I've research these options A, B and C. A has widget type one, B. has widget type two, and C. has build it yourself widgets. Is anyone using A, B, or C, and can you share your experience? Right now I'm leaning toward B, but think C could be useful, and A has a great price point.
By the time you've narrowed it down that much, searching for and asking questions in specific forums related to A, B, and C is a far better choice than slashdot. Slashdot is a far more generic location, useful when you're not yet sure even where to start your search, but think there are lots of geeks around who have gone through the process and might help guide you to save you the time they had to spent during their research.
I'm confused why you're asking here. It basically sounds like you're saying: "I've got this whole project but research is a pain in the ass." You listed a bunch of things you want but showed no real effort into figuring it out yourself (saying that trying apps is scary is not research).
Also, why would you trust this group to tell you "safe" things more than any other bunch of random internet yahoos?
Why the hell ELSE would you post a question on slashdot?
I don't get people like you. The entire point about of asking a group of people who may be more informed about a subject than you are is to cut down on the amount of research needed by narrowing down the topic to a handful of options. What do you think ask slashdot should be used for?
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy
You seem to think that this is a good thing.
I certainly do.
It bothers the crap out of me to see uninformed people voting for their representatives. To see them voting on actual decisions? No quicker way of destroying the country that I can think of.
Before I'm accused of defining "uninformed" as "believes differently than I do," I'll just point out that I follow my own guidelines, and unless I've taken the time to research the issues and all of the candidates running for a particular office meticulously, I don't cast a vote. Which generally means that I rarely vote, and when I do I leave most of the ballot empty, voting only for those offices for which I've taken the time to study every candidate and the relevant issues. I refuse to potentially cancel out the vote of a more informed citizen.
Believe it or not, I like the fact that we can weaponize it. Not because I like the idea of using it as a weapon, but because if it can be weaponized, it's more likely that it'll get funded and built. And it's something we need to have, if we want to survive. Chances are that eventually that asteroid will come. It could be 100,000 years from now, but it could also be 10 years from now.
Is there anyone outside of Tesla that can independently verify that the logs actually recorded what Musk says they recorded? Why is there an automatic assumption by some that what Musk is publishing is what the logs actually recorded? How would we know if Musk is falsifying what's in the logs?
Well, Broder didn't dispute anything in the log in his response other than his driving speeds (and he doesn't even disagree with all of it, admitting to reaching 80 at one point). Everything else he corroborates.
The only thing I found to be misleading with regards to Musk's interpretation of the log is when he said that Broder raised the cabin temperature instead of lowering. Before Broder's response, when looking at the plots the first time, I did notice that a few miles after Broder raised the temperature, he did lower it significantly. So he was slightly off the exact time at which he started doing that, not a big deal, it still looks as if he tried it.
The biggest discrepancy between the stories as told by Broder and Musk are related to the conversations between Broder and the Tesla support guys. Musk claims that Broder disconnected the car from the charger with 32 miles remaining "expressly against the advice of Tesla Personnel." Broder instead claims he was told by Tesla personnel to charge for one hour and leave, regardless of what the range display said, because as the battery heated up during driving, the car would update the range to restore what appeared to be a range loss overnight. The fact that car proceeded to drive for 51 miles after that indicates the story was plausible and that when the battery is cold, the range estimate is inaccurate. Still, I agree with Musk that it's a violation of common sense to go anywhere that the car is telling you it can't make it there, regardless of what anyone, even Tesla personnel, would tell you.
Finally, Broder claims some horrible advice from the Tesla guys to maximize battery range, which includes alternating speeding up and slowing down, to let the regenerative breaking recover energy while slowing down. That anyone would fail to grasp basic physics badly enough to think this is a valid strategy astounds me. Really, I think this is where the crux of the matter lies. I now don't think Broder was trying to sabotage the drive, but I also don't believe his claims about the problems with Model S in the cold. I think the Model S is a fine car, and either the Tesla personnel really screwed up in their advice to Broder, or more likely, Broder completely misinterpreted them, due to a lack of understanding of how batteries work (and a complete lack of understanding of basic physics, since he actually did try the speeding up and slowing down approach). I'm thinking he was probably told that regenerative breaking would extend the range shown, and not to worry about it, and took that to mean he should try to force the regenerative breaking to occur more often. I'm thinking he was told that the once he started driving and the batteries warmed up, that the range would update to show more miles than displayed, and took that to mean he could trust their charge estimate of 1 hour literally, over what was shown in the display.
Basically, this is a communication and tech support problem, that turned into accusations being flung back and forth. I'd really like to see a transcript of those conversations with Tesla to be sure.
I know some people are morally against capital punishment, but if the penalty for theft of >$1 million was a capital offense, it would happen a lot less.
Then why not make the death penalty the punishment for every crime? All crimes would happen a lot less.
Hey, there's a TNG episode about that type of Justice
It's not a secret that about half of published synthesis methods are garbage and yield values are wildly creative. Reviewers don't have the means to verify these, so anything that seems plausible gets published. Then researchers are left to sort out the best methods based on which ones get the most citations.
