I'm a huge supporter of publically funded science, it has provided society with the means to build the modern world and defines our civilizations both past and present. There is also an inate desire in humans to absorb and expand our collective understandiing of nature, in geeks it can become their metaphysical equivalent of their "purpose for being". However the reason taxpayers fund this stuff (willingly or otherwise) is that a deep understanding of nature has turned out to be extremely benifitial to society. Why should the taxpayer pay more than they have to to expand their understanding by answering specific questions via experiment? In the case of the Higgs the results of two independent and very expensive experiments conccur with each other and theory to a very high degree, as a taxpayer I'm satisfied that specific question has been answered. If you are not sastified then you can spend what it takes in money and sweat to build your own LHC.
I haven't been able to find torrents of the data available on these tests. Why is that?
The data set is enormous, torrents are mere trickles compared to the amount of data that the LHC generates. Also someone (or some team) who has spent decades on the project to get to the point where data is coming out should (in my opinion) have the right to publish first, provided they do so in a timely manner. Data is the lifeblood of science but the glory goes to whoever is first to analyse it correctly. The LHC is "team science" working on carefully selected questions, independent teams produce and analyse data then compare notes, the glory goes to past theoretical physicists who correctly predicted what would be found in the data long before anyone had the ability to generate it.
Today's theoretical physicists are not interested in the raw data, they are interested in the results that come from these independent teams. ie: Did the test work as expected? If not, why not?
Today, much of the equipment and processes we had a decade ago isn't worth much more than scrap.
This it true in the IT world due to the rapid advancement, but Moore's law cannot hold indefinitely and it will eventually slow down. Most industries advance much more slowly such that it's not uncommon for a factory worker to be using equipment that was installed before they were born. Also most large factories are basically giant machines with a concrete exoskeleton, modernising the machine often means rebuilding the entire factory and reskilling the entire workforce, it is simply not worth doing every 10yrs because the improvement in productivity is not enough to justify the costs of a new factory. Same thing applies to most everyday stuff, electricity companies plan for their generators and transmission lines to last 30-40yrs, all this stuff is "sunk cost" and business types want as little of that as they can get away with while still remaining competitive.
Once a corporation has found a profitable way to do something they turn into luddites and actively prevent others from messing that up with new technology, they see new technology and methods that don't fit with their existing model as a threat. Two shinning examples of this behaviour are the entertainment industry and the fossil fuel industry, both have tossed ethics under the bus in their attempts to "protect their bussiness". To see this in one person, look no further than Murdoch, he gained noteriety and a gigantic pile of money back in the 80's by breaking the Fleet St unions and modernising their presses (inovator), the same guy is now basically crying to parliments around the world that the internet is "not playing fair" (luddite). ie: the internet is doing to Murdoch what Murdoch did to the unions, dragging him kicking and screaming into the modern world where the printing press itself is heading the same way as that other iconic tool of journalisim, the typewriter.
If they don't like what they are doing, then yes it's their fucking fault for not doing what it takes to change their situation. And I say this as a high school drop out who gained a BSc as a 30yo while driving taxis and supporting a family with two school age kids. I've lived in what americans call a "trailer park" and done my 15yrs of shit jobs, some of them such a "lumberjack" I enjoyed immensly, others were border line torture. I'm now in my 50's and very glad to have been taught "how to think" (or more acurately "how to learn"), it's part of me and it has changed my life over the last 20 odd years in a way that cannot bought and will not be experienced "on the job". OTOH my 15yrs in the "real world" is also part of me, a part you won't get sitting in an office or a lecture hall.
Of course the money that comes with a degree is nice but how does one tell if they're genuinely happy or just brainwashed? I've worked with intellectually disabled people who are just pleased as punch to stand in one spot and feed timber into a molding machine for 12hrs a day. You could pay them in peanut butter sandwiches and they would still think it's a great job. They don't understand money they just want to do something useful, which is more than I can say for a lot of "normal" people. OTOH I know well educated proffesionals around my age who could easily afford to retire but don't because they enjoy what they are doing and want to remain useful for as long as they can.
