...how about they review eyewitness testimony? Eyewitness accounts are known to be highly unreliable in many situations, including stress, poor lighting, poor angle relative to event, and more. Additionally, identifying a person is difficult if the person is not already known to the witness, especially if the witness is not of the same race as the person being identified. Worse, the witness interview process by the police may result in suggestion to the witness' memory - either intentionally or unintentionally.
I would personally bet - though cannot prove - that more bad convictions are due to bad witness testimony than bad forensic evidence. By all means bad evidence should be cleaned up - a recent example is identifying bullets by trace metal composition, which was recently found to be questionable
In the end, however, it's only a start in the right direction, and somehow bad witness IDs need to be reviewed as well. It would be great if there was some sort of independent auditing agency (independent of the adversarial justice system) that reviewed questionable convictions based on changes in what we know about the validity of evidence.
Here's a good site that discusses eyewitness testimony effects. Scary, really.
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
And there's no comments section to concentrate the collective stupidity of mankind.
Which is why I said 'near', and '5%'. You get to the point of splitting hairs when the top 5% is calling the top 1% 'loathsome'. While I fully appreciate your ability to confuse the forest and trees, the point remains the same.
PhD scientists in many fields are paid quite well, often between $100k and $200k for mid-career in STEM. That puts someone in the top single-digit percents. Also, you do realize that $76,000 number was pulled from a search aggregator and has no validity whatsoever - right? If you want to talk numbers, fine, but go get a real one.
All in all, you make my point: while there are some entities that have more control over price than others, there are so many that it is ludicrous on the face of it to argue that there is even the possibility of a cabal.
No, most certainly I don't. First, we've established that there is a cabal, and we know its name. We're only considering its relative efficacy, which certainly makes the question worth asking and answering as to the source of price increases.
And then there's the data, which conclusively proves that individual actors have very little influence on the price of gas in the US.
I don't know what data you're referring to, but it would be damned hard to imagine any data proving that point. When you have a single unified entity controlling half the world's production, and a handful of about 5 companies controlling all the refining, it would be hard to imagine that that very point itself wouldn't be completely laughable. Further, history is decidedly against you, unless we are to pretend that 1974 didn't actually happen.
Larger point is, if you think oil is a completely untainted free market, then all I have to say is that you're a sweet kid, and I've got a shiny new bridge with your name on it.
Yes, because the prices at the local gas pump are under the direct control of an international cabal of "gentlemen" who can make the prices jump like a flea circus.
You say that as if something like OPEC doesn't exist. There are relatively few petroleum exporting countries, and many of them collude. There are very few companies, all of them globally oriented, that control the supply chain all the way from exploration to refining capacity. There is also quite a lot of politics involved, from local to international, that affect the price of oil, and eventually gasoline.
So while the demand portion is a very normal market, the supply portion is in no way anything close to a free market. As such, it is quite reasonable to question whether a price change of oil or gasoline is due to typical market conditions or price manipulation.
I have a PhD in molecular biology... I find this intolerable; my hard work is used to make some loathsome 1%er rich?
You're telling me you have a PhD in molecular bio and you aren't near that top 1% of income? 5%er perhaps? I agree with the notion of not working for free, but I think you're overselling the class-baiting angle.
Humans are always going to have greed. Capitalism is simply the engine that makes the best use of it.
And that's the point. You want to harness greed such that a person motivated by greed has to do good for others to do good for himself. That's the point of a tax rate, for instance - you want to make money, you have to earn some for the good of everyone too. The issue is that we have to regulate - fairly heavily too - the processes that allow capitalism to exist
The problems arise when you let the money talk. This is why we need to heavily limit lobbying and corporate influence in the legislation process, because the story being discussed is symptomatic of the shit that happens when you don't.
So, in summary: capitalism isn't the problem, the problem is in letting the capitalists get involved in government.