It's not just synthesis methods. I remember taking a graduate control theory class in which the final project was for the class to replicate the results of a paper with a particular control algorithm. It just...wouldn't...work. Not a single person managed to replicate the results, which simply led to the inevitable conclusion they were fudged.
I'm not and would never defend anyone who publishes any data that has been tempered with, but I still find it annoying that we've set up a system where there's an incentive to do so. There's tremendous pressure to publish in academia, starting in grad school. Combine that with the difficulty in publishing papers that have negative results and a lack of interest in replicating any experiments that are not groundbreaking and you end up with the quality of papers we have here. I'd love for it to be standard for grad students' first papers, as they're learning to write them, to be just replicating results from other papers. And have journals actually recognize the importance of such work, and publish the results often. I think this would cut down the number of crappy papers, because first, you wouldn't want to publish something that's going to be shown to be bullshit in short order, and second, you'd be able to satisfy your publishing requirements by doing the important task of verifying other people's work.
You are not a dumbass, therefore not all people are dumbasses.
QED
Feel free to disagree with my premise.
I will gladly do so.
Hey, if you tell me you've never done anything in your life that caused you to think, "man, I'm such a dumbass," then I'll know you're both a dumbass and a liar:)
I went to a really good high school, and while I was taking the AP and honors classes, the kids with low IQ were, for the most part, not.
FTFY
Depending on how you look at it, that correction might be "true" in a way, although if you distort it that way, it doesn't really add anything to the discussion other than distracting from the core issue.
It's not that plain aptitude isn't a factor. It's that raw intelligence is really hard to measure and separate from cultural factors and just plain knowledge. So hard that we can't really do it effectively. You can use IQ tests to determine someone is mentally challenged, or you can use IQ tests to determine someone is a genius. But once you get away from these extremes, it gets very fuzzy. So you'll find that the average IQ of children are correlated to their economic status.
Well, that's to be expected, you say. Intelligent people clearly are going to be more successful than those who are less intelligent, and their children will inherit those traits. The problem is that when you take only adopted children in consideration, their measured IQ follows the same socioeconomic correlation as above, but with their adoptive parents socioeconomic status, not their biological ones, so not genetic. It just so happens that all those advantages of having educated parents will help you do better in an IQ test just as much as it will help you do better in a school test. I know, citation needed. I'm feeling generous today, so here's an article in Nature about the subject.
"Amazon just debuted a new service called Autorip, which grants you MP3 copies of music when you purchase the CD version."
Grants you? I have a program called "foobar 2000" that has been giving me that power for years.
Amazon can kiss my ass. Just send me the CD I bought and step aside. Nobody invited them.
Personally, I'm a fan of the feature. I prefer buying CDs than mp3s, but often the reason I buy an album is because I want to listen to it right now. This way I get the physical disc I want, and I get to listen to it before it arrives.
CBS is a private business and has no obligation to review a product of another business
When the poster talked about "freedom of the press", I'm pretty sure he meant to talk about editorial independence. A journalistic entity isn't credible without editorial independence from the owners of the publication, because without it you can't be sure if anything you read can from that publication is the truth, or is just what is convenient to the owners. Generally publications want the reputation of being unbiased, which is also why they tend to disclose any possible source of biases (such as when slashdot covers a story related to a company that is owned by the same parent company that owns slashdot, and the editors mention that in the summary).
Dolphins rape each other, perfectly natural. Not good.
So now you want to conflate eating meat with rape, and then tell me I need to study formal logic a bit more? You need to study your teeth and your stomach a bit more.
In addition to the formal logic studies, you also need to work on your reading comprehension.
He didn't compare eating meat with rape. You argued that eating meat is natural, and therefore likened an aversion to it to a mental illness. He gave you an example of something else that is natural, assumes you have an aversion to it, but he also assumes you don't consider that aversion to be a mental illness, despite fitting your criteria.
Basically, he destroyed your argument.
For the record, I'm a meat eater. However, the entire idea that we are required to do that which we evolved to do is simply asinine. Do you know something else you didn't evolve to do, besides not eating meat? You didn't evolve to get your food at the supermarket. Food that wasn't foraged or hunted, but rather farmed or killed in slaughterhouses with the assistance of machines. Meat that I presume you like to cook to a tender consistency and cut with the assistance of knives, not really using those predator teeth you want to remind us that we have. We get concentrated sugar out of corn to make desserts and beverages that simply cannot exist without a lot of civilization infrastructure. We live so far from what we evolved to be that making an argument we should look to nature to decide what we should eat, and how we should act doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. Yes, we can get certain nutrition from meat far easier than we can get from vegetables, but we understand that, and our vegetarian friends can get their protein and iron from other sources. So if that's what they want to do, what's it to you? Mental illness indeed.
My favorite question / answer pair: "IEEE Spectrum: What kind of business model is associated with Google Glass? Babak Parviz: This is still being worked on, but we are quite interested in providing the hardware."
Probably my favorite non-answer answer of 2012.
I don't get it. It's a perfectly good answer. He's saying they intend to make money on selling the hardware, but that this is also probably not the only way in which they'll monetize glass. Not ambiguous at all, and considering the development stage at the moment, about where I'd expect them to be.
