could burn the house to the ground, but then you can do that with a box of matches.
I think you'd see the appeal in launching a lawsuit against the science kit manufacturer
Sure. And any sensible legal system would then tell the parent to fuck straight off and supervise their kid next time. 'Guns don't kill people, people do' and all that, after all...
You've got right to the heart of the problem here - that people can pass the buck for their own mistakes and the courts will sometimes uphold that. It's a risk companies can't afford to take. Look at New Zealand's liability laws, and you'll see how it should be done so as not to stifle anything that could be remotely considered risky.
Incidentally, the one thing I probably wouldn't want to see in a science kit is the 1 watt laser. If your kid doesn't understand the dangers of acid, you leave them to play with it, and they blind themselves, that's your problem; any idiot could've seen that one coming. The chances of them accidentally blowing up a neighbour's house are slim-to-none - if they're crazy enough to deliberately blow up a neighbour's house then you've got all kinds of other problems. If they put on their tinted goggles, turn on the laser, and accidentally knock it so the beam reflects off a car mirror three houses away, that could very easily blind me, and that's something I do care about. I still wouldn't want to see the things banned, but I think 'sensible handling' of high powered lasers is beyond the knowledge of most people, whereas sensible handling of chemicals is generally pretty self-explanatory.
That's an awful nice schedule you got there, Senator, be a shame if someone were to put you on the No Fly list!
Particularly worrying is the fact that recent developments suggest that they could very easily do exactly that - oversight seems to be pretty much non-existent. Unfortunately, the news media seem less than concerned about this one - I'm not suggesting any government conspiracy, it's just surprising given their common cries of "the sky is falling" to boost sales.
Detectors definitely sound like a decent idea, although the guards would need to respond quickly enough (and the locator would need to be accurate enough) that the inmate didn't have time to conceal the phone and move away or merge with a group of other prisoners.
I don’t see how this kind of stuff could make it in, in the quantities that it does, without at least a little help.
Although I don't doubt that staff are part of the problem, I've heard that the common vector for smuggling is simply throwing stuff over the walls. A good arm or a simple catapult is plenty to get over even a significant fence, it's relatively low risk, and even if some packages do get intercepted, it's economical to just keep going (especially if phones are selling at a markup like that).
The GP post said two orders of magnitude, so that's the difference between 2 hours and just over one minute. Without wanting to sound like I'm saying '640kb should be enough for anybody', there is only so much data one can reasonably consume - if you can download films 100 times faster than you can watch them, you'll only be saturating 1% of the pipe for the duration of the movie (or the entire pipe for 1% of the time, to buffer, and then nothing for the remaining 99%).
To an extent, we would undoubtedly find new data-intensive uses for the bandwidth if it became available, but it does appear that home computing tech is reaching something of a plateau. It might well be the case that a significant enough upgrade really would mean "enough bandwidth for all" rather than just encouraging greater usage.
According to TFA, some of the porn studios (evidently the ones who do understand this here intarweb thing) provide free content as a promotional tool for their paid sites.
He's not just some pure mathematics professor in a university office somewhere; TFA mentions "...his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies..." so I'm not that surprised to hear he's making decent money already. From the (brief) picture the article paints of him, I get the impression that he's a nice enough guy - if he's on one or two hundred thousand a year I'm sure he's free from worries about money and can afford various shiny luxuries, but thinking "I've just cracked the lottery" would probably flash up an idea of multiple millions in a matter of months - that's rich as in "Aston Martin or Lamborghini" rather than rich as in "decent house, nice suits, and a good holiday every year".
"I remember thinking, I'm gonna be rich! I'm gonna plunder the lottery!" he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. "Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited," Srivastava says. "I'd have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That's not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets."
Seems like a decent, down-to-earth guy; he's pretty well off already (six figure salary, if he's making more than $600/day), so I'm sure it's a prospect that was easier for him to forego than most, but it looks like he's got a good balance between the comfort of money and enjoyment of his work.
