There is a reason we built the ISS. Because aerospace contractors found a way to convince Reagan & Congress that it was important to fund the ISS to keep America from "falling behind." Falling behind in what, you ask? In space technology! Why is it important to lead in space technology? Because a lead in space technology leads to a greater lead in other critical areas of competition, such as *mumble*, and *harumph*.
After all, we couldn't leave wasteful space-based boondoggles to the Russians, could we?
Two of your remaining four came to America to do their most influential work. Who cares if Fermi was born in Italy? The U.S. had the organization, the funding, and the non-fascist, non-anti-semitic political scene that let him build the first fission reactor in Chicago. Heisenberg, possibly as brilliant (though with hardly the experimental acumen), working in Nazi Germany, got nowhere. Likewise for von Braun--Nazi Germany had him developing penny-ante weapons, the U.S. had him boost people to the moon. (I suppose he helped the U.S. develop ICBMs, but hey, that's technology, too.) Even Einstein died an American.
If the U.S. is still the destination of choice for the best and brightest foreign-born minds, that's going to pay off BIG in the long run. The only challenge I see is Chinese-born professionals starting to feel that China offers enough freedom to make staying there pay off more than coming to the U.S. In order to do that, China has to focus on maintaining its own internal stability, probably liberalize its political system, and will have to take a very calm approach to international relations. That helps the U.S., too, so the downside of being the second-largest national economy won't be so bad.
Actually, his argument is far weaker. We know that 1g is enough to keep our bones healthy for years. We know that 0g is not. A long-term moon presence will give us exactly one more data point: 1/6g. Is it really worth the billions of dollars a year that a manned moon presence would cost to determine if the gravity on the moon is enough for a long-term manned moon presence?
You are presuming that there will be anything useful to be gained by stopping at the moon. When I'm on a trip, being able to pull over at a barren rock is not a real advantage.
If I can find a gas station on the road, however, I'm happy.
Unless you believe there is some far-out way that liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (or some other rocket fuel) will be cheaply available on the moon, what exactly is the advantage of having a human presence on the moon waiting for planetary trips to stop by?
Entertainment tours (coachne.com) might beat Fung Wah. Modern bus (some of Fung Wah are just jitneys, with no luggage space), $40 round-trip, and it stops at Penn Station in NY (not Chinatown).
The most dualistic view in the whole debate is by W. himself.
"For us or against us" "Protect freedom" vs. "hate freedom" "Evil-doers" "Axis of Evil" "Protecting our national security" vs. "Unconcerned about national security"
For me, that's the discouraging thing about this administration. Every policy pronouncement they make contains an absurdity:
"Economic stimulus for the current downturn requires tax cuts in 2011"
"Osama bin Laden attacks the U.S. because he hates freedom." Hates freedom? No, he hates Western civilization! Never mind that bin Laden is presumably in favor of prayer in schools, against abortion, against gay marriage, in favor of "under Allah" in a Pledge of Allegiance, etc., as all "freedom lovers" must, right? Does Vladimir Putin love freedom? Do the Saudi princes?
"Iraq's WMD are a threat to the U.S." Not even close--a threat to Israel, Iran, Gulf States, most certainly. No attention paid, by the way, to what effect U.S. intervention will have on moderate forces in Iran, where moderates have to defend themselves against the charge that they are friends of the Great Satan. Doesn't matter because Iran is "evil," right?
Actually, after having done some research, I must apologize. GWB was, after all, born in Midland, Texas. I had been misled by some Texans who didn't think he had been born there.
The problem with your model is that the studios really can't be sure whether a movie will make a killing until it is released. There is a huge element of risk in what are one-time artistic efforts. Consumers can't pay in advance for a movie to be made.
Something like English Patient, for instance, could very easily have vanished without a trace. Or The Matrix.
There are all sorts of reasons for inexpensive, yet ultimately unprofitable films to be made. One of them is the chance that one out of fifty of these might become a wild success. Another is that directors/actors want to work on more creative, challenging projects, and the studios pay for it, in order to keep them around for the less creative but more marketable stuff they churn out to make a profit. These are reasonable choices made by rational profit-seeking companies.