The problem is that they don't know how to make a netbook. I think there is a valid market for a device the size of the original Acer ZG5 netbook. The problem is that the hardware companies allowed Microsoft to define what a netbook was and not the market. I'd love something the size of my Acer ZG5 that had a quad i7 and 8GB of ram and came with linux installed but that never happened. Underpowered Atom based machines with 2GB ram at nearly the price of a dual core equiped laptop. Who wants that? No one and I can't believe they could not figure that out.
That's not a netbook, man. Netbooks are by definition underpowered. What you want is an ultrabook, and they exist. Go check out the latest Asus zenbook prime models.
Well, it doesn't come with linux installed, but you can certainly do that yourself.
He doesn't take bullshit. that is not being unprofessional, it is a quite professional posture.
It's entirely possible to not take any bullshit while simultaneously not acting like a two-year old that was denied ice cream before dinner.
Sorry to destroy your illusions but you don't need to be nice to be professional
It's not about being nice, it's about showing respect. It's perfectly fine to tell someone their behavior is unacceptable. It's perfectly fine to fire someone outright if talking to them doesn't work and the mistakes keep coming. My job contract, however, does not say that I need to withstand verbal abuse. I wouldn't have signed it if it did.
many times you need to be quite obnoxious, ask any Sergeant out there.
There's are reasons for the behavior of a drill sergeant that simply does not apply in the workforce. It's a psychological trick designed to form a bond between everyone under his command (they all have a common enemy, and hate the drill sergeant); to get everyone to pull their weight (everyone else is made to suffer when one guy doesn't do his job, causing peer pressure to kick in and force the slackers to step it up); it conditions everyone to respond to commands quickly, because in a battle situation hesitation could mean death; and it can motivate you to do something you're afraid of doing, because being angry at the asshole screaming at you tends to override fear. I know that last one from experience: when I was learning to skydive at some point I started having panic attacks and refused to get off the plane. My ex-military instructor drill-sergeanted me out the door. Incredible experience. I felt like slugging him while telling him I wasn't a soldier under his command when suddenly I realized the fear was gone, so just stepped out the door instead.
None of the above reasons are applicable in the workplace. You don't want all your subordinates to see you as an enemy; you don't want to punish your productive workers because of the mistakes of the slackers (the good ones will easily be able to find another job, so they'll quit and go somewhere where they're not being abused); you don't want them blindly following orders, they're not in time-critical or death situation, and yes-men who won't calmly argue their position with you leads to nobody catching your own mistakes; and you're not forcing anyone to do anything they're uncomfortable with doing. Psychological warfare is therefore out of the question.
He isn't trying to make friends. He is trying to manage the efforts to implement a particularly complex piece of software, whilst hearing bullshit from one of his developers who made a very big mistake.
Everybody makes mistakes, but the right posture when it was obviously your fault is to take the blame and learn from them, not to try and make excuses.
You can't fix unprofessionalism by being unprofessional. Linus's response is uncalled for, and if anyone I work for ever tells me to shut the fuck up, he can start looking for my replacement, and won't ever need to hear me speak up again.
I agree with Linus's reasoning for why it's really a kernel bug, not a pulseaudio bug. The correct way of handling this would be to simply say, "you need to own up to this thing, because it's our policy that any kernel changes that breaks userspace applications is our problem. Fix this now." If for some reason this is a constant issue with the guy, than you remove him from that role as maintainer, but based on the lkml thread and the responses from Mauro, it seems Mauro had good reason to believe some things would remain broken after reverting the changes to the kernel, so he was just trying to understand the problem better. He behaved professionally, calmly explaining his position and agreeing with Linus about his mistake, on the face of having an adult throwing a tamper tantrum at him. Kudos to his patience, I don't share it. You simply could not pay me enough to work with someone who very publicly disrespected me in the way Linus did with him.
The material in question depicts gruesome murders, torture, sexual abuse, assaults and necrophilia â" all with young female victims.
"Art" perhaps. But I'd keep an eye on this guy. Of course it's only my reactionary opinion, but I think people that have an obsession with this sort of thing have a problem, and I'd want to make sure they don't "jump" to exercising a more "real world" form of their entertainment.
"Opinion" perhaps. But I'd like someone to keep an eye on you. Of course it's only my reactionary opinion, but I think people that have an obsession with being concerned with what people do that doesn't harm anyone have a problem, and I'd want to make sure they don't "jump" to exercising a more "real world" form of their philosophy, like lobbying for laws that remove more of our freedoms.
You and I may find it disgusting, but that just means we don't need to go look at it. It doesn't mean this guy is going to go and hurt anyone, and I think it's dangerous for us to start assuming that anyone with a fantasy would want that fantasy to be reality. Let's look at less extreme forms of entertainment. I love James Bond movies. Would I really want to be James Bond? Let's see what happens when we turn that fantasy into reality. We have a man who constantly gets beaten up and tortured, constantly in danger of dying, and although getting laid like he does sounds great, think about all the STDs he must have. I'm a fan of Batman, but do you think that means that I would really want to see a vigilante out in the streets bypassing the court system?
Just because you enjoy a fantasy, doesn't mean you'd like to make it real.
