How does arming allied forces with cheap handguns in the 1940's have anything to do with the modern military/police? You are barking mad if you think that any citizens group could stand up to either. Just look at the asymmetry in civilian and military deaths in Iraq and Afganistan. Hell, if you want to talk about the 40's, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
People defend their liberties (all of them, not just the single one in the second amendment) when they feel those liberties, as expressed in their way of life, are threatened.
I disagree. The country that I grew up in died in the Fall of 2001 when we tossed the Bill of Rights out the window, quite literally sacrificing liberty in the name of security. From naked body scanners to universal wire taps to indefinite detention without a trial, anyone who doesn't feel those liberties being threatened is either an idiot or living in a cave. Yet people get their underwear in a knot over the mildest whiff of gun control, even when it doesn't affect them--e.g., people in the flyover states getting worked up over laws in California and New York.
Nobody owns undetectable guns, or really wants to own them. Therefore nobody defends that particular liberty.
Then why were they banned? I'm pretty sure that plenty of people would be interested in owning those James Bond-esque one-shot guns concealed in an umbrella or whatever. That nobody owns them is a directly result of making them illegal to manufacture (at least for civilians), which they started doing in the late 80's when the technology was made available. They still do make plastic/ceramic guns, but they have to put a hunk of iron in them and make them look like guns on an X-Ray to comply with the law.
I'm not trying to be snarky, I am really trying to understand why something like universal background checks or limits on magazine capacity elicit howls of tyranny, while categorically banning any firearm made of a certain material flies right under the radar.
Nope. I used quantifiable phenomena--i.e., facts--rather than other peoples' opinions and avoided making arbitrary comparisons.
Good for you for digging up some numbers about murder rates, but good luck convincing anyone that the threat of roving gangs is so severe that arming the elderly is a moral imperative. I suppose you could threaten them with a gun, but that might backfire... literally and figuratively.
Hey, maybe we can transplant the brains of pensioners into armored cyborgs and they can carry giant, automatic pistols where their quadriceps used to be: "Citizen, get off of my lawn. You have ten seconds to comply! Ten... Nine..." Unfortunately for me throngs of tire-iron wielding maniacs aren't a problem where I live, so I only point guns at ducks, skeet, and targets.
As to winning debates - facts seem to be far too rarely considered in moderation or "winning" debates on Slashdot.
While that may be true, you cited the Cato institution, Fox News, something called "gunssavelives.net," the WJS opinion page, opinion pieces in the Boston Globe, The Telegraph, and The Washington Examiner, something called "americanthinker.com," a weasel-worded gallop poll, and an article from the Hill that is quoting the the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee pointing out that a couple of democrats in Montana and South Dakota aren't toeing the gun-control line. These articles all make the argument that we need more guns and less regulation because guns make us safer. Lastly, you pulled out that old canard that the UK has a higher crime rate than the US to really drive the point home. But you cleverly avoid delving into the type of crime.
Now, watch this: The rate of firearm-related deaths per capita is 10.23 in the US and 0.25 in the UK. The only countries (of the 75 listed) with higher rates than the US are: Panama, Mexico, Columbia, South Africa, Brazil, Swaziland, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Jamaica. Interestingly, the country with the lowest rate, Japan, has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world. Of course, I'm not suggesting a causal relationship, but I will point out that the presence of a gun is a prerequisite to any form of gun violence.
In the Forbes article, other than "a single nail that is used as a firing pin", the gun also includes another nonprintable part. The group, the article says, added a six-ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the undetectable firearms act. The act, Congressman Steve Israel says, is set to expire at the end of the year. "The very least we should do, as a matter of common sense, is extend the undetectable firearms act so that a plastic gun or component can't be brought onto planes because a metal detector can't detect them," notes Israel.
I could never understand why people have no problem with a law that categorically bans ALL guns that are made from non-ferrous materials, and/or that do not look like a gun by X-Ray, but run around like crazy people talking about armed citizens overthrowing the government over limitations on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines--or f***ing background checks. The only way a citizens group would ever have a chance at affecting change in government with guns would be by assassinating a politician--you have no chance against the military or police, sorry. And the Undetectable Firearms Act was written pretty much with that problem in mind (and, obviously other public places like airports.) Why then aren't people pooping their pants over this clear restriction to the supposed core principle of the Second Amendment?
Seriously, where are the protests and demonstrations against the banning of plastic guns 25 years ago? Where were all the threats to vote politicians out of office for violating their constitutional rights? If the answer to the theater shooting in Aurora was that movie-goers should have been carrying guns, and the answer to school shootings is armed teachers, then why not airplanes? Wouldn't we all feel safer if everyone in an airplane was carrying an undetectable plastic gun? I mean, what can box cutters do against bullets? This cognitive dissonance (and the total capitulation of the trampling of the rest of the Bill of Rights) perplexes me.
(This is a re-post because I genuinely want to know the answer)
In the Forbes article, other than "a single nail that is used as a firing pin", the gun also includes another nonprintable part. The group, the article says, added a six-ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the undetectable firearms act. The act, Congressman Steve Israel says, is set to expire at the end of the year.
"The very least we should do, as a matter of common sense, is extend the undetectable firearms act so that a plastic gun or component can't be brought onto planes because a metal detector can't detect them," notes Israel.
I could never understand why people have no problem with a law that categorically bans ALL guns that are made from non-ferrous materials, and/or that do not look like a gun by X-Ray, but run around like crazy people talking about armed citizens overthrowing the government over limitations on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines--or f***ing background checks. The only way a citizens group would ever have a chance at affecting change in government with guns would be by assassinating a politician--you have no chance against the military or police, sorry. And the Undetectable Firearms Act was written pretty much with that problem in mind (and, obviously other public places like airports.) Why then aren't people pooping their pants over this clear restriction to the supposed core principle of the Second Amendment?