My point was that the popes/princes were not relying on Michelangelo to generate income from ticket sales to a broad public. The Sistine chapel, for example, was essentially for private use, and did not have to turn a profit.
Oh, please. You seriously believe George W. Bush would be president today if his father weren't George H. W. Bush, or GHWB would have been president if *his* father had not been Prescott Bush?
W.'s whole "business" experience (i.e., demonstrating his ability to lose other people's money) was based on political connections to his father's associates.
As for dunce, I suppose you think that getting gentlemen's C's at Yale after a comfortable life as a Bush in Connecticut is demonstrating more intelligence than being granted a Rhodes scholarship after growing up in the middle-of-nowhere-Arkansas. Given that GWB can't seem to utter more than two sentences in a row without either garbled syntax or a manifest absurdity, I find your judgement suspect.
This is a bit unfair. Michaelangelo got funded by popes/princes who had independent sources of wealth. Who the heck is going to pay for artsy films, if not for studios who want to prove that they have some taste, after all?
Remember the rule: 99% of everything is crap. I found Independence Day and Episode I, for instance, to be unbearably execrable, and couldn't imagine *anyone* enjoying either, but many other people seem to have done so. I have to congratulate the producers for having a better sense of the movie-going public than I do. From that, I conclude that my tastes are a minority of the market, and I actually should be pleasantly surprised that films get made that I actually enjoy, instead of outraged that crowd-pleasing junk gets made.
(None of my money went to reward Episode II being made, so Lucas is getting his just reward in the end. I'm sure he is broken-hearted.)
"Engineering" refers to starting with a goal (desired functionality) and arranging materials in a way (determined by a possibly involved design process) that reaches that goal (by delivering a finished product that works).
"Reverse Engineering" is the exact opposite: one has a finished product that does something, or at least would if it were in proper working order. (Did you break it?) There might be some documentation. One might have some idea of the goal, perhaps only a vague one. (E.g., an automaker might reverse engineer a competitor's automobile, which has an obvious goal. For a Windows virus, you have a vague idea that the program is supposed to cause damage and/or replicate itself.) The missing part is insight into the design process that happened. Figuring out that design process (by whatever means) is the goal of "reverse engineering."
Why do you want to know about the design? You might discover the secret behind some unique functionality. You might expose some flaw or weakness. You might be able to reconstruct enough of the internal protocols to be able to develop compatible products. (E.g. understand enough about IBM's PC BIOS to document its behavior well enough for a programming team to construct a compatible BIOS without simply duplicating the ROM contents, to break into the market for making PC clones in the 1980s.) You might just enjoy tearing things apart.
It is not strictly true that all graphics in TeX are EPS. TeX/LaTeX do not know anything about graphics files except for "graphics" made by putting TeX primitives on the page.
What TeX/LaTeX can do for other types of graphics is include "special" commands which are picked up by the driver that processes TeX's.dvi output. The most common driver is dvips, which accepts special commands which refer to EPS graphics, which dvips can then incorporate in the PostScript output. By using different drivers, such as PDFTeX, one can incorporate other graphics types, such as JPEG, directly.
That said,.EPS is going to be the easiest way to go.
BibTeX shouldn't be that painful, although you need to be pretty in tune with LaTeX customs to really feel comfortable with it. (That is, once you understand how LaTeX does tables of contents, etc., you can understand how BiBTeX fits into the workflow.) The bonus is that many source of citation information can give it to you in BiBTeX format, so you can quickly build up your database of sources you commonly cite.
My experience (like most people) was learning LaTeX & BiBTeX for my thesis, and I feel that the relatively small effort paid off because I avoided fighting Word. Sometimes you need to debug LaTeX (forget a brace), but it's like learning any other programming language: there are fewer than a dozen common ways for LaTeX to fail, and you learn how to find and fix the problems pretty soon. Then, the only thing left to learn is the final polishing of formula appearances, punctuation, etc., which only needs to happen if you really want things to look nice.