If anything, the dislike for C++ from people who use C++ regularly is much deeper than the more casual dislike that C programmers have. C programmers just think C++ is too complex and unnecessary, but C++ programmers find themselves so consumed by their dislike they end up doing things like writing a point-by-point rebuttal to the entire C++ FAQ.
I think they're just more vocal. Not everyone hates C++. My job involves writing in C, C++, and C#. I love C++. In my ideal world, I'd have C++ with all the.net libraries (and no, managed C++ isn't that. C# is far preferable to writing in managed C++, as C# is actually a pretty good language and managed C++ doesn't give you any of the cool features of C++ that C# doesn't have).
I find people's arguments against C++ to be quite illogical. For example, one of the reasons I really like the language is because it can do true multiple inheritance. People everywhere will then immediately correct me with, "multiple inheritance is bad, mmk?" Then they'll back up that statement by talking about the diamond problem, and how I should use interfaces. I do use interfaces, but they're not a replacement for multiple inheritance because it's still forcing me to duplicate code when I wouldn't otherwise have to. Besides, the language handles the problem in a reasonable way (the order in which you define the inheritance matters), and, as a programmer, if you're inheriting from two classes that have a method with the same signature, then those methods should be virtual, and you should override the method to do exactly what you want. The diamond problem isn't this beast for which there is no reasonable solution. It's just something you need to be cognizant of when coding.
There's also the people who complain about all the incredibly hard to debug crazy stuff people do with templates. You're really just complaining about bad coding. Templates allow you to build more reusable code than generics, and that's how you should use them. If you're going beyond that just because they're turing complete and you can do more with them, well...you might as well complain about C after looking at last year's winner of the obfuscated C contest.
I too, stopped reading Spectrum a few years ago when real science article dropped to a trickle. However, this particular article is not bad. Not only was it authored by one of the original problem solvers, it was very readable despite the length.
Yeah, like I said, it's not that I had a problem with the quality of the article, it's just that it lacked new information. The summary didn't mention that this was about the heat pressure from Pioneer so, like a fool, I went on to read the whole article thinking that maybe this was something new, showing that the heat explanation wasn't enough, and there was actually new physics. Instead, the article contains absolutely no information I hadn't already read about over 6 months ago, and I was a bit bitter when I posted.
And that's the thing about Spectrum: all the articles are crappy. They're either crappy because it's a business article about tech startups instead of the actual tech, or crappy because for anyone actually interested in the field they're coming in so late that they offer nothing new: you've already read about it in far more detail elsewhere. This case was the latter. The slashdot submission from April (link in my post above) contains a link to the pdf of the actual paper, which is also very readable. I'm not a physicist or work with anything space-related, but as just an electrical engineer, I had no problems following it. Basically, if your field of work required you to take some math in college, you're good.
It struck me as they described having to contend with blueprints rather than CAD files and consulting retired engineers from the original mission, that they appeared to have forgotten there is a very nice physical model of the craft hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian
I'm sure if necessary that could have been arranged. That said, I think the blueprints and consulting the engineers who worked with the thing is actually the easier path. They'd have to disassemble the model and measure the thing both internally and externally exactly to build CAD models of it, measurements which would have been in the blueprints. And then I think they'd still need to consult with the original engineers involved, so they could get someone with experience to help pin down exactly how the RTGs radiated heat, where, and how much of it you'd expect. Besides, so many people have been trying to solve the Pioneer anomaly over the years, that it'd be difficult logistically for the Smithsonian to lend the thing to every scientist trying to get evidence for his particular theory.
I hate Spectrum. Not because they have bad articles, but because they never have anything that I haven't already been reading about for the past months, or even years.
Hint to editors. If you ever get a submission with a link to Spectrum, chances are very high that Slashdot has covered it before.
Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?
Really, who does that? Fools and idiot attention seekers.
How far have we fallen that slashdot readers are asking that?
Who does that? Nerds. Nerds do that. Incredible nerds like Steve Wozniak for example.
People wear things I find to be ridiculous all the time that everyone has no problem labeling as fashion statements. But if it's wires and fuses, it can't be a statement of the types of things you enjoy, it has to be an idiot attention seeker?
Personally, I find it much more easy to label people idiots when they think every exposed wire and fuse is a bomb.
When someone accuses you of being a creep after you do a nice thing for them, because they lack the morals to take responsibility for their own embarrassing mistakes and would rather blame the person who helped you out, you are absolutely 100% justified in calling that person whatever you want.
no matter how many people you run over with a bus, humans are not going to evolve immunity to buses
The ones who don't get run over by buses are more likely to be the ones who pay attention to what's around them or the ones who never leave the house. Both of those are good not-getting-run-over-by-a-bus survival strategies, and they can be passed down to the survivors' offspring.
That _is_ how evolution works.
You know, when I was writing my original post, I debated changing my example to "you can't develop an immunity to being shot," because I figured somebody would misinterpret it.
All I'm trying to say with that example is that you can't necessarily force an adaptation to a species by applying an evolutionary pressure. Sometimes you get extinction instead. Sometimes there are no feasible mutations that can develop, or there are feasible mutations, but they are of sufficiently low probability that they don't develop in time to stop the extinction.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is:
I've research these options A, B and C. A has widget type one, B. has widget type two, and C. has build it yourself widgets. Is anyone using A, B, or C, and can you share your experience? Right now I'm leaning toward B, but think C could be useful, and A has a great price point.