Seriously, where are the protests and demonstrations against the banning of plastic guns 25 years ago? Where were all the threats to vote politicians out of office for violating their constitutional rights? If the answer to the theater shooting in Aurora was that movie-goers should have been carrying guns, and the answer to school shootings is armed teachers, then why not airplanes? Wouldn't we all feel safer if everyone in an airplane was carrying an undetectable plastic gun? I mean, what can box cutters do against bullets? This cognitive dissonance (and the total capitulation of the trampling of the rest of the Bill of Rights) perplexes me.
But doesn't this approach just create another vector for social-engineering attacks? If any of my emails accounts are compromised, my phone is stolen, some malware gets a hold of my address book, etc., what stops a hacker from sending an email to everyone on my contact list asking for my secret Facebook codes? The chances are pretty high that the three extra-special friends on Facebook are also in your email/<insert social app> address lists.
TFA says “Choose people you can reach without using Facebook, ideally over the phone or in person, since you’ll need to contact them when you can’t log in.” I think the odds are pretty high that someone you know in person or whom you talk to over the phone would not hesitate to send you the code after getting an email from "you" that says "Hey, I got locked out of FB, can you send me your code? Thanks."
Really no difference to Chinese state-sponsored hackers. For anybody else, these people are just an (advanced) persistent threat, as they will not go to jail if identified, at least not in their own country. Treat them no different than any other criminal hackers from a different country.
I think that issue here is that law enforcement can use evidence obtained by hacking to prosecute someone. State-sponsored hacking, be it Chinese or American, is used to gather intelligence, but is clandestine by nature and cannot be used as evidence... well, at least in the criminal justice system. Who knows what "secret evidence" is introduced in the kangaroo courts used to try suspected terrorists... As someone else pointed out, the reason behind this bill is probably that it is cheaper to obtain evidence by hacking, but since it's currently inadmissible--because it's illegal--they have to use more expensive, conventional routes to obtain digital evidence.
How does nemo tenetur interact with obstruction of justice? e.g., If they ask someone who isn't a suspect and they are subsequently charged with obstruction, can they then invoke their right to remain silent even if the information isn't self-incriminating? Or can my own silence bring obstruction charges?
And does the narrowest interpretation include non-verbal communication? e.g., if the law compels me to supply a decryption key and I literally remain silent, can they compel me to write it down? And what if I just "can't recall the password" or claim to have destroyed the key prior to being arrested?
I always thought that the right to silence/against self-incrimination literally grants you the right to sit there silently, no matter what questions are asked or demands are made, but it seems more nuanced than that.
As an American living in a high-tax, socialist European country my observation is that taxes are higher here, but you end up spending the same amount of money on day-to-day life. What I mean is that, in the US, you keep more of your income, but you end up having to pay for all kinds of stuff that is free here. A friend of mine just went through cancer treatment; it cost her nothing. My wife got six months of paid leave for having a baby (I took six weeks, but could have taken more). The government pays for over half of our day care costs, most of the interest in our mortgage and subsidizes all sorts of stuff that we use in our daily lives.Whenever I'm back in the US, it's like a vacuum cleaner is attached to my wallet. I get nickel and dimed just walking down the street. Everything costs money there.
Basically the way high taxes work is that the government takes a larger share of our income, but spends it on you. It removes some choices--people with cars still subsidize public transportation for example--but is extremely efficient. It really only works in small countries where people are much more politically involved and have a larger stake in the country as a whole. In the US, you still pay for all the things that the government would otherwise subsidize, but you have a bit more choice. It's less efficient, but it prevents people in Manhattan from directly subsidizing a high speed train between Omaha and Kansas City.
The amazing thing to me is that I make about half of what I would in the US and pay about double the income tax, but my quality of living is considerably higher. It's also nice to know that the janitor at work has all of his basic needs met regardless of his crappy, low-paying job. I think the overall happiness of people here contributes to our quality of life. (But there are plenty of things to dislike here and plenty of things I miss in the US.)
However, most countries have fucked up legal affairs.. In some places, you can lose your head if you say something about mohammed (or draw his picture), or have sex out of wedlock.. In other, more 'liberal' countries, you can go to jail just for saying certain things about certain cultures in public, never mind actually defend yourself from them when they bomb your subways. In such countries, 'liberal' politicians roll over backwards to allow immigrant thugs from these protected cultures to build ghettos, gain political mass, then vote to strip their own country of the civil rights used to justify bringing them there in the first place. How 'progressive'!
Nowhere is perfect, but exactly what "liberal" countries throw you in jail for saying what about which cultures in public? Since you mention subways, you're probably talking about England or Japan?
The issue of immigration in Europe is substantially different than in the US because, at least in Western Europe, most of the immigrants come from former colonies, i.e., Indonesians in the Netherlands, or various African countries in France. These historical ties have nothing to do with civil rights or progressive policies and are not easily broken; in Algeria, the Congo, etc., people are to this day raised and educated in French. Many immigrants wind up in ghettos because the majority population have thousand-year-old cultural traditions and, as a result, overt racism (bigotry, segregation, etc.) is more common and to a large extent tolerated. Multiple generations are discriminated against, stuck in the ghettos despite being natural-born citizens, and it is by-and-large these people that become activists and politicians. I'm not sure what civil rights they are supposedly stripping, but there are laws all over Europe to that ban any public display of (non-Christian) religion, deny refugee status to children, and that openly discriminate against "non-Western immigrants."
There was a big fight, for example, in the Netherlands to stop counting the children and grand children of immigrants as "aliens" in the census and another to strip the dual citizenship of (among others) politicians who where born in the Netherlands, but whom held foreign passports by birthright. This is a very different situation than in the US, where virtually the entire population immigrated and/or took part in the genocide of the indigenous population and thus just being born there makes you "as American" as anyone else.
One thing that you will not find are politicians invoking religion... or faith healers. Look at the recent political chaos surrounding gay marriage and adoptions in France; the right-wing nuts were foaming at the mouth, threatening violent protest, but staying far, far away from invoking the Bible, lest they seem crazy. Ditto for all the laws against non-Western immigrants, the arguments for which lie in "historical" and "cultural tradition" rather than using the word Muslim.