The problem with Word is that there are a lot of very strange behaviors that aren't easy to fix, especially as documents get large. There is a lot of hidden markup that eventually gets bunged up, and then no amount of fiddling seems to make it work again. And no amount of fiddling will make Word's formulas look like anything but crap. I've never had Emacs or LaTeX crash on me and cause me to lose work.
To be fair, I think you have conflated the concept of "too slow" with "too slow in the available physical RAM."
I assume (not using it myself) that XP requires more RAM than 98 or 2000, so that swapping might be increased on old RAM-starved machines.
If you added enough RAM to accomodate the extra XP memory usage, then the speed might not be as different. This isn't a point in XP's favor, of course, but it would answer whether the problem is "XP is too slow" or "XP uses too much RAM."
Well, as for your particles moving backwards or forwards through time and "averaging out," there is a big difference between the particles "actually" moving, in the sense of having separate physical existence, and reaching a correct physical result by the mathematical operation.
Just to clarify, I believe in QED as much as the next physicist, but you have to keep in mind that Feynman's very compelling pictures are still just pictures. They show you how to find the path through the mathematical forest that was Schwinger. Just because the average of foo and bar gives you baz, and is correct, doesn't mean that "foo" and "bar" exist, just that you can use them as tools to calculate "baz" reliably.
Well the question with "falsely ruined" is whether they should have had careers as physicists at all.
I'm not a string theorist by any stretch (I've gone to a number of colloquia, and always follow it to about the same slide 20% through every time, but never get any further in really understanding what these people actually do. I understand the kind of stuff that condensed matter theorists do: making expansions, various kinds of approximations, mixed in with quantum and statistical mechanics; and I know when they think they are finished. I guess one problem is I just don't understand topological deduction at all.)
Anyhow, the point made in the article is that not everyone making string theory arguments has as much of a grasp of the necessary mathematics as they should, and referees don't have the time to check all their work as rigorously as one might like. That means that sloppy, useless, impenetrable stuff can still get through the system.
My take as an outsider is that these people probably don't have any truly publishable ideas, just confusing ones. If their careers are "ruined" it's probably because their careers shouldn't have been leading anywhere. But hey, some days I still don't see a real reason that *competent* string theorists should be having careers either. What have they done for me lately?:-)
To be more complete, however, an overelaborated theory usually is superseded by another theory that is aesthetically superior, and can be scientifically fruitful, even if the initial evidence is somewhat lacking.
Rarely does a overelaborated theory get discarded without some other theory to take its place. That's how this process can keep moving in a direction that seems to be forward.
It's also important to emphasize that theories get overelaborated because of experimental measurements that meet relatively high standards of technical excellence. Ptolemy had to have cycles to *accurately* account for observed planetary motion. That's an important thing missing from the parallel phenomenon in art. Planetary motion wasn't *settled* until impressive observations were made by Brahe and others, for Kepler to use. (Copernicus is an interesting case: the circular orbits are less accurate than Ptolemaic systems. That one could favor a less-accurate theory is the human part, but the less-accurate theory had to be made more accurate to finally win, because people didn't disbelieve their hard data. If it were truly art alone, people never would have progressed to Kepler's laws.)
Reading at +3 doesn't work because the moderators are either as stupid as the average Slashdot reader, or are too busy to pay attention to what they are moderating.
What gets modded up to +3 usually consists of the following:
1) cleverly concealed falsehoods designed to appear insightful to typical Slashdot readers. 2) carelessly presented "fact-filled" posts that usually have gross errors, but appeared early in the discussion, so they were the most informative posts at the time. 3) yet another recycling of a somewhat appealing idea that was off-topic the last time, and is off-topic yet again. 4) Harmless, uninformative, but politically tasty diatribes of various kinds. Similar to the annoying one-liners attached to the articles by the editors. Even if they have a grain of truth, they are invariably presented with smarmy, smug, overweening typically-geek confidence. 5) In general, whatever else got modded up.