Well in his case "just removing it" meant amputating his foot, but as much as I love the guy and his art I have to agree he reasoning for not doing it makes him a Darwin contender. Nevertheless he is still a "hero" of mine, not for anything he did but for what he managed to express in his art and persona. John Lennon and Pink Floyd have a similar strong appeal to me, however I'm old enough to realise all "heros" have feet of clay.
Been a fan of Marley's music since the 70's and particularly like the yrics to "Get up, Stand up". His bio is interesting, at one point he was looking after about 5000 peasants in his hometown. Oh and he didn't die from lung cancer but I wont spoil it for you.
I hear he even brokered peace between two nations at one point.
Well....he was a big supporter of the Zimbawean revolution, as was Stevie Wonder and many other people. He held a concert at a jail where political prisoners had just been released. However it didn't work out as well as people had hoped, in the 3 decades since the revolution Zimbawe has gone from one of Africa's most productive nations to a third world hell hole, and Mugabe has gone from national hero to international tyrant.
What gives IAU the authority to muck with definition of something prediating itself by thousands of years?
This implies you still believe a planet should keep it's original definition of "wandering star", so it follows you must also have an interseting definition of "star" - can you tell the rest of us what it is?
The paved roads in WA are recent constructions, melting asphalt can be seen on older Victorian roads (pre-1960's). The visible difference between the two is that the more modern surfacing has a lot more metal (small stones) mixed into it. The older surfacing has less metal and the individual stones are much smaller, it tends to become polished and warped over time, to the point where it becomes dangerous and needs resurfacing, resurfacing is done with the modern stuff so sticky ashphalt is gradually fading out here as well.
Not sure what it is but the tarry substance they use to fill cracks in ashphalt often turns into a sticky, black, chewing gum like substance in the Aussie heat. The more modern roads (freways,ect) don't appear to use it. Some of the older freeways use concrete but concrete has problems too since it expands in the heat, the concrete freeways have expansion joints to compensate but I've seen concrete footpaths buckle in the heat so badly that kids were using it as a skateboard jump.
It's belived that Venus had a runaway greenhouse effect. It's oceans evaporated, the vater vaopur was split via radiation in the upper atmosphere driving the hydrogen off into space, the free oxygen then bonded with carbon and filled the atmosphere with CO2. This is also belived to be the eventual fate of the Earth somewhere in the next 0.5-1 billion years.
What legal liability? AFAIK the only restrictions on what code one can write and distribute involve encryption, encryption was (is?) considred a munition by most major nations, and therefore had/(has?) export restrictions applied to it. Code is simply a tool for making other tools, and aside from the encryption thing, none of it is illegal. What you do with those tools may or may not be legal.
It boils down to how you approach the question, what is malware? If you think of that as a technical question that can be answered by examining the code, it puts all code monkeys in a very precarious legal position (re: encryption == munition). OTOH if you define malware as the use of code to do something illegal, then it brings the whole thing back to a moral/legal question concerning the intent of the tool user to commit a crime, rather than the intent of the tool maker. The law tends strongly toward the latter definition, meaning virus authour's get in legal trouble with authorities for releasing their virus, not for writing it.
On slashdot, it's a point of pride not to RTFA. Also it's much more interesting to go from Objective-C to Objectiv-isim to the spectrum of primate behaviour. The language popularity thing is just something for people who like talking about football ladders.
What we need now is another tenuosly linked meme...In my copy of 1984 there is a reference to a fictional document that describes the different languages spoken by various groups. One of those languages is 'C' - the language of technocrats. So it follows that if using objective-C makes one a Randian, I guess my long time use of 'C' means I'm an Orwellian technocrat. The odd thing is, I do believe the public service should be staffed with experts who are unaffraid to "speak truth to power".
I don't know if polygamous sexual bonding occurs in nature or not.
Bonobo chimps do this, polygamous lesbian sex is used to climb the social ladder in their matriarchal 'tribes'. Being seen to have sex with another higher status female by other females (publically polishing the teachers apple so to speak), confers a higher status onto the apple polisher. Unlike regular chimps, Bonobo's avoid violent confrontations as a means to determine social status. Political relationships are formed and maintained using homo and hetro sex, daugters are born into the same social level as their mother but can screw their way to the top in adulthood.