OK, sounds fun. So you've cracked the https to get the content. This raises a much more difficult question: short of having all emails screened by the employee's supervisor, how do you tell which data is sensitive, and being sent to an unauthorized party?
I've worked in classified environments. I've done research on detecting data leakage using anomaly detection, and my impression of the field is that it's seriously hard, and that you'll be hard-pressed to identify unauthorized content. At best, you might identify unusual employee behavior, which could be used to tip an internal team for an information audit.
Since that's so hard, the best thing to do is to segregate sensitive information in some way - air-gapped networks is one way. Another way is to use protected networks (logically isolated?), which allows you at least the a priori assumption that any documents leaving contain sensitive information, which allows you to improve your needle/hay ratio. Otherwise, you're looking at rather a difficult problem. Also, there's no notion that employees should be doing their banking on such systems, so it sort of puts a wet blanket on the moral discussion of this story.
So, I'm interested - outside of heavily isolated networks (that employees aren't using for banking), once you've gotten down to the content, what the hell do you *then*?
You have your answer. You charge by the hour for support including bug fixes. Only slaves work for free.
It depends. Are you selling the product, or your work? If you're selling the product, you should support it, because if it's buggy, then the client didn't get what they paid for. If you're selling your work, you always charge by the hour no matter what.
In reality, most arrangements of this type are sort of in between, which is why a service agreement is so important. Also, it may depend on how much the client is worth, and how egregious the bug was, as to whether you go above your legal liability.
Or she could simply be one of the hordes who work for government contractors who support the NSA and similar agencies. The standards are, unfortunately, not so high. Problem is one needs to work in some very specific locations, and an existing security clearance is often a prerequisite.
....until the next time we really, really need you to bail us out of a jam.
Hey, the US has tried to play isolationist a few times, it seems to be Europe that keeps begging us back out of retirement. Just sayin'.
As an example, I'm assuming that Europe absolutely will not be seeking any sort of economic assistance from the US as part of the sovereign debt problems that seem to be facing 2/3 of that continent. And I'm also certain that Japan, SK, and Taiwan would be A-OK with us removing any and all support that has helped stabilize that region. Admittedly we've fucked up the whole middle east thing, but it was sort of our turn since everybody else has over the last couple thousand years.
As an American, we're used to the "Go away until we need your resources to solve our problems, at which we will act like ungrateful bastards about it" thing. Keep it up.
There conceivably could be an infinite number of "parellel" universes, but there's a real philosophical problem with that. So long as we use the real physicists definitions and not something out of Stargate SG1, those parallels will always remain undetectable. SF writers tell stories about interacting with other universes - physicists define them in ways that show they can't be interacted with to be verified.
An untestable idea isn't part of science.
Quite true. And while there is a component of such research that will appeal to the sci-fi or metaphysical crowds, it is still worth considering what such systems would imply. Question: what defines a parallel universe? To me, it is as simple as an ensemble of particles that does not interact with our universe via any of the 4 standard forces with which we are familiar. Once we start there, it can become scientific (ie, testable) again if we ask another simple question: could groups of particles that do not interact at standard temperatures begin interacting at extremely high energies? If the physics were to suggest such a thing, it could be made testable.
There is some precent for such notions - in general, at higher energies, things become more symmetric. A singularity is fully symmetric, and the big bang process resulted in our universe losing its symmetry as it cooled. The 4 major forces (or at least the 3 non-gravity) converge at high energies. It's not inconceivable that other types of symmetry were broken as the universe cooled - whether that symmetry breaking resulted in a preference for matter, or whether it resulted in multiple ensembles of matter that do not interact (ie, universes), remains to be seen.
But like everything else in fundamental physics, creating higher energies should be part of the experiment. And, as you say, it has to be scientific.
Which exposes how little these tards understand about science, because nanotech is not a specific branch of science, but an amalgamation of many branches of science lumped together by those who don't understand any of them.