They were in star trek. They'll be around. Everyone likes phones for communication. Tablets will replace books eventually. Tablets will replace phones even.
Think about a tablet with a flexible screen. One that you can roll up. Now think about a cell phone type stick device that you can put to your ear. Now think about pulling out a display for when you need to use it's screen. And then when you're done just let it roll back into the device.
Welcome to the next tablet device.
Blackberry is completely short sighted.
Great, so I can fold my tablet up and stuff it in my pocket and insert my phone into my ear canal, but I still have to typing using a f***ing soft keyboard. If you read TFA (the second link), I think what Thorsten Heins is saying is that the current tablet market is a bubble and that tablets will not be durable, particularly in business. When the wow-a-shiny-new-toy factor wears off, they will settle into their niche applications, while something else will prevail for mobile productivity.
As someone that travels and gives talks, my laptop is irreplaceable. I have to have a mouse/keyboard interface to work on my slides and there is no tablet that I would trust enough to give an important talk on (bear in mind that ancient, analog RGB connectors are still ubiquitous in this arena). I also do a lot of writing for work, often while traveling, and there is just no replacement for a full-size keyboard. What I end up doing is taking the MacBook Air for work trips and the tablet for family trips. The latter is a bit smaller, has excellent battery life, and is perfectly capable of entertaining the family, while the former is an indispensable tool for work/productivity that will not be supplanted by capacitive touch screens any time in the near future. What remains to be seen is how often I feel the need to update the tablet.
Last week at the airport, I was quite impressed at how efficiently an agent could deal with ticketing issues by just wandering around with an iPad. Those sorts of applications are clearly hear to stay. But in my line of work, they have been trying to force tablets on us and the end result is a lot of tablets collecting dust.
The thing about the Big Bang Theory is that there are little science-nerd jokes tucked into it that give me a chuckle, while the boiler plate sit com format still makes my wife laugh, who is European and doesn't get the subtle cultural jokes and wordplay of shows like Arrested Development. For example, why is Sheldon's face on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry? That journal (or any other journal that I know of) would never put someone's face on the cover--let alone a theoretical physicist postdoc. I chose to take that as an inside joke because even the equations in the backgrounds of the sets were clearly vetted by people who know better. Meanwhile my wife thoroughly enjoys watching the various ham-handed relationships evolve. So neither of us is in love with show, but we both get some entertainment out if it... and voilà, mass appeal.
...I also think that the new Futurama isn't as good as the original, but it's hard to tell given that I was still in college when it first aired and I probably changed more than the show in time it was off the air. I hope Arrested Development has evolved with its audience, but I keep reminding myself that it can't possible meet my unrealistic expectations. At least they are releasing a whole batch at once so I can power through a few at a time to get re-immersed, rather than having to wait a week or more between episodes.
Shows like Community, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development, Futurama, etc. do attract hard-core niche fan bases that are willing to deal with multiple cancellations, "restaffing," and arbitrary schedule changes and hiatuses, but that lack the "mass appeal" to drive ratings, which is how ad-buys are priced. That is why "teevee" is in the process of bifurcating between streaming, on-demand (and often subscription-based) services like Netflix and traditional push-media. And I for one think it is a good thing.
I would much rather pay Netflix a monthly fee (that is, if it were offered where I live) for à la carte, niche shows that can make me laugh up an internal organ (I happen to find Arrested Development extraordinarily funny) than suffer through commercials for funny-but-forgettable shows like The Big Bang Theory. On the other hand, there is a huge audience of people that prefer to nestle their ass into the couch for whatever is being delivered through their hundreds of channels at that moment... very, very old people, for example.
I hope that there will be successful competitors to Netflix in the near future, i.e., companies that produce teevee for on-demand streaming, which creates space for talented and creative people to find their niches and minimizes the role of focus groups, network executives, and other ad-sales-driven tools for mass appeal. There are shockingly good "webisodes" (e.g., Childrens Hospital and Robot Chicken) that are currently a pain for those of us with limited time (to spend trolling Youtube, etc.) to discover until they are picked up by an aggregator like Netflix or a specialty cable network.
To the best of our knowledge, these tool use puzzle and
social cooperation puzzle results represent the first successful completion of such standard animal cognition tests using
only a simple physical process. The remarkable spontaneous emergence of these sophisticated behaviors from such a
simple physical process suggests that causal entropic forces
might be used as the basis for a general—and potentially
universal—thermodynamic model for adaptive behavior.
So, yah, XKCD nailed it... clearly trying to maximize the overall diversity of accessible future paths of their worlds.
Amusingly, I have a mathematician friend who came up with an algorithm to solve numerically chemical problems. The things you describe are more the product of being a skilled technician than a scientist... As for the total synthesis of strychnine, I would think that doing that ab nihilo would require enormous amounts of maths. Or lots of trial and error.
I'm fairly confident that E.J. Corey would not describe his Nobel prize-winning research as something that "a skilled technician" could do. And by your logic, my cell phone is a better mathematician than any human that has every lived. Your friend's algorithm is undoubtably cute, but would fail in practice the vast majority of the time.
In reality, it is impossible to perform a total synthesis in silico or really to do any chemistry ab initio because the subtleties are too complex to understand, let alone model. People have been claiming for years now that organic chemistry is dead--that it has been relegated to following recipes because every molecule of interest can be prepared using "known" reactions. In reality, no one has managed to come close to supplanting the work of the talented scientists who make molecules for a living. The most useful application of math in total synthesis, in my opinion, is using explicit, exact, known transformations to build chemical networks to shorten and optimize existing synthetic routes (e.g., in industry).
People who do not understand maths fail to realise that mathematicians can frequently learn the essential bits of their specialty very fast, because they are trained to think in the abstract. See for example the stories of Feynman amongst biologists. Also, in many fields, people still learn heaps of useless facts with very little attention to overarching theories which allow one to quickly figure out said facts...
