The military's job is fighting wars. Securing peace is the people's and governments' job.
Part of the military's job is to be prepared for war. If they never had to actually fight one, that would be fine with me; I'd still cut them a paycheck.
If they looked our way today, they would have front-row seats to the rise of the Ottoman empire.
Front row seats? If I had front row tickets to a concert, and they seated me 600 light years away, I'd be pissed. Unless it was a Disaster Area concert. Or Justin Bieber.
Just to make clear: The Air Force does not want to check Kepler 22b. Here's what they want:
AFSPC, through the Space Innovation and Development Center (SIDC), is currently researching the possible use of the ATA to augment the already extensive sensors of the Space Surveillance Network, potentially leveraging the array to help increase space situational awareness. Initial demonstrations show promise for the ATA to track transmitting satellites in Low Earth Orbit, Medium Earth Orbit and, most promising, in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO), which is home to the most costly, highly-utilized, and vital satellites that orbit the earth. A collision and subsequent debris field in GEO could permanently remove the GEO belt from worldwide use.
Before I read that the array was going to be used by the Air Force for non-SETI purposes (something not made apparent by the summary), my thought was: "The planet is 600 light years away. Let's say we detect radio signals from Kepler-22b. That means we know that on a planet 3 quadrillion miles away, some species used radio signals 600 years ago. That's not exactly situational awareness..."
I imagined a conversation about "situational awareness" during the Iraq war going something like this:
General: So, what's the situation?
Advisor: Sir! In the 15th century, the Aztecs defeated Azcapotzalco, sir!
General: Excellent!
Yeah, if it was repeated measures that does threaten the sign test. I can't easily check the paper again on this phone. Regardless, they are arguing from a null result, with a low power test, and they misinterpret the p value.
While Perl has never had a particular reputation for clarity, the fact that our data shows
that there is only a 55.2 % (1 - p) chance that Perl affords
more accurate performance amongst novices than Randomo,
a language that even we, as the designers, nd excruciatingly difcult to understand, was very surprising.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what a p value means in statistical inference. The p value is not, and should not be interpreted as, the chance that "Perl affords more [or less] accurate performance." The p value is the chance, given that there is no difference, of obtaining a difference as large or larger. This is covered in first-year statistics.
They claim that Perl is not significantly better than Randomo, but that's just due to the test they chose. Looking at their figure, Perl programmers outperformed Randomo programmers in 6/6 tasks (that is, their means were greater). Using a simple sign test on the differences between the means, the two tailed p value is about 0.03, and the one-tailed p value (I think we're justified here having having a directional hypothesis...) is about 0.015. Both of these numbers are less than 0.05; we are justified in saying that Perl programmers performed significantly better than Randomo programmers, in spite of what the paper says.
Absolutely! I should hand myself in to the authorities immediately. All that virtual murder I committed when playing Doom^WGTA^WManhunt^W^Wwatching an action movie makes me a threat to society!
Don't be dense. Someone dying is a necessary condition for murder. Someone having sex is not a necessary condition for pornography (there is, for instance, pornographic animation). "Virtual murder" is not murder, but "virtual pornography" is still pornography. What defines "murder" and what defines "pornography" are totally different: murder is not a depiction of anything, while pornography is.
I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with pornography, I'm just saying it's dumb to say that "child pornography" should be defined by whether a child was abused to create it, since whether something is "pornographic" depends on what is depicted (and the manner of depiction), not how it was made.
Not necessarily by legal definitions. Some jurisdictions have decided that pornography that shows virtual children is prosecutable, and yet does not require the sexual abuse of children. I guess maybe by "appropriate" definition, you meant your own definition, but even though the US Supreme Court decided that virtual child pornography is protected in some cases, that doesn't mean it isn't (or shouldn't be considered) child pornography.
Let's have this post as a placeholder for all the Heisenberg and Schrodinger superposition jokes that show up in every single quantum computer story. Thanks!
Do you want the jokes or not? You can't have it both ways.
So, if I buy a harddrive from someone, and it has some software installed on it, that means that I can do whatever I want with it because I didn't agree to the ToS! Right...?
>it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans.
I thought that Lucy/African Eve was the one that we're all descended from. Or was that a single pair of humans... Lucy and multiple males.
No. Lucy is the name given to some skeletal remains, we are HIGHLY unlikely to be descended from her. "African Eve" is a completely different idea.
Or if we don't all descend from a common source (the rest having died or being killed off), does that give weight to racist arguments that blacks and whites are separate species?
No, it doesn't. The idea that "blacks" and "whites" are separate genetically, much less different species, is ridiculous.
The standard definition of "probably" in the particle physics community is a five-sigma signal, which means that the odds of it happening by chance are 1.4 * 10^-14.