Genuinely informative, insightful, and interesting posts are lucky to get one positive mod point. Much more commonly, something that deserves at most one positive mod point, and likely deserves a "-1 completly misguided," will instead get a pile-on that would send it to +10 if there weren't a +5 limit.
You're not clear about who is "totally wrong" in this discussion. Just to be clear, you ought to acknowledge that this is a point in favor of registering. Without registration, how can they provide anything to indicate to advertisers in a general audience newspaper that they are reaching people who at least purport to be part of a desirable demographic?
The NYT is giving away most of its coverage, which includes Pulitzer-prize-winning journalism day-in and day-out. They can afford to do this, if they are making money instead of losing it, by promising to advertisers that they are reaching a desirable demographic. They need registrations to do that, and I believe they are genuinely conscientious in their desire to not exploit the registrators.
You think England is somehow all of Europe? Europeans would be surprised. Ever hear of Norway, Spain, Poland, Italy? Those are the extremes you should be considering. Europe as a continent is basically the size of the U.S. You think Europeans only eat what is grown in their back yards?
The question is whether a similarly huge investment in rail would have resulted in more efficient rail service. For example, passenger rail service in the U.S. is, through some miracle, supposed to pay for itself, although it does so in no country that I know of. Highway expenditures are, however, huge and unquestioned. Gas taxes are low and unquestioned. Truck transportation is cheap, but only because the highway use is subsidized through government expenditure. Road use taxes and fuel taxes paid by trucks doesn't even come close to paying for the upkeep of roads.
Government expenditures subsidize trucks, they don't subsidize rail. That is obviously going to favor trucks.
I am not arguing that Europe is morally superior, simply that economic incentives are what determine the transportation mix, not some massive distance requirements alone. In fact, the longer the distance, the *greater* the inherent advantage of rail transport for goods.
I don't really want to get drawn into this, but Microsoft clearly rooked IBM when it came to OS/2. IBM, even after the MS-DOS experience, made the mistake of letting MS write OS/2 for them. At the same time that MS was developing Windows.
You think MS really gave 100% to developing OS/2 when they were also developing the competition? You think MS was really honest to the makers of Wordperfect when they said "don't bother developing a Windows word processor...OS/2 is the future."?
It wouldn't bring the economy to collapse, although it would cause great changes.
The U.S. certainly uses rail to move goods, just as we use trailer trucks. The ratio of the usage is different in Europe, but that is largely because of the costs involved. Change the costs, and the behavior will change.
In Germany, automobile travel is considered desirable, although more expensive than in the U.S.. Another thing to be considered is the quality of the inter-city highways, which is *much* higher in Germany. How else do you think people can drive 180 miles per hour on the autobahn? How do they afford to build such nice roads....the tax revenue from gasoline, perhaps?
Your answer is incomplete. If the tax is enough to represent the societal cost of the pollution, then the increase in net selling price will give buyers the incentive to change their buying habits to optimize the tradeoff between societal costs and their personal benefit.
Prices drive behavior. They serve as the mechanism for resource usage (of all kinds) to be regulated. E.g. using scarce precious metals vs. less scarce minerals. The problem with pollution is that it causes a decrease in people's well-being without an accompanying payment.
In principle, you could bid with me for the privilege of making my air dirtier in exchange for money. If I decided I wanted pristine air, the bid would have to be high, and there would be few polluters who could afford to pollute. As long as I voluntarily accepted the bid, and were fully informed as to the effects of the pollution, I would have no reason to complain. I gave up my clean air for good money. Perhaps even enough to buy an air filter that would remove the pollution with some left over.
The problem is that we don't have the power to control the air we breathe, except through governmental regulation. Therefore, one alternative is to tax activities that cause pollution. The government collects the money, instead of the individuals, but in principle, it has a similar effect on polluters. Presumably, it would be even more effective if a market existed to determine the price of pollution, with producers having to bid for the right to pollute, instead of having a fixed, somewhat arbitrary tax rate. (Good luck trying to explain this to an Earth-firster.)