Why do corporations and governments have any say in who we love, live with, and raise together?
The political/economic aspect of marriage.Strong incentives are given for the traditional family, politicians, priests, and rich merchants understand the power and financial relationships in it. Different family structures are not as clear cut, for a start the "head of the houshold" is already difficult to identify compared to what I grew up with in the 60's. That sort of social upheaval scares a lot of people who firmly believe variety is NOT the spice of life.
The Taliban is a malevolent organization, but they are not comic book villains plotting nefarious acts for evil's sake.
Spot on. The Taliban are basically the political right-wing of the Pushtun tribe (ie: a clan within the tribe). The Pushtun's have ruled the area around the ancient city of Kandahar for centuries, the area is also a natural choke point for intenational trade and is a strategically a very important control point, as such the locals have fought with and against just about every empire that has existed over the past 10,000yrs, there is a desert city in the area that is 7000yo (forget the name), it has been leveled by invading armies 800 times, the current city is built on a 30-40 foot high mound of rubble left over from the previous 799 versions.
Hamid Karzai (the president of Afghanistan and Nato's BFF) is himself a Pushtun but belongs to a different clan. They are all hard people living in a hard place, a large chunk of the population are literally still living in a medieval culture, the more radical clans such as the Taliban remind me very much of the Scottish highlanders who until fairly recently attacked anyone who came to close to their mountains (and did so with sound reasoning based on past experience).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a huge supporter of publically funded science, it has provided society with the means to build the modern world and defines our civilizations both past and present. There is also an inate desire in humans to absorb and expand our collective understandiing of nature, in geeks it can become their metaphysical equivalent of their "purpose for being". However the reason taxpayers fund this stuff (willingly or otherwise) is that a deep understanding of nature has turned out to be extremely benifitial to society. Why should the taxpayer pay more than they have to to expand their understanding by answering specific questions via experiment? In the case of the Higgs the results of two independent and very expensive experiments conccur with each other and theory to a very high degree, as a taxpayer I'm satisfied that specific question has been answered. If you are not sastified then you can spend what it takes in money and sweat to build your own LHC.
I haven't been able to find torrents of the data available on these tests. Why is that?
The data set is enormous, torrents are mere trickles compared to the amount of data that the LHC generates. Also someone (or some team) who has spent decades on the project to get to the point where data is coming out should (in my opinion) have the right to publish first, provided they do so in a timely manner. Data is the lifeblood of science but the glory goes to whoever is first to analyse it correctly. The LHC is "team science" working on carefully selected questions, independent teams produce and analyse data then compare notes, the glory goes to past theoretical physicists who correctly predicted what would be found in the data long before anyone had the ability to generate it.
Today's theoretical physicists are not interested in the raw data, they are interested in the results that come from these independent teams. ie: Did the test work as expected? If not, why not?
Today, much of the equipment and processes we had a decade ago isn't worth much more than scrap.
This it true in the IT world due to the rapid advancement, but Moore's law cannot hold indefinitely and it will eventually slow down. Most industries advance much more slowly such that it's not uncommon for a factory worker to be using equipment that was installed before they were born. Also most large factories are basically giant machines with a concrete exoskeleton, modernising the machine often means rebuilding the entire factory and reskilling the entire workforce, it is simply not worth doing every 10yrs because the improvement in productivity is not enough to justify the costs of a new factory. Same thing applies to most everyday stuff, electricity companies plan for their generators and transmission lines to last 30-40yrs, all this stuff is "sunk cost" and business types want as little of that as they can get away with while still remaining competitive.