Thanks for the summary, it was staggeringly accurate to what I spent the last 6 months doing - namely, getting a high-end machine to use as a centralized computational workstation for my small research group. First I had to fight the external vendor to just get a quote. Then, a guy in IT cancelled my order because the company "doesn't support" that type of machine - which is, again, simply a beefed-up version of a machine they *do* support. Of course, they don't tell me it was cancelled, it was just sort of a silent failure. After a while, I inquire as to status, discover it was cancelled, find the guy who cancelled it, argue with him on the phone, eventually win him over.
Then, it takes forever for a "custom" machine to get delivered. When it does get delivered, it goes to the on-site vendor support team, who basically just put it in a corner and refuse to touch it, simply because it's not one of the very few machines approved for our large company. I discover this after a month. Then, I spend a month arguing with various representatives of the vendor, and finally I go back to one of the IT guys actually employed by the company who is actually willing to put an image on the machine. Finally, the OS and network access gets installed in a day (probably less), which is all I wanted in the first place.
I'd hate to imagine the amount of labor I spent getting this machine, but I'd say it exceeded the price of the machine.
They're getting paid. Facebook replaces messaging because people are using it through their smart phone. So they're paying for data plans.
No way it offsets. Even if you got ass-pounded with some $0.25/MB data charge, that SMS message is less than a kB. We're talking a tenth of a cent of data per SMS at worst, maybe less, for the worst data plan imaginable.
On the other hand, the carriers typically upcharge $10-20 for text plans, or $0.05-0.10 per SMS. SMS plans were definitely their cash cow, and the data used will absolutely not outweigh.
The only way it would make them more money is if people who *wouldn't otherwise have paid for data* did so as an upgrade to text, but I'm thinking the numbers there don't justify the low-cost, high-revenue stream they're losing. I think what happens is that people who want data for a variety of reasons drop text because they realize they don't need it. And I don't think the carriers will like that much.
They definitely want to still have the phone + text + data plans being sold, because it seems like you're getting 3 things instead of 2, so when you get that three-figure cell bill, it might remind consumers just a bit less of sodomy.
The only thing I wonder about is the intelligence of a guy who felt the need to lie about his degree when it matters so little given his work experience and which can easily be checked.
That's the problem with lies - you get caught in them. It would certainly have mattered a lot when he was first in the industry. After that, when do you suddenly drop it? Once he was well-known, that background would have become attached to him and it would have been impossible to drop quietly without something public.
I assure you that the limiting factor will be the battery, in practice. The limits placed by the chemical reactions that occur under high sustained charging current is a much harder cap than the technical feasibility of fast chargers.
The point is, they can establish that the same conditions which are necessary for evolution everywhere else, were also present in this relatively agricultural/industrialised society,
No they didn't. All this study did was establish that some people have more children than other people, and that some people starve. Hey, no shit. They didn't establish *at all* that there was any impact, or that the genetic selection made future generations more hardy against...anything, including starving.
and hence that unless the entire way we think about evolution is wrong, it was also happening here.
Which would have been an interesting thing to demonstrate, had they actually demonstrated it.
It's correlational, sure
No it's not. It's not *even* correlational. Correlational is when you have two observations, A and B, and you can demonstrate that A changes with B. Here, they have A (reproduction), but *there is no B*.
but the association between sex selection and evolution is so strong
Is it? They certainly didn't demonstrate as much. Sure, other studies have, but they didn't.
In sum, this does in fact appear to be a completely worthless study, unless they actually look at genetic variation either directly or indirectly, which, given the article, doesn't appear to have occurred. Again, what did we actually *learn* from this study, other than the fact that living in Finland in the 1850s probably sucked?
Slashdot Mirror
I pay them in eyeballs.
...how about they review eyewitness testimony? Eyewitness accounts are known to be highly unreliable in many situations, including stress, poor lighting, poor angle relative to event, and more. Additionally, identifying a person is difficult if the person is not already known to the witness, especially if the witness is not of the same race as the person being identified. Worse, the witness interview process by the police may result in suggestion to the witness' memory - either intentionally or unintentionally.