People with too much mathematical training fail to realize that the vast majority of science cannot be abstracted. They fall into the trap of hindsight, thinking that the elegant equations that "govern" (I disagree strongly with that common phrasing) natural processes is evidence that everything can be understood in the abstract language of mathematics. What they fail to understand--because they are largely unaware of it--is that actual scientific discovery requires intuition and creativity; more the Sherlock Holmes type than the Feynman type.
Feynman is, in fact, an excellent example of how math benefits science that lends credence to Wilson's argument. Once the difficult exploratory work has been done, and a robust experimental framework is in place to generate data, it is exceedingly useful for mathematically-inclined people to make sense of it all by formulating theories. However, no matter how gifted a mathematician, no amount of abstract thinking can compete with practical knowledge.
Bullshit. Any scientist needs to understand basic maths, notably statistics. Not advanced calculus or complex algebra. But statistics and understanding what a model is is paramount. If you cannot recognised the patterns produced by common types of random processes, you may well start to believe you have found something.
And in fact just measured experimental noise.
How much math, exactly, does one need to create and execute a total synthesis for strychnine? Or, for that matter, any random, possibly life-extending compound isolated in sub-milligram quantities from a sea sponge? Conversely, could a brilliant mathematician with no knowledge of organic chemistry accomplish the same? There has been a lot of social-science bashing around here today, but Chemistry is a physical science in which many sub-disciplines (not just total synthesis) require little if any math.
Which is why none of us should generalize our experiences. As I'm sure you are aware, ethical standards with respect to authorship are notoriously opaque, lab-specific, and self-regulated. Where I come from, submitting an article without a co-author's approval is borderline fraud (imagine if I randomly included E.O. Wilson as a co-author), which I suppose is why reputable journals now send explicit emails to all co-authors upon submission.
...since we're swapping war stories, I have seen the exact opposite case, where someone took the first author's name off of a manuscript and tried to submit it as their own. I've also seen someone get their own paper for review--i.e., they published it and someone copy/pasted the text into a manuscript and tried to submit it to a different journal. I get that competition drives people to questionable practices, particularly in the publish-or-perish world of academia, so perhaps I've been lucky to have worked with (mostly) responsible authors.
Did anyone actually read Wilson's article... including the irate, myopic blogger who is projecting his own bias while criticizing Wilson for the same?
Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.
In my fifteen-or-so years as an academic scientist, I have found this observation to be 100% correct and I have worked with some incredibly famous and well-respected scientists not unlike E.O. Wilson.
Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.
In other words, math skills have nothing to do with creativity and science is driven, at its most fundamental level, by creative thinking.
Pioneers in science only rarely make discoveries by extracting ideas from pure mathematics. Most of the stereotypical photographs of scientists studying rows of equations on a blackboard are instructors explaining discoveries already made.
Math is a descriptive language, not an engine for discovery, duh.
Ideas in science emerge most readily when some part of the world is studied for its own sake. They follow from thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence. When something new is encountered, the follow-up steps usually require mathematical and statistical methods to move the analysis forward. If that step proves too technically difficult for the person who made the discovery, a mathematician or statistician can be added as a collaborator.
Modern science is too complex for one generalist to do everything (and to take credit for it). These days everyone is a specialist, with a PhD in a very specific subject, and they all work together to bring ideas through to discoveries and eventually to technology. Would anyone argue that the POTUS runs the entire federal government by himself, being a world-class expert in everything from speech writing to foreign policy? Then why is it so hard to imagine that great discoveries are supported by the collaborative efforts of many, with one generally receiving the lion's share of the credit for the actual discovery?
The response of the blogger focuses on the idea that Wilson is an outlier and that, like Bill Gates dropping out of college, his resume should not be used as a template. But Wilson is not arguing that he was successful because he was semi-literate at math, he is arguing that you can be successful by focusing on what your good at, and complimenting your abilities with fruitful collaboration. His reason for making this argument is simple; too many people that would otherwise make talented scientists shy away from the sciences because they aren't good at math.
My two cents: there are, very broadly speaking, two principle kinds of scientists (with many exceptions). There the creative types, who are rarely good with math, often lack attention to detail, but who are astonishingly good at creative problem solving. Then there are the analytic types, who are too skeptical to be creative, are often detail-oriented, but who are astonishingly good at analyzing and understanding raw data. The best science is performed by teams comprising both types of people who respect and trust one another.
You make the assumption that a long list of authors indicates a truly collaborative research effort. In practice, this is very rarely the case. From my experience, nine times out of ten the work is done completely by the primary author or the first two authors. The rest of the authors are supervisors, technical managers, those who secured the funding, possibly a technician who assisted with the experiments, etc., who never even lay eyes on the paper until it's basically finished.
And from my experience, publishing dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles, your experience is the exception. In fact, many sciences do not even utilize technicians. In the ten or so laboratories that I have worked in/with and the labs of the numerous professors that I talk with about their publication policies, exactly zero will allow someone authorship on a paper that they don't see until it's "basically finished." I'm sure some fall through the cracks, though certainly not the majority. However, I would not generalize my experiences and neither should you.
You also minimize the role of "those who secured the funding." Let me translate that phrase: "Those who came up with the ideas, spent countless hours writing proposals, will lose their job if they cannot secure said funding at a regular clip, and actually did the work putting together the collaborative team, which they hand pick, train/supervise, and for which they provide a state-of-the-art lab." Let's not forget that they were on the receiving end, as the first or second author, often for over a decade, before earning the right to that asterisk by their name.
...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.
i still can't figure out the point in spending $1500 on a pair of glasses when i don't even wear glasses
And I can't figure out the point in spending $1500 on a pair of glasses when I already wear glasses to, you know, see. Speaking of which, I wonder if they will offer prescription Google Glass or if they expect the bespectacled amongst us to wear contact lenses.