Once a corporation has found a profitable way to do something they turn into luddites and actively prevent others from messing that up with new technology, they see new technology and methods that don't fit with their existing model as a threat. Two shinning examples of this behaviour are the entertainment industry and the fossil fuel industry, both have tossed ethics under the bus in their attempts to "protect their bussiness". To see this in one person, look no further than Murdoch, he gained noteriety and a gigantic pile of money back in the 80's by breaking the Fleet St unions and modernising their presses (inovator), the same guy is now basically crying to parliments around the world that the internet is "not playing fair" (luddite). ie: the internet is doing to Murdoch what Murdoch did to the unions, dragging him kicking and screaming into the modern world where the printing press itself is heading the same way as that other iconic tool of journalisim, the typewriter.
Tell me it's their fault. Do it.
If they don't like what they are doing, then yes it's their fucking fault for not doing what it takes to change their situation. And I say this as a high school drop out who gained a BSc as a 30yo while driving taxis and supporting a family with two school age kids. I've lived in what americans call a "trailer park" and done my 15yrs of shit jobs, some of them such a "lumberjack" I enjoyed immensly, others were border line torture. I'm now in my 50's and very glad to have been taught "how to think" (or more acurately "how to learn"), it's part of me and it has changed my life over the last 20 odd years in a way that cannot bought and will not be experienced "on the job". OTOH my 15yrs in the "real world" is also part of me, a part you won't get sitting in an office or a lecture hall.
Of course the money that comes with a degree is nice but how does one tell if they're genuinely happy or just brainwashed? I've worked with intellectually disabled people who are just pleased as punch to stand in one spot and feed timber into a molding machine for 12hrs a day. You could pay them in peanut butter sandwiches and they would still think it's a great job. They don't understand money they just want to do something useful, which is more than I can say for a lot of "normal" people. OTOH I know well educated proffesionals around my age who could easily afford to retire but don't because they enjoy what they are doing and want to remain useful for as long as they can.
It just has a terribly documented API.
Only a nerds have a problem with the API, the rest of humanity calls it "intuative".
Well in his case "just removing it" meant amputating his foot, but as much as I love the guy and his art I have to agree he reasoning for not doing it makes him a Darwin contender. Nevertheless he is still a "hero" of mine, not for anything he did but for what he managed to express in his art and persona. John Lennon and Pink Floyd have a similar strong appeal to me, however I'm old enough to realise all "heros" have feet of clay.
I hear he even brokered peace between two nations at one point.
Well....he was a big supporter of the Zimbawean revolution, as was Stevie Wonder and many other people. He held a concert at a jail where political prisoners had just been released. However it didn't work out as well as people had hoped, in the 3 decades since the revolution Zimbawe has gone from one of Africa's most productive nations to a third world hell hole, and Mugabe has gone from national hero to international tyrant.
What gives IAU the authority to muck with definition of something prediating itself by thousands of years?
This implies you still believe a planet should keep it's original definition of "wandering star", so it follows you must also have an interseting definition of "star" - can you tell the rest of us what it is?
So to put that as a car analogy, if I pay to park my stolen car in a private car park then the car park owner must be a criminal.
I can handle "funny and stupid", angry and stupid not so much.
The paved roads in WA are recent constructions, melting asphalt can be seen on older Victorian roads (pre-1960's). The visible difference between the two is that the more modern surfacing has a lot more metal (small stones) mixed into it. The older surfacing has less metal and the individual stones are much smaller, it tends to become polished and warped over time, to the point where it becomes dangerous and needs resurfacing, resurfacing is done with the modern stuff so sticky ashphalt is gradually fading out here as well.
Now that is impressive! And yes, it's the same phenomena on a larger scale, but shallower angle.
Not sure what it is but the tarry substance they use to fill cracks in ashphalt often turns into a sticky, black, chewing gum like substance in the Aussie heat. The more modern roads (freways,ect) don't appear to use it. Some of the older freeways use concrete but concrete has problems too since it expands in the heat, the concrete freeways have expansion joints to compensate but I've seen concrete footpaths buckle in the heat so badly that kids were using it as a skateboard jump.
It's belived that Venus had a runaway greenhouse effect. It's oceans evaporated, the vater vaopur was split via radiation in the upper atmosphere driving the hydrogen off into space, the free oxygen then bonded with carbon and filled the atmosphere with CO2. This is also belived to be the eventual fate of the Earth somewhere in the next 0.5-1 billion years.