Amazon/Kindle has made a big deal about how books you buy from them are tied to your account, so it doesn't matter what device you're using or what device you originally bought the books on, you'll have access to all your stuff
You'll have access to all your books as long as Amazon decides to give your device support for the Kindle format and associated DRM (meaning Kindle only if you want an e-ink reader, and perhaps not the iPad for much longer if they decide to play hardball and let Apple pull the Kindle app), and as long as they keep the download server available. Being beholden to a single company, be it Apple, Amazon or any other, is not what I'd call portable.
DRM free ePubs (or any other freely documented standard) are the only option if you want to know your books are going to be usable on contemporary devices in future, either through direct support for the ePub or through conversion to a newer format.
eBook prices are rather close to printed book prices because apparently the printing costs are very low (or so I've read...)
To say that per-unit printing costs are very low is true but misleading; once you've added in storage, distribution, and the initial overhead required to produce a print run of economical size, it has a significant impact on the market.
At a slightly more abstract level, the fact that a large quantity of start up capital (for the initial run of 'x' thousand books) is no longer necessary greatly reduces the necessity of a publisher in general. Without a publisher in the middle taking a significant cut, prices can drop like a stone. They still serve some use as marketers, but they're trying to hold their position as patrons to whom the artists are beholden, and that's going to change soon whether they like it or not.
I'd say that portability (and, by extension, longevity) is very important, especially considering that eBooks are often not cheap. Currently ePub is a decent bet - it's supported by most readers (iPad, nook, Sony's range, etc.) and is a fairly simple open format, so even if it's not directly supported in future devices it will be easy to convert without loss of formatting and so forth. The one notable exception here is the Kindle, which requires books to be converted into its own format before reading.
The real problem, though is that if it's DRM'ed it's not portable, and can't be converted to another format. There are very few DRM free options out there, and none that do exist have the range that the major sellers do. Currently Apple forces sellers to use DRM, whether the author and publisher want to or not - I'm not sure how strong the DRM on Apple purchases is, but even so I'd recommend against supporting that behaviour by purchasing from them.
Red headings are "mysterious future" articles - the brief preview that subscribers get before they're posted publicly. I've been seeing them occasionally, too, so it's either a glitch with the new design or somehow related to the "Ads Disabled. Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" box that you get for spending far to much time here without subscribing.
In my experience there are two basic classes of non-techie user: there are the utterly, wilfully ignorant morons, and there's really nothing that can be done about them, but there are also a very large number of users who (admittedly foolishly) panic as soon as they sit at a computer and don't think to try to read/comprehend that dialog on their screen - if it's on a computer it's somehow "different"; these types you can normally hand a copy of this, with a smile, and they'll actually be sorting their own problems pretty quickly (although admittedly with the occasional solution of this nature).
No, something has changed. Previously a tripped moisture sensor would be grounds for an immediately voided warranty, now they'll take other points into account (presumably including, but not limited to, whether there is any other evidence of liquid damage, how convincing the customer's story is, how good a mood the manager is in that day, how attractive the customer is, how much fuss the customer kicks up, and the proximity of that day's lunch break).
First example, fair enough. I don't know about the second, though; the customer was clearly a moron, but that doesn't change the fact that one could make a very reasonable argument that a mobile phone which fails in the rain is not fit for purpose. Obviously there isn't enough detail to know for sure - if they left it out in a monsoon then I'm certainly not blaming the company for the phone's failure - but the reasoning sounds dubious.
By voting for representatives, you are seen as having had your say - it's not "the government" making the rules, it's "the people" doing so by proxy. Or so the theory goes.
Those in power might well act as if they know best, but at the end of the day they are, to some extent, beholden to the people. We can and do get rid of them if they piss us off too badly. I know it doesn't work that well, but it's still a damn sight better than being told "We are right, if you disagree you are a dangerous subversive, and there's not a thing you can do about it.".