Slashdot Mirror
There is a reason we built the ISS. Because aerospace contractors found a way to convince Reagan & Congress that it was important to fund the ISS to keep America from "falling behind." Falling behind in what, you ask? In space technology! Why is it important to lead in space technology? Because a lead in space technology leads to a greater lead in other critical areas of competition, such as *mumble*, and *harumph*.
After all, we couldn't leave wasteful space-based boondoggles to the Russians, could we?
Two of your remaining four came to America to do their most influential work. Who cares if Fermi was born in Italy? The U.S. had the organization, the funding, and the non-fascist, non-anti-semitic political scene that let him build the first fission reactor in Chicago. Heisenberg, possibly as brilliant (though with hardly the experimental acumen), working in Nazi Germany, got nowhere. Likewise for von Braun--Nazi Germany had him developing penny-ante weapons, the U.S. had him boost people to the moon. (I suppose he helped the U.S. develop ICBMs, but hey, that's technology, too.) Even Einstein died an American.
If the U.S. is still the destination of choice for the best and brightest foreign-born minds, that's going to pay off BIG in the long run. The only challenge I see is Chinese-born professionals starting to feel that China offers enough freedom to make staying there pay off more than coming to the U.S. In order to do that, China has to focus on maintaining its own internal stability, probably liberalize its political system, and will have to take a very calm approach to international relations. That helps the U.S., too, so the downside of being the second-largest national economy won't be so bad.
Actually, his argument is far weaker. We know that 1g is enough to keep our bones healthy for years. We know that 0g is not. A long-term moon presence will give us exactly one more data point: 1/6g. Is it really worth the billions of dollars a year that a manned moon presence would cost to determine if the gravity on the moon is enough for a long-term manned moon presence?
You are presuming that there will be anything useful to be gained by stopping at the moon. When I'm on a trip, being able to pull over at a barren rock is not a real advantage.
If I can find a gas station on the road, however, I'm happy.
Unless you believe there is some far-out way that liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (or some other rocket fuel) will be cheaply available on the moon, what exactly is the advantage of having a human presence on the moon waiting for planetary trips to stop by?
You're both wrong.
Heigh-ho, the derry-o.
Heigh-ho is in Shakespeare, as an interjection.
Derry, possibly as in county Derry?
Entertainment tours (coachne.com) might beat Fung Wah. Modern bus (some of Fung Wah are just jitneys, with no luggage space), $40 round-trip, and it stops at Penn Station in NY (not Chinatown).
The most dualistic view in the whole debate is by W. himself.
"For us or against us"
"Protect freedom" vs. "hate freedom"
"Evil-doers"
"Axis of Evil"
"Protecting our national security" vs. "Unconcerned about national security"
For me, that's the discouraging thing about this administration. Every policy pronouncement they make contains an absurdity:
"Economic stimulus for the current downturn requires tax cuts in 2011"
"Osama bin Laden attacks the U.S. because he hates freedom." Hates freedom? No, he hates Western civilization! Never mind that bin Laden is presumably in favor of prayer in schools, against abortion, against gay marriage, in favor of "under Allah" in a Pledge of Allegiance, etc., as all "freedom lovers" must, right? Does Vladimir Putin love freedom? Do the Saudi princes?
"Iraq's WMD are a threat to the U.S." Not even close--a threat to Israel, Iran, Gulf States, most certainly. No attention paid, by the way, to what effect U.S. intervention will have on moderate forces in Iran, where moderates have to defend themselves against the charge that they are friends of the Great Satan. Doesn't matter because Iran is "evil," right?
Actually, after having done some research, I must apologize. GWB was, after all, born in Midland, Texas. I had been misled by some Texans who didn't think he had been born there.
The problem with your model is that the studios really can't be sure whether a movie will make a killing until it is released. There is a huge element of risk in what are one-time artistic efforts. Consumers can't pay in advance for a movie to be made.
Something like English Patient, for instance, could very easily have vanished without a trace.
Or The Matrix.