What legal liability? AFAIK the only restrictions on what code one can write and distribute involve encryption, encryption was (is?) considred a munition by most major nations, and therefore had/(has?) export restrictions applied to it. Code is simply a tool for making other tools, and aside from the encryption thing, none of it is illegal. What you do with those tools may or may not be legal.
It boils down to how you approach the question, what is malware? If you think of that as a technical question that can be answered by examining the code, it puts all code monkeys in a very precarious legal position (re: encryption == munition). OTOH if you define malware as the use of code to do something illegal, then it brings the whole thing back to a moral/legal question concerning the intent of the tool user to commit a crime, rather than the intent of the tool maker. The law tends strongly toward the latter definition, meaning virus authour's get in legal trouble with authorities for releasing their virus, not for writing it.
When I was three Ringo had just started banging drums on the radio.
Germany = Catholic, Russia = Orthodox.
On slashdot, it's a point of pride not to RTFA. Also it's much more interesting to go from Objective-C to Objectiv-isim to the spectrum of primate behaviour. The language popularity thing is just something for people who like talking about football ladders.
What we need now is another tenuosly linked meme...In my copy of 1984 there is a reference to a fictional document that describes the different languages spoken by various groups. One of those languages is 'C' - the language of technocrats. So it follows that if using objective-C makes one a Randian, I guess my long time use of 'C' means I'm an Orwellian technocrat. The odd thing is, I do believe the public service should be staffed with experts who are unaffraid to "speak truth to power".
The 1.3 million request figure is widely understated.
I love the way the way you studiously avoided questioning the veracity of the ATT data point.
I don't know if polygamous sexual bonding occurs in nature or not.
Bonobo chimps do this, polygamous lesbian sex is used to climb the social ladder in their matriarchal 'tribes'. Being seen to have sex with another higher status female by other females (publically polishing the teachers apple so to speak), confers a higher status onto the apple polisher. Unlike regular chimps, Bonobo's avoid violent confrontations as a means to determine social status. Political relationships are formed and maintained using homo and hetro sex, daugters are born into the same social level as their mother but can screw their way to the top in adulthood.
pedophile or beastophile(?)
Animals and children are not adults and connot give consent. So what part of "between consenting adults" do you not understand?
Why do corporations and governments have any say in who we love, live with, and raise together?
The political/economic aspect of marriage.Strong incentives are given for the traditional family, politicians, priests, and rich merchants understand the power and financial relationships in it. Different family structures are not as clear cut, for a start the "head of the houshold" is already difficult to identify compared to what I grew up with in the 60's. That sort of social upheaval scares a lot of people who firmly believe variety is NOT the spice of life.
Sigh, Zuck may be a douche but he has donated hundres of millions to charities, including $100M to NJ public schools.
The Taliban is a malevolent organization, but they are not comic book villains plotting nefarious acts for evil's sake.
Spot on. The Taliban are basically the political right-wing of the Pushtun tribe (ie: a clan within the tribe). The Pushtun's have ruled the area around the ancient city of Kandahar for centuries, the area is also a natural choke point for intenational trade and is a strategically a very important control point, as such the locals have fought with and against just about every empire that has existed over the past 10,000yrs, there is a desert city in the area that is 7000yo (forget the name), it has been leveled by invading armies 800 times, the current city is built on a 30-40 foot high mound of rubble left over from the previous 799 versions.
Hamid Karzai (the president of Afghanistan and Nato's BFF) is himself a Pushtun but belongs to a different clan. They are all hard people living in a hard place, a large chunk of the population are literally still living in a medieval culture, the more radical clans such as the Taliban remind me very much of the Scottish highlanders who until fairly recently attacked anyone who came to close to their mountains (and did so with sound reasoning based on past experience).
AFAICT US policy seems to be to assasinate the Pushtun warlords it does not like. Having seen the video of Saddam Hussien doing something conceptually similar (start @ 1:25, nsfw), I'm not sure I'm ok with that.
Envy is an ugly emotion.