Slashdot Mirror
An excellent post. Were I currently in possession of mod points, they would be yours.
I think the religious lobby pushing this 'controversy' are perhaps smarter (or at least better manipulators) than we give them credit for. They know that we (and by 'we' in this context I mean the general scientific community) would be negating our own arguments if we were not to accept objective facts. Those on the religious side of the argument have realised that if they hit us with facts (such as that evolution is a simplification), however out-of-context or irrelevant they may be, we will always be willing to concede to those facts - our logical integrity gives no other option - but in a political environment, conceding that the opposition's point is valid (whether or not it supports their overall argument) is almost seen as tantamount to endorsing their viewpoint.
So don't always dismiss imposed diversity as sexism, because it's not.
Perhaps a nit-pick, but it is by definition sexism - the treatment of otherwise identical participants is varied based on gender. The question is whether it is valid to balance 'bad sexism' with 'good sexism' or not.
What you say about Wikipedia's structure and ingrained problems seems reasonable, if unnecessarily combative, but to draw from that the conclusion that it's "a lousy resource for documentation of anything that happened prior to 1990" is absolutely asinine. For all its problems, Wikipedia still provides excellent information on anything from particle physics to historical figures to linguistics. It might not be as deep as an expensive specialist textbook, and the work that goes into articles that many people consider pointless may well outweigh the work that goes into 'useful' articles, but those by no means negate the value of the site as a whole. I don't care what percentage of it's articles are 'worthwhile', I care that in absolute terms there are many thousands of accurate, well-referenced and coherent articles on a wide array of topics.
I'm a miserable bastard, I know, but my take on this would be that your actions as an individual are insignificant to the point of being negligible, and history shows that your chances of influencing others by your example are also near zero. Realistically the chances are that you're not assisting those worse off than yourself, you're just giving another opportunity for gain to the self-serving asshats who exploit the system for all it's worth.
Yes, it can be a problem, but the 1 watt laser like is found as a driver for a fiber optic communications link is generally quite harmless. If a science "kit" has one of them, you don't have to panic merely because of the word "laser".
Although I'm certainly no expert, I've done enough work in optics labs to know a bit about the tech - I assure you that I'm not just going on gut feeling and declaring that lasers in general are dangerous.
As another poster said, a 1W visible light laser is plenty to cause retinal damage even from diffuse reflections at close range. A blue beam of that power exceeds the maximum safe skin exposure by a factor of about 75 - it's quite capable of causing burns or potentially even skin cancer; that's a relatively low risk, but it's good for a sense of perspective (no pun intended) when considering what it could do to your eyes. Specular reflection, depending on range, can cause permanent retinal burns before the blink reflex can kick in.
I'd say a kid would be safer with a bag of thermite and an ignition source than a Class 4 laser. The risks of the former are obvious and well contained, the risks of the latter are not.
Talk about "sensible legal systems" all that you want. That's just not the reality, however.
As I pointed out, it is in some countries. There's no real reason the US system couldn't be reformed somewhat; given the widespread support it would garner (even those who abuse the system don't like to think they're doing so) I doubt it'd even be that politically difficult.
Why should a doctor go unpaid after rendering medical services to your son, just because you were an irresponsible parent? Why should your neighbor have to cover the cost of damage that your son inflicted?
They shouldn't. Why should the chemistry set manufacturer have to?
When you're suddenly facing a $650,000 medical bill because your child splashed acid in his eyes or crushed his genitals with a "supermagnet"
Medical insurance doesn't cover accidents?
and then you're facing a further $300,000 in repairs to your neighbor's house and property due to damage that his "science" caused
If the kid can cause $300k in damage with the basic ingredients from a science set, they deserve a job with the DoD. I guess they could burn the house to the ground, but then you can do that with a box of matches.
I think you'd see the appeal in launching a lawsuit against the science kit manufacturer
Sure. And any sensible legal system would then tell the parent to fuck straight off and supervise their kid next time. 'Guns don't kill people, people do' and all that, after all...