By the time you've narrowed it down that much, searching for and asking questions in specific forums related to A, B, and C is a far better choice than slashdot. Slashdot is a far more generic location, useful when you're not yet sure even where to start your search, but think there are lots of geeks around who have gone through the process and might help guide you to save you the time they had to spent during their research.
I'm confused why you're asking here. It basically sounds like you're saying: "I've got this whole project but research is a pain in the ass." You listed a bunch of things you want but showed no real effort into figuring it out yourself (saying that trying apps is scary is not research).
Also, why would you trust this group to tell you "safe" things more than any other bunch of random internet yahoos?
Why the hell ELSE would you post a question on slashdot?
I don't get people like you. The entire point about of asking a group of people who may be more informed about a subject than you are is to cut down on the amount of research needed by narrowing down the topic to a handful of options. What do you think ask slashdot should be used for?
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy
You seem to think that this is a good thing.
I certainly do.
It bothers the crap out of me to see uninformed people voting for their representatives. To see them voting on actual decisions? No quicker way of destroying the country that I can think of.
Before I'm accused of defining "uninformed" as "believes differently than I do," I'll just point out that I follow my own guidelines, and unless I've taken the time to research the issues and all of the candidates running for a particular office meticulously, I don't cast a vote. Which generally means that I rarely vote, and when I do I leave most of the ballot empty, voting only for those offices for which I've taken the time to study every candidate and the relevant issues. I refuse to potentially cancel out the vote of a more informed citizen.
The best part about your article: "when something falls--it's man-made."
Gravity is a US secret-weapon.
It would also be a bit harder to weaponize.
Believe it or not, I like the fact that we can weaponize it. Not because I like the idea of using it as a weapon, but because if it can be weaponized, it's more likely that it'll get funded and built. And it's something we need to have, if we want to survive. Chances are that eventually that asteroid will come. It could be 100,000 years from now, but it could also be 10 years from now.
Is there anyone outside of Tesla that can independently verify that the logs actually recorded what Musk says they recorded? Why is there an automatic assumption by some that what Musk is publishing is what the logs actually recorded? How would we know if Musk is falsifying what's in the logs?
Well, Broder didn't dispute anything in the log in his response other than his driving speeds (and he doesn't even disagree with all of it, admitting to reaching 80 at one point). Everything else he corroborates.
The only thing I found to be misleading with regards to Musk's interpretation of the log is when he said that Broder raised the cabin temperature instead of lowering. Before Broder's response, when looking at the plots the first time, I did notice that a few miles after Broder raised the temperature, he did lower it significantly. So he was slightly off the exact time at which he started doing that, not a big deal, it still looks as if he tried it.
The biggest discrepancy between the stories as told by Broder and Musk are related to the conversations between Broder and the Tesla support guys. Musk claims that Broder disconnected the car from the charger with 32 miles remaining "expressly against the advice of Tesla Personnel." Broder instead claims he was told by Tesla personnel to charge for one hour and leave, regardless of what the range display said, because as the battery heated up during driving, the car would update the range to restore what appeared to be a range loss overnight. The fact that car proceeded to drive for 51 miles after that indicates the story was plausible and that when the battery is cold, the range estimate is inaccurate. Still, I agree with Musk that it's a violation of common sense to go anywhere that the car is telling you it can't make it there, regardless of what anyone, even Tesla personnel, would tell you.
Finally, Broder claims some horrible advice from the Tesla guys to maximize battery range, which includes alternating speeding up and slowing down, to let the regenerative breaking recover energy while slowing down. That anyone would fail to grasp basic physics badly enough to think this is a valid strategy astounds me. Really, I think this is where the crux of the matter lies. I now don't think Broder was trying to sabotage the drive, but I also don't believe his claims about the problems with Model S in the cold. I think the Model S is a fine car, and either the Tesla personnel really screwed up in their advice to Broder, or more likely, Broder completely misinterpreted them, due to a lack of understanding of how batteries work (and a complete lack of understanding of basic physics, since he actually did try the speeding up and slowing down approach). I'm thinking he was probably told that regenerative breaking would extend the range shown, and not to worry about it, and took that to mean he should try to force the regenerative breaking to occur more often. I'm thinking he was told that the once he started driving and the batteries warmed up, that the range would update to show more miles than displayed, and took that to mean he could trust their charge estimate of 1 hour literally, over what was shown in the display.
Basically, this is a communication and tech support problem, that turned into accusations being flung back and forth. I'd really like to see a transcript of those conversations with Tesla to be sure.
I know some people are morally against capital punishment, but if the penalty for theft of >$1 million was a capital offense, it would happen a lot less.
Then why not make the death penalty the punishment for every crime? All crimes would happen a lot less.
Hey, there's a TNG episode about that type of Justice
It's not a secret that about half of published synthesis methods are garbage and yield values are wildly creative. Reviewers don't have the means to verify these, so anything that seems plausible gets published. Then researchers are left to sort out the best methods based on which ones get the most citations.