Slashdot Mirror
How does arming allied forces with cheap handguns in the 1940's have anything to do with the modern military/police? You are barking mad if you think that any citizens group could stand up to either. Just look at the asymmetry in civilian and military deaths in Iraq and Afganistan. Hell, if you want to talk about the 40's, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
People defend their liberties (all of them, not just the single one in the second amendment) when they feel those liberties, as expressed in their way of life, are threatened.
I disagree. The country that I grew up in died in the Fall of 2001 when we tossed the Bill of Rights out the window, quite literally sacrificing liberty in the name of security. From naked body scanners to universal wire taps to indefinite detention without a trial, anyone who doesn't feel those liberties being threatened is either an idiot or living in a cave. Yet people get their underwear in a knot over the mildest whiff of gun control, even when it doesn't affect them--e.g., people in the flyover states getting worked up over laws in California and New York.
Nobody owns undetectable guns, or really wants to own them. Therefore nobody defends that particular liberty.
Then why were they banned? I'm pretty sure that plenty of people would be interested in owning those James Bond-esque one-shot guns concealed in an umbrella or whatever. That nobody owns them is a directly result of making them illegal to manufacture (at least for civilians), which they started doing in the late 80's when the technology was made available. They still do make plastic/ceramic guns, but they have to put a hunk of iron in them and make them look like guns on an X-Ray to comply with the law.
I'm not trying to be snarky, I am really trying to understand why something like universal background checks or limits on magazine capacity elicit howls of tyranny, while categorically banning any firearm made of a certain material flies right under the radar.
Nope. I used quantifiable phenomena--i.e., facts--rather than other peoples' opinions and avoided making arbitrary comparisons.
Good for you for digging up some numbers about murder rates, but good luck convincing anyone that the threat of roving gangs is so severe that arming the elderly is a moral imperative. I suppose you could threaten them with a gun, but that might backfire... literally and figuratively.
Hey, maybe we can transplant the brains of pensioners into armored cyborgs and they can carry giant, automatic pistols where their quadriceps used to be: "Citizen, get off of my lawn. You have ten seconds to comply! Ten... Nine..." Unfortunately for me throngs of tire-iron wielding maniacs aren't a problem where I live, so I only point guns at ducks, skeet, and targets.
As to winning debates - facts seem to be far too rarely considered in moderation or "winning" debates on Slashdot.
While that may be true, you cited the Cato institution, Fox News, something called "gunssavelives.net," the WJS opinion page, opinion pieces in the Boston Globe, The Telegraph, and The Washington Examiner, something called "americanthinker.com," a weasel-worded gallop poll, and an article from the Hill that is quoting the the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee pointing out that a couple of democrats in Montana and South Dakota aren't toeing the gun-control line. These articles all make the argument that we need more guns and less regulation because guns make us safer. Lastly, you pulled out that old canard that the UK has a higher crime rate than the US to really drive the point home. But you cleverly avoid delving into the type of crime.
Now, watch this: The rate of firearm-related deaths per capita is 10.23 in the US and 0.25 in the UK. The only countries (of the 75 listed) with higher rates than the US are: Panama, Mexico, Columbia, South Africa, Brazil, Swaziland, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Jamaica. Interestingly, the country with the lowest rate, Japan, has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world. Of course, I'm not suggesting a causal relationship, but I will point out that the presence of a gun is a prerequisite to any form of gun violence.
Do you see the difference?
From TFA:
In the Forbes article, other than "a single nail that is used as a firing pin", the gun also includes another nonprintable part. The group, the article says, added a six-ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the undetectable firearms act. The act, Congressman Steve Israel says, is set to expire at the end of the year. "The very least we should do, as a matter of common sense, is extend the undetectable firearms act so that a plastic gun or component can't be brought onto planes because a metal detector can't detect them," notes Israel.
I could never understand why people have no problem with a law that categorically bans ALL guns that are made from non-ferrous materials, and/or that do not look like a gun by X-Ray, but run around like crazy people talking about armed citizens overthrowing the government over limitations on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines--or f***ing background checks. The only way a citizens group would ever have a chance at affecting change in government with guns would be by assassinating a politician--you have no chance against the military or police, sorry. And the Undetectable Firearms Act was written pretty much with that problem in mind (and, obviously other public places like airports.) Why then aren't people pooping their pants over this clear restriction to the supposed core principle of the Second Amendment?
Seriously, where are the protests and demonstrations against the banning of plastic guns 25 years ago? Where were all the threats to vote politicians out of office for violating their constitutional rights? If the answer to the theater shooting in Aurora was that movie-goers should have been carrying guns, and the answer to school shootings is armed teachers, then why not airplanes? Wouldn't we all feel safer if everyone in an airplane was carrying an undetectable plastic gun? I mean, what can box cutters do against bullets? This cognitive dissonance (and the total capitulation of the trampling of the rest of the Bill of Rights) perplexes me.
(This is a re-post because I genuinely want to know the answer)
From TFA:
In the Forbes article, other than "a single nail that is used as a firing pin", the gun also includes another nonprintable part. The group, the article says, added a six-ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the undetectable firearms act. The act, Congressman Steve Israel says, is set to expire at the end of the year. "The very least we should do, as a matter of common sense, is extend the undetectable firearms act so that a plastic gun or component can't be brought onto planes because a metal detector can't detect them," notes Israel.
I could never understand why people have no problem with a law that categorically bans ALL guns that are made from non-ferrous materials, and/or that do not look like a gun by X-Ray, but run around like crazy people talking about armed citizens overthrowing the government over limitations on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines--or f***ing background checks. The only way a citizens group would ever have a chance at affecting change in government with guns would be by assassinating a politician--you have no chance against the military or police, sorry. And the Undetectable Firearms Act was written pretty much with that problem in mind (and, obviously other public places like airports.) Why then aren't people pooping their pants over this clear restriction to the supposed core principle of the Second Amendment?