I would personally bet - though cannot prove - that more bad convictions are due to bad witness testimony than bad forensic evidence. By all means bad evidence should be cleaned up - a recent example is identifying bullets by trace metal composition, which was recently found to be questionable
In the end, however, it's only a start in the right direction, and somehow bad witness IDs need to be reviewed as well. It would be great if there was some sort of independent auditing agency (independent of the adversarial justice system) that reviewed questionable convictions based on changes in what we know about the validity of evidence.
Here's a good site that discusses eyewitness testimony effects. Scary, really.
...he says the Grim Reaper will be there between 9 and 3 tomorrow.
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
And there's no comments section to concentrate the collective stupidity of mankind.
Which is why I said 'near', and '5%'. You get to the point of splitting hairs when the top 5% is calling the top 1% 'loathsome'. While I fully appreciate your ability to confuse the forest and trees, the point remains the same.
PhD scientists in many fields are paid quite well, often between $100k and $200k for mid-career in STEM. That puts someone in the top single-digit percents. Also, you do realize that $76,000 number was pulled from a search aggregator and has no validity whatsoever - right? If you want to talk numbers, fine, but go get a real one.
All in all, you make my point: while there are some entities that have more control over price than others, there are so many that it is ludicrous on the face of it to argue that there is even the possibility of a cabal.
No, most certainly I don't. First, we've established that there is a cabal, and we know its name. We're only considering its relative efficacy, which certainly makes the question worth asking and answering as to the source of price increases.
And then there's the data, which conclusively proves that individual actors have very little influence on the price of gas in the US.
I don't know what data you're referring to, but it would be damned hard to imagine any data proving that point. When you have a single unified entity controlling half the world's production, and a handful of about 5 companies controlling all the refining, it would be hard to imagine that that very point itself wouldn't be completely laughable. Further, history is decidedly against you, unless we are to pretend that 1974 didn't actually happen.
Larger point is, if you think oil is a completely untainted free market, then all I have to say is that you're a sweet kid, and I've got a shiny new bridge with your name on it.
Yes, because the prices at the local gas pump are under the direct control of an international cabal of "gentlemen" who can make the prices jump like a flea circus.
You say that as if something like OPEC doesn't exist. There are relatively few petroleum exporting countries, and many of them collude. There are very few companies, all of them globally oriented, that control the supply chain all the way from exploration to refining capacity. There is also quite a lot of politics involved, from local to international, that affect the price of oil, and eventually gasoline.
So while the demand portion is a very normal market, the supply portion is in no way anything close to a free market. As such, it is quite reasonable to question whether a price change of oil or gasoline is due to typical market conditions or price manipulation.
I have a PhD in molecular biology ... I find this intolerable; my hard work is used to make some loathsome 1%er rich?
You're telling me you have a PhD in molecular bio and you aren't near that top 1% of income? 5%er perhaps? I agree with the notion of not working for free, but I think you're overselling the class-baiting angle.
Humans are always going to have greed. Capitalism is simply the engine that makes the best use of it.
And that's the point. You want to harness greed such that a person motivated by greed has to do good for others to do good for himself. That's the point of a tax rate, for instance - you want to make money, you have to earn some for the good of everyone too. The issue is that we have to regulate - fairly heavily too - the processes that allow capitalism to exist
The problems arise when you let the money talk. This is why we need to heavily limit lobbying and corporate influence in the legislation process, because the story being discussed is symptomatic of the shit that happens when you don't.
So, in summary: capitalism isn't the problem, the problem is in letting the capitalists get involved in government.
OK, sounds fun. So you've cracked the https to get the content. This raises a much more difficult question: short of having all emails screened by the employee's supervisor, how do you tell which data is sensitive, and being sent to an unauthorized party?
I've worked in classified environments. I've done research on detecting data leakage using anomaly detection, and my impression of the field is that it's seriously hard, and that you'll be hard-pressed to identify unauthorized content. At best, you might identify unusual employee behavior, which could be used to tip an internal team for an information audit.