You've got right to the heart of the problem here - that people can pass the buck for their own mistakes and the courts will sometimes uphold that. It's a risk companies can't afford to take. Look at New Zealand's liability laws, and you'll see how it should be done so as not to stifle anything that could be remotely considered risky.
Incidentally, the one thing I probably wouldn't want to see in a science kit is the 1 watt laser. If your kid doesn't understand the dangers of acid, you leave them to play with it, and they blind themselves, that's your problem; any idiot could've seen that one coming. The chances of them accidentally blowing up a neighbour's house are slim-to-none - if they're crazy enough to deliberately blow up a neighbour's house then you've got all kinds of other problems. If they put on their tinted goggles, turn on the laser, and accidentally knock it so the beam reflects off a car mirror three houses away, that could very easily blind me, and that's something I do care about. I still wouldn't want to see the things banned, but I think 'sensible handling' of high powered lasers is beyond the knowledge of most people, whereas sensible handling of chemicals is generally pretty self-explanatory.
That's an awful nice schedule you got there, Senator, be a shame if someone were to put you on the No Fly list!
Particularly worrying is the fact that recent developments suggest that they could very easily do exactly that - oversight seems to be pretty much non-existent. Unfortunately, the news media seem less than concerned about this one - I'm not suggesting any government conspiracy, it's just surprising given their common cries of "the sky is falling" to boost sales.
Detectors definitely sound like a decent idea, although the guards would need to respond quickly enough (and the locator would need to be accurate enough) that the inmate didn't have time to conceal the phone and move away or merge with a group of other prisoners.
I don’t see how this kind of stuff could make it in, in the quantities that it does, without at least a little help.
Although I don't doubt that staff are part of the problem, I've heard that the common vector for smuggling is simply throwing stuff over the walls. A good arm or a simple catapult is plenty to get over even a significant fence, it's relatively low risk, and even if some packages do get intercepted, it's economical to just keep going (especially if phones are selling at a markup like that).
The GP post said two orders of magnitude, so that's the difference between 2 hours and just over one minute. Without wanting to sound like I'm saying '640kb should be enough for anybody', there is only so much data one can reasonably consume - if you can download films 100 times faster than you can watch them, you'll only be saturating 1% of the pipe for the duration of the movie (or the entire pipe for 1% of the time, to buffer, and then nothing for the remaining 99%).
To an extent, we would undoubtedly find new data-intensive uses for the bandwidth if it became available, but it does appear that home computing tech is reaching something of a plateau. It might well be the case that a significant enough upgrade really would mean "enough bandwidth for all" rather than just encouraging greater usage.
According to TFA, some of the porn studios (evidently the ones who do understand this here intarweb thing) provide free content as a promotional tool for their paid sites.
Computers can't generate true random numbers, but it's easy enough to feed them in from a hardware source.
Charges for what, exactly?
He's not just some pure mathematics professor in a university office somewhere; TFA mentions "...his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies..." so I'm not that surprised to hear he's making decent money already. From the (brief) picture the article paints of him, I get the impression that he's a nice enough guy - if he's on one or two hundred thousand a year I'm sure he's free from worries about money and can afford various shiny luxuries, but thinking "I've just cracked the lottery" would probably flash up an idea of multiple millions in a matter of months - that's rich as in "Aston Martin or Lamborghini" rather than rich as in "decent house, nice suits, and a good holiday every year".
He comments on the issue in TFA:
"I remember thinking, I'm gonna be rich! I'm gonna plunder the lottery!" he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. "Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited," Srivastava says. "I'd have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That's not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets."
Seems like a decent, down-to-earth guy; he's pretty well off already (six figure salary, if he's making more than $600/day), so I'm sure it's a prospect that was easier for him to forego than most, but it looks like he's got a good balance between the comfort of money and enjoyment of his work.