No. The probability of a five-sigma signal (from a Gaussian) is exactly 0. The probability of a five-sigma sigma signal or one more extreme is 5.7 * 10^-7. I don't know where you got your number, but it isn't right.
Tell that to all the people in the world to whom it is a staple. When prices go up, people suffer. Just because you don't think corn ethanol should complete with food production doesn't mean it doesn't compete, here in the real world.
...if there were already some kind of giant fusion reactor near us in space? And what if that giant fusion reactor were constantly beaming some of its energy at us? That would be AWESOME.
I am a Spotify premium customer, because it gives me access to lots of streaming music on my iPod. However, they are not an iTunes competitor. Their catalog is no where near iTunes in comprehensiveness. For many somewhat popular songs (try, for instance, finding the original "MacArthur park" the only results you get are a zillion bad karaoke albums, or covers. They have lots of random crap though. They are not really a competitor to iTunes, but rather a complement to it.
No one has a right to not be offended. If the principle of free speech means anything it means that offensive speech is also allowed and protected, or it's a hollow and hypocritical principle. Even so-called "hate speech" is still just "speech" that expresses a feeling of "hate". It should be allowed.
That is a rare viewpoint in the liberal ideology.
That is liberal ideology; maybe you don't understand what the term "liberal" means?
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech because the US government isn't making them.
You apparently believe that only the US government can violate your freedom of speech -- which is one point of view, but a completely wrong one. Not only is it wrong, but it is dangerous to pretend that other threats to free speech, including by corporations that control the dissemination of information, don't exist. We've discussed this
before on Slashdot...
Reporters and news operation executives are NEARLY unanimous in contributing to Ds and not to Rs. >80% typically. (Plenty of documentation on that is available, thanks to campaign finance reporting laws.)
You appear to be confused. The OP was discussing the organization itself (that is, who ultimately controls things), not the private citizens employed by the organization. You then quoted statistics about private citizens giving.
If you can't see the difference, consider what it would mean to an employee that the organization that signs their paycheck, and determines whether they'll be employed tomorrow, is invested in one party winning over the other.
Slashdot Mirror
The military's job is fighting wars. Securing peace is the people's and governments' job.
Part of the military's job is to be prepared for war. If they never had to actually fight one, that would be fine with me; I'd still cut them a paycheck.
If they looked our way today, they would have front-row seats to the rise of the Ottoman empire.
Front row seats? If I had front row tickets to a concert, and they seated me 600 light years away, I'd be pissed. Unless it was a Disaster Area concert. Or Justin Bieber.
Just to make clear: The Air Force does not want to check Kepler 22b. Here's what they want:
AFSPC, through the Space Innovation and Development Center (SIDC), is currently researching the possible use of the ATA to augment the already extensive sensors of the Space Surveillance Network, potentially leveraging the array to help increase space situational awareness. Initial demonstrations show promise for the ATA to track transmitting satellites in Low Earth Orbit, Medium Earth Orbit and, most promising, in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO), which is home to the most costly, highly-utilized, and vital satellites that orbit the earth. A collision and subsequent debris field in GEO could permanently remove the GEO belt from worldwide use.
I imagined a conversation about "situational awareness" during the Iraq war going something like this:
General: So, what's the situation?
Advisor: Sir! In the 15th century, the Aztecs defeated Azcapotzalco, sir!
General: Excellent!
Yeah, if it was repeated measures that does threaten the sign test. I can't easily check the paper again on this phone. Regardless, they are arguing from a null result, with a low power test, and they misinterpret the p value.
While Perl has never had a particular reputation for clarity, the fact that our data shows that there is only a 55.2 % (1 - p) chance that Perl affords more accurate performance amongst novices than Randomo, a language that even we, as the designers, nd excruciatingly difcult to understand, was very surprising.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what a p value means in statistical inference. The p value is not, and should not be interpreted as, the chance that "Perl affords more [or less] accurate performance." The p value is the chance, given that there is no difference, of obtaining a difference as large or larger. This is covered in first-year statistics.
They claim that Perl is not significantly better than Randomo, but that's just due to the test they chose. Looking at their figure, Perl programmers outperformed Randomo programmers in 6/6 tasks (that is, their means were greater). Using a simple sign test on the differences between the means, the two tailed p value is about 0.03, and the one-tailed p value (I think we're justified here having having a directional hypothesis...) is about 0.015. Both of these numbers are less than 0.05; we are justified in saying that Perl programmers performed significantly better than Randomo programmers, in spite of what the paper says.
Absolutely! I should hand myself in to the authorities immediately. All that virtual murder I committed when playing Doom^WGTA^WManhunt^W^Wwatching an action movie makes me a threat to society!