There are all sorts of reasons for inexpensive, yet ultimately unprofitable films to be made. One of them is the chance that one out of fifty of these might become a wild success. Another is that directors/actors want to work on more creative, challenging projects, and the studios pay for it, in order to keep them around for the less creative but more marketable stuff they churn out to make a profit. These are reasonable choices made by rational profit-seeking companies.
My point was that the popes/princes were not relying on Michelangelo to generate income from ticket sales to a broad public. The Sistine chapel, for example, was essentially for private use, and did not have to turn a profit.
Oh, please. You seriously believe George W. Bush would be president today if his father weren't George H. W. Bush, or GHWB would have been president if *his* father had not been Prescott Bush?
W.'s whole "business" experience (i.e., demonstrating his ability to lose other people's money) was based on political connections to his father's associates.
As for dunce, I suppose you think that getting gentlemen's C's at Yale after a comfortable life as a Bush in Connecticut is demonstrating more intelligence than being granted a Rhodes scholarship after growing up in the middle-of-nowhere-Arkansas. Given that GWB can't seem to utter more than two sentences in a row without either garbled syntax or a manifest absurdity, I find your judgement suspect.
This is a bit unfair. Michaelangelo got funded by popes/princes who had independent sources of wealth. Who the heck is going to pay for artsy films, if not for studios who want to prove that they have some taste, after all?
Remember the rule: 99% of everything is crap. I found Independence Day and Episode I, for instance, to be unbearably execrable, and couldn't imagine *anyone* enjoying either, but many other people seem to have done so. I have to congratulate the producers for having a better sense of the movie-going public than I do. From that, I conclude that my tastes are a minority of the market, and I actually should be pleasantly surprised that films get made that I actually enjoy, instead of outraged that crowd-pleasing junk gets made.
(None of my money went to reward Episode II being made, so Lucas is getting his just reward in the end. I'm sure he is broken-hearted.)
"Engineering" refers to starting with a goal (desired functionality) and arranging materials in a way (determined by a possibly involved design process) that reaches that goal (by delivering a finished product that works).
"Reverse Engineering" is the exact opposite: one has a finished product that does something, or at least would if it were in proper working order. (Did you break it?) There might be some documentation. One might have some idea of the goal, perhaps only a vague one. (E.g., an automaker might reverse engineer a competitor's automobile, which has an obvious goal. For a Windows virus, you have a vague idea that the program is supposed to cause damage and/or replicate itself.) The missing part is insight into the design process that happened. Figuring out that design process (by whatever means) is the goal of "reverse engineering."
Why do you want to know about the design? You might discover the secret behind some unique functionality. You might expose some flaw or weakness. You might be able to reconstruct enough of the internal protocols to be able to develop compatible products. (E.g. understand enough about IBM's PC BIOS to document its behavior well enough for a programming team to construct a compatible BIOS without simply duplicating the ROM contents, to break into the market for making PC clones in the 1980s.) You might just enjoy tearing things apart.
Hope this helps!
It is not strictly true that all graphics in TeX are EPS. TeX/LaTeX do not know anything about graphics files except for "graphics" made by putting TeX primitives on the page.
.dvi output. The most common driver is dvips, which accepts special commands which refer to EPS graphics, which dvips can then incorporate in the PostScript output. By using different drivers, such as PDFTeX, one can incorporate other graphics types, such as JPEG, directly.
.EPS is going to be the easiest way to go.
What TeX/LaTeX can do for other types of graphics is include "special" commands which are picked up by the driver that processes TeX's
That said,
BibTeX shouldn't be that painful, although you need to be pretty in tune with LaTeX customs to really feel comfortable with it. (That is, once you understand how LaTeX does tables of contents, etc., you can understand how BiBTeX fits into the workflow.) The bonus is that many source of citation information can give it to you in BiBTeX format, so you can quickly build up your database of sources you commonly cite.
My experience (like most people) was learning LaTeX & BiBTeX for my thesis, and I feel that the relatively small effort paid off because I avoided fighting Word. Sometimes you need to debug LaTeX (forget a brace), but it's like learning any other programming language: there are fewer than a dozen common ways for LaTeX to fail, and you learn how to find and fix the problems pretty soon. Then, the only thing left to learn is the final polishing of formula appearances, punctuation, etc., which only needs to happen if you really want things to look nice.