Seriously, where are the protests and demonstrations against the banning of plastic guns 25 years ago? Where were all the threats to vote politicians out of office for violating their constitutional rights? If the answer to the theater shooting in Aurora was that movie-goers should have been carrying guns, and the answer to school shootings is armed teachers, then why not airplanes? Wouldn't we all feel safer if everyone in an airplane was carrying an undetectable plastic gun? I mean, what can box cutters do against bullets? This cognitive dissonance (and the total capitulation of the trampling of the rest of the Bill of Rights) perplexes me.
But doesn't this approach just create another vector for social-engineering attacks? If any of my emails accounts are compromised, my phone is stolen, some malware gets a hold of my address book, etc., what stops a hacker from sending an email to everyone on my contact list asking for my secret Facebook codes? The chances are pretty high that the three extra-special friends on Facebook are also in your email/<insert social app> address lists.
TFA says “Choose people you can reach without using Facebook, ideally over the phone or in person, since you’ll need to contact them when you can’t log in.” I think the odds are pretty high that someone you know in person or whom you talk to over the phone would not hesitate to send you the code after getting an email from "you" that says "Hey, I got locked out of FB, can you send me your code? Thanks."
Really no difference to Chinese state-sponsored hackers. For anybody else, these people are just an (advanced) persistent threat, as they will not go to jail if identified, at least not in their own country. Treat them no different than any other criminal hackers from a different country.
I think that issue here is that law enforcement can use evidence obtained by hacking to prosecute someone. State-sponsored hacking, be it Chinese or American, is used to gather intelligence, but is clandestine by nature and cannot be used as evidence... well, at least in the criminal justice system. Who knows what "secret evidence" is introduced in the kangaroo courts used to try suspected terrorists... As someone else pointed out, the reason behind this bill is probably that it is cheaper to obtain evidence by hacking, but since it's currently inadmissible--because it's illegal--they have to use more expensive, conventional routes to obtain digital evidence.
How does nemo tenetur interact with obstruction of justice? e.g., If they ask someone who isn't a suspect and they are subsequently charged with obstruction, can they then invoke their right to remain silent even if the information isn't self-incriminating? Or can my own silence bring obstruction charges?
And does the narrowest interpretation include non-verbal communication? e.g., if the law compels me to supply a decryption key and I literally remain silent, can they compel me to write it down? And what if I just "can't recall the password" or claim to have destroyed the key prior to being arrested?
I always thought that the right to silence/against self-incrimination literally grants you the right to sit there silently, no matter what questions are asked or demands are made, but it seems more nuanced than that.
As an American living in a high-tax, socialist European country my observation is that taxes are higher here, but you end up spending the same amount of money on day-to-day life. What I mean is that, in the US, you keep more of your income, but you end up having to pay for all kinds of stuff that is free here. A friend of mine just went through cancer treatment; it cost her nothing. My wife got six months of paid leave for having a baby (I took six weeks, but could have taken more). The government pays for over half of our day care costs, most of the interest in our mortgage and subsidizes all sorts of stuff that we use in our daily lives.Whenever I'm back in the US, it's like a vacuum cleaner is attached to my wallet. I get nickel and dimed just walking down the street. Everything costs money there.
Basically the way high taxes work is that the government takes a larger share of our income, but spends it on you. It removes some choices--people with cars still subsidize public transportation for example--but is extremely efficient. It really only works in small countries where people are much more politically involved and have a larger stake in the country as a whole. In the US, you still pay for all the things that the government would otherwise subsidize, but you have a bit more choice. It's less efficient, but it prevents people in Manhattan from directly subsidizing a high speed train between Omaha and Kansas City.
The amazing thing to me is that I make about half of what I would in the US and pay about double the income tax, but my quality of living is considerably higher. It's also nice to know that the janitor at work has all of his basic needs met regardless of his crappy, low-paying job. I think the overall happiness of people here contributes to our quality of life. (But there are plenty of things to dislike here and plenty of things I miss in the US.)
However, most countries have fucked up legal affairs.. In some places, you can lose your head if you say something about mohammed (or draw his picture), or have sex out of wedlock.. In other, more 'liberal' countries, you can go to jail just for saying certain things about certain cultures in public, never mind actually defend yourself from them when they bomb your subways. In such countries, 'liberal' politicians roll over backwards to allow immigrant thugs from these protected cultures to build ghettos, gain political mass, then vote to strip their own country of the civil rights used to justify bringing them there in the first place. How 'progressive'!
Nowhere is perfect, but exactly what "liberal" countries throw you in jail for saying what about which cultures in public? Since you mention subways, you're probably talking about England or Japan?
The issue of immigration in Europe is substantially different than in the US because, at least in Western Europe, most of the immigrants come from former colonies, i.e., Indonesians in the Netherlands, or various African countries in France. These historical ties have nothing to do with civil rights or progressive policies and are not easily broken; in Algeria, the Congo, etc., people are to this day raised and educated in French. Many immigrants wind up in ghettos because the majority population have thousand-year-old cultural traditions and, as a result, overt racism (bigotry, segregation, etc.) is more common and to a large extent tolerated. Multiple generations are discriminated against, stuck in the ghettos despite being natural-born citizens, and it is by-and-large these people that become activists and politicians. I'm not sure what civil rights they are supposedly stripping, but there are laws all over Europe to that ban any public display of (non-Christian) religion, deny refugee status to children, and that openly discriminate against "non-Western immigrants."
There was a big fight, for example, in the Netherlands to stop counting the children and grand children of immigrants as "aliens" in the census and another to strip the dual citizenship of (among others) politicians who where born in the Netherlands, but whom held foreign passports by birthright. This is a very different situation than in the US, where virtually the entire population immigrated and/or took part in the genocide of the indigenous population and thus just being born there makes you "as American" as anyone else.
One thing that you will not find are politicians invoking religion... or faith healers. Look at the recent political chaos surrounding gay marriage and adoptions in France; the right-wing nuts were foaming at the mouth, threatening violent protest, but staying far, far away from invoking the Bible, lest they seem crazy. Ditto for all the laws against non-Western immigrants, the arguments for which lie in "historical" and "cultural tradition" rather than using the word Muslim.