It's not just synthesis methods. I remember taking a graduate control theory class in which the final project was for the class to replicate the results of a paper with a particular control algorithm. It just...wouldn't...work. Not a single person managed to replicate the results, which simply led to the inevitable conclusion they were fudged.
I'm not and would never defend anyone who publishes any data that has been tempered with, but I still find it annoying that we've set up a system where there's an incentive to do so. There's tremendous pressure to publish in academia, starting in grad school. Combine that with the difficulty in publishing papers that have negative results and a lack of interest in replicating any experiments that are not groundbreaking and you end up with the quality of papers we have here. I'd love for it to be standard for grad students' first papers, as they're learning to write them, to be just replicating results from other papers. And have journals actually recognize the importance of such work, and publish the results often. I think this would cut down the number of crappy papers, because first, you wouldn't want to publish something that's going to be shown to be bullshit in short order, and second, you'd be able to satisfy your publishing requirements by doing the important task of verifying other people's work.
You are not a dumbass, therefore not all people are dumbasses.
QED
Feel free to disagree with my premise.
I will gladly do so.
Hey, if you tell me you've never done anything in your life that caused you to think, "man, I'm such a dumbass," then I'll know you're both a dumbass and a liar :)
I went to a really good high school, and while I was taking the AP and honors classes, the kids with low IQ were, for the most part, not.
FTFY
Depending on how you look at it, that correction might be "true" in a way, although if you distort it that way, it doesn't really add anything to the discussion other than distracting from the core issue.
It's not that plain aptitude isn't a factor. It's that raw intelligence is really hard to measure and separate from cultural factors and just plain knowledge. So hard that we can't really do it effectively. You can use IQ tests to determine someone is mentally challenged, or you can use IQ tests to determine someone is a genius. But once you get away from these extremes, it gets very fuzzy. So you'll find that the average IQ of children are correlated to their economic status.
Well, that's to be expected, you say. Intelligent people clearly are going to be more successful than those who are less intelligent, and their children will inherit those traits. The problem is that when you take only adopted children in consideration, their measured IQ follows the same socioeconomic correlation as above, but with their adoptive parents socioeconomic status, not their biological ones, so not genetic. It just so happens that all those advantages of having educated parents will help you do better in an IQ test just as much as it will help you do better in a school test. I know, citation needed. I'm feeling generous today, so here's an article in Nature about the subject.
Let's raise $10k to get 100 people to send Zuckerberg GNAA spam.
Yeah, let's give facebook $10k. That will show them.
Grants you? I have a program called "foobar 2000" that has been giving me that power for years.
Amazon can kiss my ass. Just send me the CD I bought and step aside. Nobody invited them.
Personally, I'm a fan of the feature. I prefer buying CDs than mp3s, but often the reason I buy an album is because I want to listen to it right now. This way I get the physical disc I want, and I get to listen to it before it arrives.
It's to protect your rights from the government
CBS is a private business and has no obligation to review a product of another business
When the poster talked about "freedom of the press", I'm pretty sure he meant to talk about editorial independence. A journalistic entity isn't credible without editorial independence from the owners of the publication, because without it you can't be sure if anything you read can from that publication is the truth, or is just what is convenient to the owners. Generally publications want the reputation of being unbiased, which is also why they tend to disclose any possible source of biases (such as when slashdot covers a story related to a company that is owned by the same parent company that owns slashdot, and the editors mention that in the summary).
Dolphins rape each other, perfectly natural. Not good.
So now you want to conflate eating meat with rape, and then tell me I need to study formal logic a bit more? You need to study your teeth and your stomach a bit more.
In addition to the formal logic studies, you also need to work on your reading comprehension.
He didn't compare eating meat with rape. You argued that eating meat is natural, and therefore likened an aversion to it to a mental illness. He gave you an example of something else that is natural, assumes you have an aversion to it, but he also assumes you don't consider that aversion to be a mental illness, despite fitting your criteria.
Basically, he destroyed your argument.
For the record, I'm a meat eater. However, the entire idea that we are required to do that which we evolved to do is simply asinine. Do you know something else you didn't evolve to do, besides not eating meat? You didn't evolve to get your food at the supermarket. Food that wasn't foraged or hunted, but rather farmed or killed in slaughterhouses with the assistance of machines. Meat that I presume you like to cook to a tender consistency and cut with the assistance of knives, not really using those predator teeth you want to remind us that we have. We get concentrated sugar out of corn to make desserts and beverages that simply cannot exist without a lot of civilization infrastructure. We live so far from what we evolved to be that making an argument we should look to nature to decide what we should eat, and how we should act doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. Yes, we can get certain nutrition from meat far easier than we can get from vegetables, but we understand that, and our vegetarian friends can get their protein and iron from other sources. So if that's what they want to do, what's it to you? Mental illness indeed.
My favorite question / answer pair: "IEEE Spectrum: What kind of business model is associated with Google Glass? Babak Parviz: This is still being worked on, but we are quite interested in providing the hardware." Probably my favorite non-answer answer of 2012.
I don't get it. It's a perfectly good answer. He's saying they intend to make money on selling the hardware, but that this is also probably not the only way in which they'll monetize glass. Not ambiguous at all, and considering the development stage at the moment, about where I'd expect them to be.