Since that's so hard, the best thing to do is to segregate sensitive information in some way - air-gapped networks is one way. Another way is to use protected networks (logically isolated?), which allows you at least the a priori assumption that any documents leaving contain sensitive information, which allows you to improve your needle/hay ratio. Otherwise, you're looking at rather a difficult problem. Also, there's no notion that employees should be doing their banking on such systems, so it sort of puts a wet blanket on the moral discussion of this story.
So, I'm interested - outside of heavily isolated networks (that employees aren't using for banking), once you've gotten down to the content, what the hell do you *then*?
You have your answer. You charge by the hour for support including bug fixes. Only slaves work for free.
It depends. Are you selling the product, or your work? If you're selling the product, you should support it, because if it's buggy, then the client didn't get what they paid for. If you're selling your work, you always charge by the hour no matter what.
In reality, most arrangements of this type are sort of in between, which is why a service agreement is so important. Also, it may depend on how much the client is worth, and how egregious the bug was, as to whether you go above your legal liability.
Can't see any other way, copyrights are copyrights. And I don't think the GPL has ever implied that it can cover the APIs.
Or she could simply be one of the hordes who work for government contractors who support the NSA and similar agencies. The standards are, unfortunately, not so high. Problem is one needs to work in some very specific locations, and an existing security clearance is often a prerequisite.
....until the next time we really, really need you to bail us out of a jam.
Hey, the US has tried to play isolationist a few times, it seems to be Europe that keeps begging us back out of retirement. Just sayin'.
As an example, I'm assuming that Europe absolutely will not be seeking any sort of economic assistance from the US as part of the sovereign debt problems that seem to be facing 2/3 of that continent. And I'm also certain that Japan, SK, and Taiwan would be A-OK with us removing any and all support that has helped stabilize that region. Admittedly we've fucked up the whole middle east thing, but it was sort of our turn since everybody else has over the last couple thousand years.
As an American, we're used to the "Go away until we need your resources to solve our problems, at which we will act like ungrateful bastards about it" thing. Keep it up.
There conceivably could be an infinite number of "parellel" universes, but there's a real philosophical problem with that. So long as we use the real physicists definitions and not something out of Stargate SG1, those parallels will always remain undetectable. SF writers tell stories about interacting with other universes - physicists define them in ways that show they can't be interacted with to be verified. An untestable idea isn't part of science.
Quite true. And while there is a component of such research that will appeal to the sci-fi or metaphysical crowds, it is still worth considering what such systems would imply. Question: what defines a parallel universe? To me, it is as simple as an ensemble of particles that does not interact with our universe via any of the 4 standard forces with which we are familiar. Once we start there, it can become scientific (ie, testable) again if we ask another simple question: could groups of particles that do not interact at standard temperatures begin interacting at extremely high energies? If the physics were to suggest such a thing, it could be made testable.
There is some precent for such notions - in general, at higher energies, things become more symmetric. A singularity is fully symmetric, and the big bang process resulted in our universe losing its symmetry as it cooled. The 4 major forces (or at least the 3 non-gravity) converge at high energies. It's not inconceivable that other types of symmetry were broken as the universe cooled - whether that symmetry breaking resulted in a preference for matter, or whether it resulted in multiple ensembles of matter that do not interact (ie, universes), remains to be seen.
But like everything else in fundamental physics, creating higher energies should be part of the experiment. And, as you say, it has to be scientific.
Which exposes how little these tards understand about science, because nanotech is not a specific branch of science, but an amalgamation of many branches of science lumped together by those who don't understand any of them.