Amazon/Kindle has made a big deal about how books you buy from them are tied to your account, so it doesn't matter what device you're using or what device you originally bought the books on, you'll have access to all your stuff
You'll have access to all your books as long as Amazon decides to give your device support for the Kindle format and associated DRM (meaning Kindle only if you want an e-ink reader, and perhaps not the iPad for much longer if they decide to play hardball and let Apple pull the Kindle app), and as long as they keep the download server available. Being beholden to a single company, be it Apple, Amazon or any other, is not what I'd call portable.
DRM free ePubs (or any other freely documented standard) are the only option if you want to know your books are going to be usable on contemporary devices in future, either through direct support for the ePub or through conversion to a newer format.
eBook prices are rather close to printed book prices because apparently the printing costs are very low (or so I've read...)
To say that per-unit printing costs are very low is true but misleading; once you've added in storage, distribution, and the initial overhead required to produce a print run of economical size, it has a significant impact on the market.
At a slightly more abstract level, the fact that a large quantity of start up capital (for the initial run of 'x' thousand books) is no longer necessary greatly reduces the necessity of a publisher in general. Without a publisher in the middle taking a significant cut, prices can drop like a stone. They still serve some use as marketers, but they're trying to hold their position as patrons to whom the artists are beholden, and that's going to change soon whether they like it or not.
I'd say that portability (and, by extension, longevity) is very important, especially considering that eBooks are often not cheap. Currently ePub is a decent bet - it's supported by most readers (iPad, nook, Sony's range, etc.) and is a fairly simple open format, so even if it's not directly supported in future devices it will be easy to convert without loss of formatting and so forth. The one notable exception here is the Kindle, which requires books to be converted into its own format before reading.
The real problem, though is that if it's DRM'ed it's not portable, and can't be converted to another format. There are very few DRM free options out there, and none that do exist have the range that the major sellers do. Currently Apple forces sellers to use DRM, whether the author and publisher want to or not - I'm not sure how strong the DRM on Apple purchases is, but even so I'd recommend against supporting that behaviour by purchasing from them.
And apparently I fail at previewing; s/to/too/g
Red headings are "mysterious future" articles - the brief preview that subscribers get before they're posted publicly. I've been seeing them occasionally, too, so it's either a glitch with the new design or somehow related to the "Ads Disabled. Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" box that you get for spending far to much time here without subscribing.
/thread
In my experience there are two basic classes of non-techie user: there are the utterly, wilfully ignorant morons, and there's really nothing that can be done about them, but there are also a very large number of users who (admittedly foolishly) panic as soon as they sit at a computer and don't think to try to read/comprehend that dialog on their screen - if it's on a computer it's somehow "different"; these types you can normally hand a copy of this, with a smile, and they'll actually be sorting their own problems pretty quickly (although admittedly with the occasional solution of this nature).
No, something has changed. Previously a tripped moisture sensor would be grounds for an immediately voided warranty, now they'll take other points into account (presumably including, but not limited to, whether there is any other evidence of liquid damage, how convincing the customer's story is, how good a mood the manager is in that day, how attractive the customer is, how much fuss the customer kicks up, and the proximity of that day's lunch break).
First example, fair enough. I don't know about the second, though; the customer was clearly a moron, but that doesn't change the fact that one could make a very reasonable argument that a mobile phone which fails in the rain is not fit for purpose. Obviously there isn't enough detail to know for sure - if they left it out in a monsoon then I'm certainly not blaming the company for the phone's failure - but the reasoning sounds dubious.
By voting for representatives, you are seen as having had your say - it's not "the government" making the rules, it's "the people" doing so by proxy. Or so the theory goes.
Those in power might well act as if they know best, but at the end of the day they are, to some extent, beholden to the people. We can and do get rid of them if they piss us off too badly. I know it doesn't work that well, but it's still a damn sight better than being told "We are right, if you disagree you are a dangerous subversive, and there's not a thing you can do about it.".