While You're right, of course, to point out that incandescent bulbs are only a small part of the problem, but the fact that this article has been categorized as 'greenwashing' is very revealing. The prevailing attitude in our country is that anything is OK as long as you're willing to pay for it, and that market forces rather than prudence, foresight and common sense should be what determine our choices both as consumers and as a nation in terms of our policy. While there is obviously something to be said for allowing people the 'freedom' to decide for themselves how wasteful they want to be, the inconvenient truth is that the attitude that 'I can do whatever I feel like as long as I can afford it' is what is destroying the planet.
The incandescent versus CFL issue probably isn't the best example. While it's true that incandescent bulbs are inefficient, most CFL's still contain mercury and other toxins that are harmful to the environment both during production and after consumption. And while most incandescent bulbs are wasteful in terms of heat, that energy is not actually wasted all the time. In my house in the winter, any heat the bulbs put out is heat the furnace doesn't have to put out. It's not a perfectly even exchange, since the furnace runs on gas, but it's not entirely one-sided.
Also, most incandescent bulbs may not last as long as most CFLs, but that is almost certainly a product of planned obsolescence and not a genuine technological limitation. Everyone has an incandescent bulb in the house that, for whatever reason, never burns out. There are incandescent bulbs still working that were made in the Edison era a century ago. It IS possible to make an incandescent bulb that will never burn out. But then nobody would ever buy more bulbs, would they? Not much profit in making good bulbs then, and so Phillips and GE et al make bulbs that last just long enough so that you can't quite remember when you last replaced them - typically around 6 months.
And lastly, CFLs are not necessarily the best alternative technology option we have. As I understand it, LED bulbs are likely to be the best choice. I haven't seen them yet myself, but I hear they're OK and improving, and of course they are very efficient and last more or less forever.
Oops, well, after a quick tour through Infopath 2003 it doesn't look like it'll do what our office needs without a boatload of tough customization work. Maybe 2007 is different? Basically, what we need is to be able to take existing government forms and make the fields feature-rich: editable and capable of supporting formulae, conditions, etc, etc. If we were to use Infopath, we couldn't just put form fields on top of a scanned image, as in PDF documents say, so we'd have recreate each form - that'd be really hard and time consuming since we'd have to match the exact appearance of each of dozens and dozens of government forms. I tried inserting an image in Infopath, and you don't have the option of putting it behind the text. I could make the form in MS Word instead, and try to convert it... Not sure what would happen to the image.
Long story short, Infopath is NOT the easy, simple solution to digitizing government case-based paperwork shuffling I thought it was. Unless INfopath 2007 is radically different, and from the online demos and testdrives I tried it doesn't seem to be, there's still a hole in the market there that could be filled.
Hey, thanks for pointing that stuff out. The first link looks like it's aimed at software development specifically, and doesn't apply at the level I was thinking of. Sharepoint's workflows are basically what I had in mind - I guess I'm just stuck in the dark ages with regular versions of MS Office that don't have Sharepoint! I don't have it on my PC or laptop, my university doesn't have it, and no employer I've ever worked for has had it. it really is a shame. I'll see if I can get it rolling in my office though, as it would save me a huge amount of work!
One partial explanation: since it's harder to infringe upon hardware patents, that makes them easier to protect than software patents. Possibly, your list of examples is all hardware and no software simply because MS has done a good job of genuinely protecting their intellectual property by keeping everyone unaware of what it is, and what it does. Maybe a stretch, I grant you, but a possibility nonetheless.
Alternatively, it could just be the M$ really is resting on it's laurels, especially when it comes to Office. I just started working a second job in an office to help save up for grad school, and it is simply staggering how inefficient the workflow in my office is. We basically do case-based paperwork for immigration applications to the US government. There are 6 people in the office, and if anything I am underestimating when I claim that at least 80 percent of our work could be completely eliminated with halfway decent software.
Now here's the funny thing: we are the employee immigration services office for a major top-tier university, we use a small company's proprietary software solution, and we are cited nationwide as an example of 'best practices' in the immigration 'industry'. It's absolutely ridiculous.