The problem is that they don't know how to make a netbook. I think there is a valid market for a device the size of the original Acer ZG5 netbook. The problem is that the hardware companies allowed Microsoft to define what a netbook was and not the market. I'd love something the size of my Acer ZG5 that had a quad i7 and 8GB of ram and came with linux installed but that never happened. Underpowered Atom based machines with 2GB ram at nearly the price of a dual core equiped laptop. Who wants that? No one and I can't believe they could not figure that out.
That's not a netbook, man. Netbooks are by definition underpowered. What you want is an ultrabook, and they exist. Go check out the latest Asus zenbook prime models.
Well, it doesn't come with linux installed, but you can certainly do that yourself.
He doesn't take bullshit. that is not being unprofessional, it is a quite professional posture.
It's entirely possible to not take any bullshit while simultaneously not acting like a two-year old that was denied ice cream before dinner.
Sorry to destroy your illusions but you don't need to be nice to be professional
It's not about being nice, it's about showing respect. It's perfectly fine to tell someone their behavior is unacceptable. It's perfectly fine to fire someone outright if talking to them doesn't work and the mistakes keep coming. My job contract, however, does not say that I need to withstand verbal abuse. I wouldn't have signed it if it did.
many times you need to be quite obnoxious, ask any Sergeant out there.
There's are reasons for the behavior of a drill sergeant that simply does not apply in the workforce. It's a psychological trick designed to form a bond between everyone under his command (they all have a common enemy, and hate the drill sergeant); to get everyone to pull their weight (everyone else is made to suffer when one guy doesn't do his job, causing peer pressure to kick in and force the slackers to step it up); it conditions everyone to respond to commands quickly, because in a battle situation hesitation could mean death; and it can motivate you to do something you're afraid of doing, because being angry at the asshole screaming at you tends to override fear. I know that last one from experience: when I was learning to skydive at some point I started having panic attacks and refused to get off the plane. My ex-military instructor drill-sergeanted me out the door. Incredible experience. I felt like slugging him while telling him I wasn't a soldier under his command when suddenly I realized the fear was gone, so just stepped out the door instead.
None of the above reasons are applicable in the workplace. You don't want all your subordinates to see you as an enemy; you don't want to punish your productive workers because of the mistakes of the slackers (the good ones will easily be able to find another job, so they'll quit and go somewhere where they're not being abused); you don't want them blindly following orders, they're not in time-critical or death situation, and yes-men who won't calmly argue their position with you leads to nobody catching your own mistakes; and you're not forcing anyone to do anything they're uncomfortable with doing. Psychological warfare is therefore out of the question.
He isn't trying to make friends. He is trying to manage the efforts to implement a particularly complex piece of software, whilst hearing bullshit from one of his developers who made a very big mistake. Everybody makes mistakes, but the right posture when it was obviously your fault is to take the blame and learn from them, not to try and make excuses.
You can't fix unprofessionalism by being unprofessional. Linus's response is uncalled for, and if anyone I work for ever tells me to shut the fuck up, he can start looking for my replacement, and won't ever need to hear me speak up again.
I agree with Linus's reasoning for why it's really a kernel bug, not a pulseaudio bug. The correct way of handling this would be to simply say, "you need to own up to this thing, because it's our policy that any kernel changes that breaks userspace applications is our problem. Fix this now." If for some reason this is a constant issue with the guy, than you remove him from that role as maintainer, but based on the lkml thread and the responses from Mauro, it seems Mauro had good reason to believe some things would remain broken after reverting the changes to the kernel, so he was just trying to understand the problem better. He behaved professionally, calmly explaining his position and agreeing with Linus about his mistake, on the face of having an adult throwing a tamper tantrum at him. Kudos to his patience, I don't share it. You simply could not pay me enough to work with someone who very publicly disrespected me in the way Linus did with him.
The material in question depicts gruesome murders, torture, sexual abuse, assaults and necrophilia â" all with young female victims.
"Art" perhaps. But I'd keep an eye on this guy. Of course it's only my reactionary opinion, but I think people that have an obsession with this sort of thing have a problem, and I'd want to make sure they don't "jump" to exercising a more "real world" form of their entertainment.
"Opinion" perhaps. But I'd like someone to keep an eye on you. Of course it's only my reactionary opinion, but I think people that have an obsession with being concerned with what people do that doesn't harm anyone have a problem, and I'd want to make sure they don't "jump" to exercising a more "real world" form of their philosophy, like lobbying for laws that remove more of our freedoms.
You and I may find it disgusting, but that just means we don't need to go look at it. It doesn't mean this guy is going to go and hurt anyone, and I think it's dangerous for us to start assuming that anyone with a fantasy would want that fantasy to be reality. Let's look at less extreme forms of entertainment. I love James Bond movies. Would I really want to be James Bond? Let's see what happens when we turn that fantasy into reality. We have a man who constantly gets beaten up and tortured, constantly in danger of dying, and although getting laid like he does sounds great, think about all the STDs he must have. I'm a fan of Batman, but do you think that means that I would really want to see a vigilante out in the streets bypassing the court system?
Just because you enjoy a fantasy, doesn't mean you'd like to make it real.