The problem with Word is that there are a lot of very strange behaviors that aren't easy to fix, especially as documents get large. There is a lot of hidden markup that eventually gets bunged up, and then no amount of fiddling seems to make it work again. And no amount of fiddling will make Word's formulas look like anything but crap. I've never had Emacs or LaTeX crash on me and cause me to lose work.
To be fair, I think you have conflated the concept of "too slow" with "too slow in the available physical RAM."
I assume (not using it myself) that XP requires more RAM than 98 or 2000, so that swapping might be increased on old RAM-starved machines.
If you added enough RAM to accomodate the extra XP memory usage, then the speed might not be as different. This isn't a point in XP's favor, of course, but it would answer whether the problem is "XP is too slow" or "XP uses too much RAM."
Well, as for your particles moving backwards or forwards through time and "averaging out," there is a big difference between the particles "actually" moving, in the sense of having separate physical existence, and reaching a correct physical result by the mathematical operation.
Just to clarify, I believe in QED as much as the next physicist, but you have to keep in mind that Feynman's very compelling pictures are still just pictures. They show you how to find the path through the mathematical forest that was Schwinger.
Just because the average of foo and bar gives you baz, and is correct, doesn't mean that "foo" and "bar" exist, just that you can use them as tools to calculate "baz" reliably.
Well the question with "falsely ruined" is whether they should have had careers as physicists at all.
:-)
I'm not a string theorist by any stretch (I've gone to a number of colloquia, and always follow it to about the same slide 20% through every time, but never get any further in really understanding what these people actually do. I understand the kind of stuff that condensed matter theorists do: making expansions, various kinds of approximations, mixed in with quantum and statistical mechanics; and I know when they think they are finished. I guess one problem is I just don't understand topological deduction at all.)
Anyhow, the point made in the article is that not everyone making string theory arguments has as much of a grasp of the necessary mathematics as they should, and referees don't have the time to check all their work as rigorously as one might like. That means that sloppy, useless, impenetrable stuff can still get through the system.
My take as an outsider is that these people probably don't have any truly publishable ideas, just confusing ones. If their careers are "ruined" it's probably because their careers shouldn't have been leading anywhere. But hey, some days I still don't see a real reason that *competent* string theorists should be having careers either. What have they done for me lately?
To be more complete, however, an overelaborated theory usually is superseded by another theory that is aesthetically superior, and can be scientifically fruitful, even if the initial evidence is somewhat lacking.
Rarely does a overelaborated theory get discarded without some other theory to take its place. That's how this process can keep moving in a direction that seems to be forward.
It's also important to emphasize that theories get overelaborated because of experimental measurements that meet relatively high standards of technical excellence. Ptolemy had to have cycles to *accurately* account for observed planetary motion. That's an important thing missing from the parallel phenomenon in art. Planetary motion wasn't *settled* until impressive observations were made by Brahe and others, for Kepler to use. (Copernicus is an interesting case: the circular orbits are less accurate than Ptolemaic systems. That one could favor a less-accurate theory is the human part, but the less-accurate theory had to be made more accurate to finally win, because people didn't disbelieve their hard data. If it were truly art alone, people never would have progressed to Kepler's laws.)
Reading at +3 doesn't work because the moderators are either as stupid as the average Slashdot reader, or are too busy to pay attention to what they are moderating.
What gets modded up to +3 usually consists of the following:
1) cleverly concealed falsehoods designed to appear insightful to typical Slashdot readers.
2) carelessly presented "fact-filled" posts that usually have gross errors, but appeared early in the discussion, so they were the most informative posts at the time.
3) yet another recycling of a somewhat appealing idea that was off-topic the last time, and is off-topic yet again.
4) Harmless, uninformative, but politically tasty diatribes of various kinds. Similar to the annoying one-liners attached to the articles by the editors. Even if they have a grain of truth, they are invariably presented with smarmy, smug, overweening typically-geek confidence.