If I could sit down with the engineers at Google or Microsoft for a whole day and talk them through our process - and if they really listened - we could all enjoy software that really did eliminate a big chunk of the monkeywork that Dilbert et al make so much fun of. And not just for this one office procedure, but for thousands like it in organizations and businesses across the country. Sadly, Google and Microsoft won't return my calls...
It's ironic too, because I'm actually someone qualified to evaluate workflow - my training is in organizational and workflow management. Ahhh, how tragic this silly life is...
Seriously, if any of you fellow slashdotters actually work for a big vendor, you should get in touch. Microsoft needs a simple, highly customizable, wizard-driven workflow-optimizing app called - wait for it - "Workflow" in its Office suite, expressly for this purpose.
You create a perfect opportunity to draw an elucidating analogy: gawking at someone playing guitar hero would be just like gawking at someone playing All Pro Football 2k8. Yes, gaming skills can be impressive. But there IS a difference between being an elite athlete on a real football field and being an elite gamer when people are looking not at the skill but at the game. Transpose (no pun intended...) said analogy to Guitar Hero and playing a real guitar, and the point is the same: At the moment it is not as 'cool' to be a star gamer as it is to be a star football player or a real guitar virtuoso. That may change one day, but for right now that's just how it is.
I'm trying to visualize the end-game for online office applications. In the old days, dumb terminals accessed more powerful computers in order to provide more feature-rich functionality. Later, as personal computers got more powerful, feature-rich apps have moved onto users' machines while online apps have become 'lite' versions because of bandwidth and processor limitations. Now that processing and memory capacity are already so massive that virtually any device has enough power to run virtually any office application, what I want to know is what will happen when bandwidth is no longer an issue. Then it truly wouldn't matter where the application was run - all that would matter would be the interface itself: the monitor and input devices. For example, you mentioned accessing all your documents from computers away from home - with massive bandwidth, why connect to a centralized online service instead of just connecting to your home computer?
There may be some holes in your logic. Predicted phenomena, once observed, become... wait for it... observed phenomena. So a theory that agrees with all observed phenomena with maximum parsimony without making new predictions is... useless? According to you and the other responder, apparently so. Hrrm. Houston, we have a problem.
Maybe this mindset where prediction is the 'gold standard' is peculiar to physics, I don't know. In other, less abstract and more tangible scientific fields the paramount thing seems to be for a theory to gel with all existing evidence. If it does so better than any other theory, we lend it credence. Appealing to nonsense like Intelligent Design as bullshit explanations is nonsensical precisely because they are so much less parsimonious, so much less logical, and so much less in agreement with all observations and evidence than good scientific theory. Logically, a theory that is in perfect agreement with observed reality, predictions aside, is going to be unavoidably credible. I'm not sure why this is so difficult a concept for folks to understand.
You've added nothing in your latest response, and so while I stand by my earlier decision to take the conversation no further, I can't resist making one more attempt to dispel your stubbornly persistent ignorance.
While you've grudgingly acknowledged the value of explaining observed phenomena, you're still clumsily claiming that prediction of new phenomena alone is the gold standard by which science can be said to be science. You were wrong in the beginning, and are still wrong now.
Scientific theories, as structures of logically coherent hypotheses, must agree with observed reality. That is all. The more they agree, the better we say they are and the more useful they tend to be at predicting future observations. So long as a scientific theory consistently offers a logically coherent explanation of observed reality, we give it credence until new evidence comes along that contradicts the theory. If ever such evidence comes along, or if a theory comes along that does a better job of explaining observed reality - better meaning it possesses greater elegance, comprehensiveness and simplicity which we lump together under the term 'parsimony' - we either modify the original theory or toss the theory out.