Maybe something like this? It's not like battery technology is just standing still while portable devices proliferate.
They were in star trek. They'll be around. Everyone likes phones for communication. Tablets will replace books eventually. Tablets will replace phones even. Think about a tablet with a flexible screen. One that you can roll up. Now think about a cell phone type stick device that you can put to your ear. Now think about pulling out a display for when you need to use it's screen. And then when you're done just let it roll back into the device. Welcome to the next tablet device. Blackberry is completely short sighted.
Great, so I can fold my tablet up and stuff it in my pocket and insert my phone into my ear canal, but I still have to typing using a f***ing soft keyboard. If you read TFA (the second link), I think what Thorsten Heins is saying is that the current tablet market is a bubble and that tablets will not be durable, particularly in business. When the wow-a-shiny-new-toy factor wears off, they will settle into their niche applications, while something else will prevail for mobile productivity.
As someone that travels and gives talks, my laptop is irreplaceable. I have to have a mouse/keyboard interface to work on my slides and there is no tablet that I would trust enough to give an important talk on (bear in mind that ancient, analog RGB connectors are still ubiquitous in this arena). I also do a lot of writing for work, often while traveling, and there is just no replacement for a full-size keyboard. What I end up doing is taking the MacBook Air for work trips and the tablet for family trips. The latter is a bit smaller, has excellent battery life, and is perfectly capable of entertaining the family, while the former is an indispensable tool for work/productivity that will not be supplanted by capacitive touch screens any time in the near future. What remains to be seen is how often I feel the need to update the tablet.
Last week at the airport, I was quite impressed at how efficiently an agent could deal with ticketing issues by just wandering around with an iPad. Those sorts of applications are clearly hear to stay. But in my line of work, they have been trying to force tablets on us and the end result is a lot of tablets collecting dust.
The thing about the Big Bang Theory is that there are little science-nerd jokes tucked into it that give me a chuckle, while the boiler plate sit com format still makes my wife laugh, who is European and doesn't get the subtle cultural jokes and wordplay of shows like Arrested Development. For example, why is Sheldon's face on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry? That journal (or any other journal that I know of) would never put someone's face on the cover--let alone a theoretical physicist postdoc. I chose to take that as an inside joke because even the equations in the backgrounds of the sets were clearly vetted by people who know better. Meanwhile my wife thoroughly enjoys watching the various ham-handed relationships evolve. So neither of us is in love with show, but we both get some entertainment out if it... and voilà, mass appeal.
...I also think that the new Futurama isn't as good as the original, but it's hard to tell given that I was still in college when it first aired and I probably changed more than the show in time it was off the air. I hope Arrested Development has evolved with its audience, but I keep reminding myself that it can't possible meet my unrealistic expectations. At least they are releasing a whole batch at once so I can power through a few at a time to get re-immersed, rather than having to wait a week or more between episodes.
Shows like Community, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development, Futurama, etc. do attract hard-core niche fan bases that are willing to deal with multiple cancellations, "restaffing," and arbitrary schedule changes and hiatuses, but that lack the "mass appeal" to drive ratings, which is how ad-buys are priced. That is why "teevee" is in the process of bifurcating between streaming, on-demand (and often subscription-based) services like Netflix and traditional push-media. And I for one think it is a good thing.
I would much rather pay Netflix a monthly fee (that is, if it were offered where I live) for à la carte, niche shows that can make me laugh up an internal organ (I happen to find Arrested Development extraordinarily funny) than suffer through commercials for funny-but-forgettable shows like The Big Bang Theory. On the other hand, there is a huge audience of people that prefer to nestle their ass into the couch for whatever is being delivered through their hundreds of channels at that moment... very, very old people, for example.
I hope that there will be successful competitors to Netflix in the near future, i.e., companies that produce teevee for on-demand streaming, which creates space for talented and creative people to find their niches and minimizes the role of focus groups, network executives, and other ad-sales-driven tools for mass appeal. There are shockingly good "webisodes" (e.g., Childrens Hospital and Robot Chicken) that are currently a pain for those of us with limited time (to spend trolling Youtube, etc.) to discover until they are picked up by an aggregator like Netflix or a specialty cable network.
From TFA:
To the best of our knowledge, these tool use puzzle and social cooperation puzzle results represent the first successful completion of such standard animal cognition tests using only a simple physical process. The remarkable spontaneous emergence of these sophisticated behaviors from such a simple physical process suggests that causal entropic forces might be used as the basis for a general—and potentially universal—thermodynamic model for adaptive behavior.
So, yah, XKCD nailed it... clearly trying to maximize the overall diversity of accessible future paths of their worlds.
Amusingly, I have a mathematician friend who came up with an algorithm to solve numerically chemical problems. The things you describe are more the product of being a skilled technician than a scientist... As for the total synthesis of strychnine, I would think that doing that ab nihilo would require enormous amounts of maths. Or lots of trial and error.
I'm fairly confident that E.J. Corey would not describe his Nobel prize-winning research as something that "a skilled technician" could do. And by your logic, my cell phone is a better mathematician than any human that has every lived. Your friend's algorithm is undoubtably cute, but would fail in practice the vast majority of the time.
In reality, it is impossible to perform a total synthesis in silico or really to do any chemistry ab initio because the subtleties are too complex to understand, let alone model. People have been claiming for years now that organic chemistry is dead--that it has been relegated to following recipes because every molecule of interest can be prepared using "known" reactions. In reality, no one has managed to come close to supplanting the work of the talented scientists who make molecules for a living. The most useful application of math in total synthesis, in my opinion, is using explicit, exact, known transformations to build chemical networks to shorten and optimize existing synthetic routes (e.g., in industry).
People who do not understand maths fail to realise that mathematicians can frequently learn the essential bits of their specialty very fast, because they are trained to think in the abstract. See for example the stories of Feynman amongst biologists. Also, in many fields, people still learn heaps of useless facts with very little attention to overarching theories which allow one to quickly figure out said facts...