If anything, the dislike for C++ from people who use C++ regularly is much deeper than the more casual dislike that C programmers have. C programmers just think C++ is too complex and unnecessary, but C++ programmers find themselves so consumed by their dislike they end up doing things like writing a point-by-point rebuttal to the entire C++ FAQ.
I think they're just more vocal. Not everyone hates C++. My job involves writing in C, C++, and C#. I love C++. In my ideal world, I'd have C++ with all the .net libraries (and no, managed C++ isn't that. C# is far preferable to writing in managed C++, as C# is actually a pretty good language and managed C++ doesn't give you any of the cool features of C++ that C# doesn't have).
I find people's arguments against C++ to be quite illogical. For example, one of the reasons I really like the language is because it can do true multiple inheritance. People everywhere will then immediately correct me with, "multiple inheritance is bad, mmk?" Then they'll back up that statement by talking about the diamond problem, and how I should use interfaces. I do use interfaces, but they're not a replacement for multiple inheritance because it's still forcing me to duplicate code when I wouldn't otherwise have to. Besides, the language handles the problem in a reasonable way (the order in which you define the inheritance matters), and, as a programmer, if you're inheriting from two classes that have a method with the same signature, then those methods should be virtual, and you should override the method to do exactly what you want. The diamond problem isn't this beast for which there is no reasonable solution. It's just something you need to be cognizant of when coding.
There's also the people who complain about all the incredibly hard to debug crazy stuff people do with templates. You're really just complaining about bad coding. Templates allow you to build more reusable code than generics, and that's how you should use them. If you're going beyond that just because they're turing complete and you can do more with them, well...you might as well complain about C after looking at last year's winner of the obfuscated C contest.
I too, stopped reading Spectrum a few years ago when real science article dropped to a trickle. However, this particular article is not bad. Not only was it authored by one of the original problem solvers, it was very readable despite the length.
Yeah, like I said, it's not that I had a problem with the quality of the article, it's just that it lacked new information. The summary didn't mention that this was about the heat pressure from Pioneer so, like a fool, I went on to read the whole article thinking that maybe this was something new, showing that the heat explanation wasn't enough, and there was actually new physics. Instead, the article contains absolutely no information I hadn't already read about over 6 months ago, and I was a bit bitter when I posted.
And that's the thing about Spectrum: all the articles are crappy. They're either crappy because it's a business article about tech startups instead of the actual tech, or crappy because for anyone actually interested in the field they're coming in so late that they offer nothing new: you've already read about it in far more detail elsewhere. This case was the latter. The slashdot submission from April (link in my post above) contains a link to the pdf of the actual paper, which is also very readable. I'm not a physicist or work with anything space-related, but as just an electrical engineer, I had no problems following it. Basically, if your field of work required you to take some math in college, you're good.
It struck me as they described having to contend with blueprints rather than CAD files and consulting retired engineers from the original mission, that they appeared to have forgotten there is a very nice physical model of the craft hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian
I'm sure if necessary that could have been arranged. That said, I think the blueprints and consulting the engineers who worked with the thing is actually the easier path. They'd have to disassemble the model and measure the thing both internally and externally exactly to build CAD models of it, measurements which would have been in the blueprints. And then I think they'd still need to consult with the original engineers involved, so they could get someone with experience to help pin down exactly how the RTGs radiated heat, where, and how much of it you'd expect. Besides, so many people have been trying to solve the Pioneer anomaly over the years, that it'd be difficult logistically for the Smithsonian to lend the thing to every scientist trying to get evidence for his particular theory.
I hate Spectrum. Not because they have bad articles, but because they never have anything that I haven't already been reading about for the past months, or even years.
Hint to editors. If you ever get a submission with a link to Spectrum, chances are very high that Slashdot has covered it before.
Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security? Really, who does that? Fools and idiot attention seekers.
How far have we fallen that slashdot readers are asking that?
Who does that? Nerds. Nerds do that. Incredible nerds like Steve Wozniak for example.
People wear things I find to be ridiculous all the time that everyone has no problem labeling as fashion statements. But if it's wires and fuses, it can't be a statement of the types of things you enjoy, it has to be an idiot attention seeker?
Personally, I find it much more easy to label people idiots when they think every exposed wire and fuse is a bomb.
When someone accuses you of being a creep after you do a nice thing for them, because they lack the morals to take responsibility for their own embarrassing mistakes and would rather blame the person who helped you out, you are absolutely 100% justified in calling that person whatever you want.
no matter how many people you run over with a bus, humans are not going to evolve immunity to buses
The ones who don't get run over by buses are more likely to be the ones who pay attention to what's around them or the ones who never leave the house. Both of those are good not-getting-run-over-by-a-bus survival strategies, and they can be passed down to the survivors' offspring.
That _is_ how evolution works.
You know, when I was writing my original post, I debated changing my example to "you can't develop an immunity to being shot," because I figured somebody would misinterpret it.
All I'm trying to say with that example is that you can't necessarily force an adaptation to a species by applying an evolutionary pressure. Sometimes you get extinction instead. Sometimes there are no feasible mutations that can develop, or there are feasible mutations, but they are of sufficiently low probability that they don't develop in time to stop the extinction.