5) In general, whatever else got modded up.
Genuinely informative, insightful, and interesting posts are lucky to get one positive mod point. Much more commonly, something that deserves at most one positive mod point, and likely deserves a "-1 completly misguided," will instead get a pile-on that would send it to +10 if there weren't a +5 limit.
You're not clear about who is "totally wrong" in this discussion. Just to be clear, you ought to acknowledge that this is a point in favor of registering. Without registration, how can they provide anything to indicate to advertisers in a general audience newspaper that they are reaching people who at least purport to be part of a desirable demographic?
The NYT is giving away most of its coverage, which includes Pulitzer-prize-winning journalism day-in and day-out. They can afford to do this, if they are making money instead of losing it, by promising to advertisers that they are reaching a desirable demographic. They need registrations to do that, and I believe they are genuinely conscientious in their desire to not exploit the registrators.
You think England is somehow all of Europe? Europeans would be surprised. Ever hear of Norway, Spain, Poland, Italy? Those are the extremes you should be considering. Europe as a continent is basically the size of the U.S. You think Europeans only eat what is grown in their back yards?
The question is whether a similarly huge investment in rail would have resulted in more efficient rail service. For example, passenger rail service in the U.S. is, through some miracle, supposed to pay for itself, although it does so in no country that I know of. Highway expenditures are, however, huge and unquestioned. Gas taxes are low and unquestioned. Truck transportation is cheap, but only because the highway use is subsidized through government expenditure. Road use taxes and fuel taxes paid by trucks doesn't even come close to paying for the upkeep of roads.
Government expenditures subsidize trucks, they don't subsidize rail. That is obviously going to favor trucks.
I am not arguing that Europe is morally superior, simply that economic incentives are what determine the transportation mix, not some massive distance requirements alone. In fact, the longer the distance, the *greater* the inherent advantage of rail transport for goods.
I don't really want to get drawn into this, but Microsoft clearly rooked IBM when it came to OS/2. IBM, even after the MS-DOS experience, made the mistake of letting MS write OS/2 for them. At the same time that MS was developing Windows.
You think MS really gave 100% to developing OS/2 when they were also developing the competition? You think MS was really honest to the makers of Wordperfect when they said "don't bother developing a Windows word processor...OS/2 is the future."?
It wouldn't bring the economy to collapse, although it would cause great changes.
The U.S. certainly uses rail to move goods, just as we use trailer trucks. The ratio of the usage is different in Europe, but that is largely because of the costs involved. Change the costs, and the behavior will change.
In Germany, automobile travel is considered desirable, although more expensive than in the U.S.. Another thing to be considered is the quality of the inter-city highways, which is *much* higher in Germany. How else do you think people can drive 180 miles per hour on the autobahn? How do they afford to build such nice roads....the tax revenue from gasoline, perhaps?
Your answer is incomplete. If the tax is enough to represent the societal cost of the pollution, then the increase in net selling price will give buyers the incentive to change their buying habits to optimize the tradeoff between societal costs and their personal benefit.
Prices drive behavior. They serve as the mechanism for resource usage (of all kinds) to be regulated. E.g. using scarce precious metals vs. less scarce minerals. The problem with pollution is that it causes a decrease in people's well-being without an accompanying payment.
In principle, you could bid with me for the privilege of making my air dirtier in exchange for money. If I decided I wanted pristine air, the bid would have to be high, and there would be few polluters who could afford to pollute. As long as I voluntarily accepted the bid, and were fully informed as to the effects of the pollution, I would have no reason to complain. I gave up my clean air for good money. Perhaps even enough to buy an air filter that would remove the pollution with some left over.
The problem is that we don't have the power to control the air we breathe, except through governmental regulation. Therefore, one alternative is to tax activities that cause pollution. The government collects the money, instead of the individuals, but in principle, it has a similar effect on polluters. Presumably, it would be even more effective if a market existed to determine the price of pollution, with producers having to bid for the right to pollute, instead of having a fixed, somewhat arbitrary tax rate. (Good luck trying to explain this to an Earth-firster.)