People with too much mathematical training fail to realize that the vast majority of science cannot be abstracted. They fall into the trap of hindsight, thinking that the elegant equations that "govern" (I disagree strongly with that common phrasing) natural processes is evidence that everything can be understood in the abstract language of mathematics. What they fail to understand--because they are largely unaware of it--is that actual scientific discovery requires intuition and creativity; more the Sherlock Holmes type than the Feynman type.
Feynman is, in fact, an excellent example of how math benefits science that lends credence to Wilson's argument. Once the difficult exploratory work has been done, and a robust experimental framework is in place to generate data, it is exceedingly useful for mathematically-inclined people to make sense of it all by formulating theories. However, no matter how gifted a mathematician, no amount of abstract thinking can compete with practical knowledge.
Bullshit. Any scientist needs to understand basic maths, notably statistics. Not advanced calculus or complex algebra. But statistics and understanding what a model is is paramount. If you cannot recognised the patterns produced by common types of random processes, you may well start to believe you have found something.
And in fact just measured experimental noise.
How much math, exactly, does one need to create and execute a total synthesis for strychnine? Or, for that matter, any random, possibly life-extending compound isolated in sub-milligram quantities from a sea sponge? Conversely, could a brilliant mathematician with no knowledge of organic chemistry accomplish the same? There has been a lot of social-science bashing around here today, but Chemistry is a physical science in which many sub-disciplines (not just total synthesis) require little if any math.
Which is why none of us should generalize our experiences. As I'm sure you are aware, ethical standards with respect to authorship are notoriously opaque, lab-specific, and self-regulated. Where I come from, submitting an article without a co-author's approval is borderline fraud (imagine if I randomly included E.O. Wilson as a co-author), which I suppose is why reputable journals now send explicit emails to all co-authors upon submission.
...since we're swapping war stories, I have seen the exact opposite case, where someone took the first author's name off of a manuscript and tried to submit it as their own. I've also seen someone get their own paper for review--i.e., they published it and someone copy/pasted the text into a manuscript and tried to submit it to a different journal. I get that competition drives people to questionable practices, particularly in the publish-or-perish world of academia, so perhaps I've been lucky to have worked with (mostly) responsible authors.
Yet Stephanie Meyers, who can barely string together a coherent sentence, is an incredibly successful author.
Did anyone actually read Wilson's article... including the irate, myopic blogger who is projecting his own bias while criticizing Wilson for the same?
Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.
In my fifteen-or-so years as an academic scientist, I have found this observation to be 100% correct and I have worked with some incredibly famous and well-respected scientists not unlike E.O. Wilson.
Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.
In other words, math skills have nothing to do with creativity and science is driven, at its most fundamental level, by creative thinking.
Pioneers in science only rarely make discoveries by extracting ideas from pure mathematics. Most of the stereotypical photographs of scientists studying rows of equations on a blackboard are instructors explaining discoveries already made.
Math is a descriptive language, not an engine for discovery, duh.
Ideas in science emerge most readily when some part of the world is studied for its own sake. They follow from thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence. When something new is encountered, the follow-up steps usually require mathematical and statistical methods to move the analysis forward. If that step proves too technically difficult for the person who made the discovery, a mathematician or statistician can be added as a collaborator.
Modern science is too complex for one generalist to do everything (and to take credit for it). These days everyone is a specialist, with a PhD in a very specific subject, and they all work together to bring ideas through to discoveries and eventually to technology. Would anyone argue that the POTUS runs the entire federal government by himself, being a world-class expert in everything from speech writing to foreign policy? Then why is it so hard to imagine that great discoveries are supported by the collaborative efforts of many, with one generally receiving the lion's share of the credit for the actual discovery?
The response of the blogger focuses on the idea that Wilson is an outlier and that, like Bill Gates dropping out of college, his resume should not be used as a template. But Wilson is not arguing that he was successful because he was semi-literate at math, he is arguing that you can be successful by focusing on what your good at, and complimenting your abilities with fruitful collaboration. His reason for making this argument is simple; too many people that would otherwise make talented scientists shy away from the sciences because they aren't good at math.
My two cents: there are, very broadly speaking, two principle kinds of scientists (with many exceptions). There the creative types, who are rarely good with math, often lack attention to detail, but who are astonishingly good at creative problem solving. Then there are the analytic types, who are too skeptical to be creative, are often detail-oriented, but who are astonishingly good at analyzing and understanding raw data. The best science is performed by teams comprising both types of people who respect and trust one another.
You make the assumption that a long list of authors indicates a truly collaborative research effort. In practice, this is very rarely the case. From my experience, nine times out of ten the work is done completely by the primary author or the first two authors. The rest of the authors are supervisors, technical managers, those who secured the funding, possibly a technician who assisted with the experiments, etc., who never even lay eyes on the paper until it's basically finished.
And from my experience, publishing dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles, your experience is the exception. In fact, many sciences do not even utilize technicians. In the ten or so laboratories that I have worked in/with and the labs of the numerous professors that I talk with about their publication policies, exactly zero will allow someone authorship on a paper that they don't see until it's "basically finished." I'm sure some fall through the cracks, though certainly not the majority. However, I would not generalize my experiences and neither should you.
You also minimize the role of "those who secured the funding." Let me translate that phrase: "Those who came up with the ideas, spent countless hours writing proposals, will lose their job if they cannot secure said funding at a regular clip, and actually did the work putting together the collaborative team, which they hand pick, train/supervise, and for which they provide a state-of-the-art lab." Let's not forget that they were on the receiving end, as the first or second author, often for over a decade, before earning the right to that asterisk by their name.
...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.
i still can't figure out the point in spending $1500 on a pair of glasses when i don't even wear glasses
And I can't figure out the point in spending $1500 on a pair of glasses when I already wear glasses to, you know, see. Speaking of which, I wonder if they will offer prescription Google Glass or if they expect the bespectacled amongst us to wear contact lenses.
For $100? Links?