Thanks for the summary, it was staggeringly accurate to what I spent the last 6 months doing - namely, getting a high-end machine to use as a centralized computational workstation for my small research group. First I had to fight the external vendor to just get a quote. Then, a guy in IT cancelled my order because the company "doesn't support" that type of machine - which is, again, simply a beefed-up version of a machine they *do* support. Of course, they don't tell me it was cancelled, it was just sort of a silent failure. After a while, I inquire as to status, discover it was cancelled, find the guy who cancelled it, argue with him on the phone, eventually win him over.
Then, it takes forever for a "custom" machine to get delivered. When it does get delivered, it goes to the on-site vendor support team, who basically just put it in a corner and refuse to touch it, simply because it's not one of the very few machines approved for our large company. I discover this after a month. Then, I spend a month arguing with various representatives of the vendor, and finally I go back to one of the IT guys actually employed by the company who is actually willing to put an image on the machine. Finally, the OS and network access gets installed in a day (probably less), which is all I wanted in the first place.
I'd hate to imagine the amount of labor I spent getting this machine, but I'd say it exceeded the price of the machine.
They're getting paid. Facebook replaces messaging because people are using it through their smart phone. So they're paying for data plans.
No way it offsets. Even if you got ass-pounded with some $0.25/MB data charge, that SMS message is less than a kB. We're talking a tenth of a cent of data per SMS at worst, maybe less, for the worst data plan imaginable.
On the other hand, the carriers typically upcharge $10-20 for text plans, or $0.05-0.10 per SMS. SMS plans were definitely their cash cow, and the data used will absolutely not outweigh.
The only way it would make them more money is if people who *wouldn't otherwise have paid for data* did so as an upgrade to text, but I'm thinking the numbers there don't justify the low-cost, high-revenue stream they're losing. I think what happens is that people who want data for a variety of reasons drop text because they realize they don't need it. And I don't think the carriers will like that much.
They definitely want to still have the phone + text + data plans being sold, because it seems like you're getting 3 things instead of 2, so when you get that three-figure cell bill, it might remind consumers just a bit less of sodomy.
Of course, back then, you worked till the day you died, since there was no Social Security
Of course, since Social Security isn't supposed to be a fucking retirement plan, that's a non-sequitur.
Thankfully, the first amendment doesn't work that way, or we would have no free speech to speak of.
//REMEMBER TO COMMENT THIS SHIT OUT SO I DONT GET FIRED
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING....
The only thing I wonder about is the intelligence of a guy who felt the need to lie about his degree when it matters so little given his work experience and which can easily be checked.
That's the problem with lies - you get caught in them. It would certainly have mattered a lot when he was first in the industry. After that, when do you suddenly drop it? Once he was well-known, that background would have become attached to him and it would have been impossible to drop quietly without something public.
I assure you that the limiting factor will be the battery, in practice. The limits placed by the chemical reactions that occur under high sustained charging current is a much harder cap than the technical feasibility of fast chargers.
Better question is how many KWh can it deliver in 15 mins? Since vehicle battery capacities vary significantly, that's the relevant question.
Actually, the relevant question is how many kWh the battery can take.
The point is, they can establish that the same conditions which are necessary for evolution everywhere else, were also present in this relatively agricultural/industrialised society,
No they didn't. All this study did was establish that some people have more children than other people, and that some people starve. Hey, no shit. They didn't establish *at all* that there was any impact, or that the genetic selection made future generations more hardy against...anything, including starving.
and hence that unless the entire way we think about evolution is wrong, it was also happening here.
Which would have been an interesting thing to demonstrate, had they actually demonstrated it.
It's correlational, sure
No it's not. It's not *even* correlational. Correlational is when you have two observations, A and B, and you can demonstrate that A changes with B. Here, they have A (reproduction), but *there is no B*.
but the association between sex selection and evolution is so strong
Is it? They certainly didn't demonstrate as much. Sure, other studies have, but they didn't.
In sum, this does in fact appear to be a completely worthless study, unless they actually look at genetic variation either directly or indirectly, which, given the article, doesn't appear to have occurred. Again, what did we actually *learn* from this study, other than the fact that living in Finland in the 1850s probably sucked?