Don't be dense. Someone dying is a necessary condition for murder. Someone having sex is not a necessary condition for pornography (there is, for instance, pornographic animation). "Virtual murder" is not murder, but "virtual pornography" is still pornography. What defines "murder" and what defines "pornography" are totally different: murder is not a depiction of anything, while pornography is.
I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with pornography, I'm just saying it's dumb to say that "child pornography" should be defined by whether a child was abused to create it, since whether something is "pornographic" depends on what is depicted (and the manner of depiction), not how it was made.
Not necessarily by legal definitions. Some jurisdictions have decided that pornography that shows virtual children is prosecutable, and yet does not require the sexual abuse of children. I guess maybe by "appropriate" definition, you meant your own definition, but even though the US Supreme Court decided that virtual child pornography is protected in some cases, that doesn't mean it isn't (or shouldn't be considered) child pornography.
Let's have this post as a placeholder for all the Heisenberg and Schrodinger superposition jokes that show up in every single quantum computer story. Thanks!
Do you want the jokes or not? You can't have it both ways.
So, if I buy a harddrive from someone, and it has some software installed on it, that means that I can do whatever I want with it because I didn't agree to the ToS! Right...?
Don't feed the hipsters!
>it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans.
I thought that Lucy/African Eve was the one that we're all descended from. Or was that a single pair of humans ... Lucy and multiple males.
No. Lucy is the name given to some skeletal remains, we are HIGHLY unlikely to be descended from her. "African Eve" is a completely different idea.
Or if we don't all descend from a common source (the rest having died or being killed off), does that give weight to racist arguments that blacks and whites are separate species?
No, it doesn't. The idea that "blacks" and "whites" are separate genetically, much less different species, is ridiculous.
This scandal keeps getting worse; it's like the "penis pump" scene from Austin Powers....
Yes. This is how statistics works.
The standard definition of "probably" in the particle physics community is a five-sigma signal, which means that the odds of it happening by chance are 1.4 * 10^-14.
No. The probability of a five-sigma signal (from a Gaussian) is exactly 0. The probability of a five-sigma sigma signal or one more extreme is 5.7 * 10^-7. I don't know where you got your number, but it isn't right.
What, no INTERCAL? It could have blown away the competition; it has "COME FROM"!
Because corn isn't food.
Tell that to all the people in the world to whom it is a staple. When prices go up, people suffer. Just because you don't think corn ethanol should complete with food production doesn't mean it doesn't compete, here in the real world.
Evernote saves to the cloud, no backup worries.
You are foolish if you trust your data to the "cloud". Please understand: THE CLOUD IS NOT, BY ITSELF, A REPLACEMENT FOR BACKUPS.
...if there were already some kind of giant fusion reactor near us in space? And what if that giant fusion reactor were constantly beaming some of its energy at us? That would be AWESOME.
I am a Spotify premium customer, because it gives me access to lots of streaming music on my iPod. However, they are not an iTunes competitor. Their catalog is no where near iTunes in comprehensiveness. For many somewhat popular songs (try, for instance, finding the original "MacArthur park" the only results you get are a zillion bad karaoke albums, or covers. They have lots of random crap though. They are not really a competitor to iTunes, but rather a complement to it.
No one has a right to not be offended. If the principle of free speech means anything it means that offensive speech is also allowed and protected, or it's a hollow and hypocritical principle. Even so-called "hate speech" is still just "speech" that expresses a feeling of "hate". It should be allowed.
That is a rare viewpoint in the liberal ideology.
That is liberal ideology; maybe you don't understand what the term "liberal" means?
As the Richter scale is logarithmic, they withstood a quake seven times their maximum.
10^.7 = 5, not 7.
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech because the US government isn't making them.
You apparently believe that only the US government can violate your freedom of speech -- which is one point of view, but a completely wrong one. Not only is it wrong, but it is dangerous to pretend that other threats to free speech, including by corporations that control the dissemination of information, don't exist. We've discussed this before on Slashdot...
Reporters and news operation executives are NEARLY unanimous in contributing to Ds and not to Rs. >80% typically. (Plenty of documentation on that is available, thanks to campaign finance reporting laws.)
You appear to be confused. The OP was discussing the organization itself (that is, who ultimately controls things), not the private citizens employed by the organization. You then quoted statistics about private citizens giving.
If you can't see the difference, consider what it would mean to an employee that the organization that signs their paycheck, and determines whether they'll be employed tomorrow, is invested in one party winning over the other.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
A music track exists to sound good, so degradation of quality transitively degrades its' purpose.
Have you heard pop music recently?