Again, all a scientific theory must do in order to be science is logically and consistently explain observed reality, and - crucially - be willing to be subject to new evidence and continuous criticism. THAT, and that alone, is the scientific method. Countless theories have been refuted by new evidence. Countless new observations have required theories to be modified because they defied prediction. It happens every day. But before that happens, they ARE science so long as they are logical and open to new evidence and criticism, even if they later turn out to be wrong. Before we had better evidence, it was perfectly reasonable to posit a flat Earth, for example. The difference between science and your 'storytelling' is that science continuously improves itself through self-criticism. These theories are the 'stories' which you claim to be bullshit, from evolutionary biology to quantum mechanics and cosmology. Sadly, these 'stories' - these explanations of observed reality - are all we have. If it's all just bullshit to you, I suggest you consider a line of work either in the clergy or in math, the only field of science which can be said to ever actually 'prove' anything. You seem to think that a theory's ability to predict future observations 'proves' it to be correct, and that it must otherwise be false. In the rest of science, you never prove anything; you simply have theories - 'stories' - that explain what we see.
One last time: a theory's ability to make predictions is icing on the cake; it is not a litmus test or a definitional criteria for science itself. My guess is that you're confusing testing with prediction. You don't need to be able to make predictions to test a theory. To test a theory, all you have to do is confirm that it squares with all existing observations and evidence. If it does so, it's a good theory; if it doesn't, it's probably wrong.
the criterion of a successful science is its ability to make correct predictions. After it can/do/ that, then you can go and try to use it to explain observed phenomena -- but, unless and until it can do that, you're no better than the ancient tribes who explained the observed phenomena of lightening by saying it was a dude throwing bolts down from the clouds.
The theory of evolution itself provides a perfect example of why your personal definition of good science is flawed. Evolutionary theory existed for more than a century only as an explanation, with zero predictive power. Only with the advent of microbiology and genetics in the second half of the 20th Century did we actually get to see "evolution in action". Fundies, whom you sound just like, love to criticize evolutionary theory as 'bad science' or 'pseudoscience' for this very reason. We don't take them seriously, and we don't take people like yourself seriously, and the reason why is that explanatory power alone is enough to make something good science. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is widely regarded as the the most powerful and most profound scientific insight in the history of mankind. Yet if you were to be consistent, you would condemn it as pseudoscience because of the difficulty in testing its predictions over short spaces of time - the same difficulty faced by all of the evolutionary sciences, including human behavior aka psychology.
The trouble with evolution is that it really can explain just about everything. Certainly it does, ultimately, explain everything, even if we see conflicting or diametrically opposed scenarios played out simultaneously. Far from being evidence that evolution is wrong, what this reveals is that reality is more complex than we care to admit: multiple strategies are used simultaneously, opposite approaches do work and often run complementary to one another. The complexity makes simplistic, one-dimensional explanations (such as why women have large breasts) likely to be partial explanations at best. Your example illustrates an important point I was making earlier: there is, in fact, no way to tease out psychology from biology - that is the whole crux of the science. You may think that by framing the question as, 'why do men like large breasts?' you're talking about psychology, but of course the same question can be framed as, 'why do women have large breasts?' Maybe this is a difficult concept for you, I don't know - you were confused as to whether a behavioral prediction (women will avoid certain foods during early pregnancy) constitutes psychology or biology. The point, in simple terms, is that evolutionary behavior emerges from biology - a point I made very early on. When you call that pseudoscience, you're right out on the thin ice with creationists.
I'll end this exchange by offering what is, I hope, an example that will better illustrate the power of evolution to explain and predict human behavior than my previous one. Back in the 60s and 70s when scientists like EO Wilson were helping evolution establish itself as an explanatory platform for human behavior, biologists were learning interesting things about other animals' biology and behavior, including primates: that the physiological features of sexual dimorphism (difference in size between males and females) and testes size tended to correspond with certain reproductive strategies. High dimorphism and large testes correlated strongly with polyandry, or what we would call female promiscuity. In chimps, for examples, males are much larger than females and have massive testicles. The prevailing explanation for why is that males fight one another to have access to mates, and there is a great deal of competition between the sperm of different males within a female who has had sex with more than one partner in a short space of time. In species where monogamy is the dominant strategy, dimorphism is minimal and testes size is low. Humans are somewhere in th
evolutionary psychology is pseudoscientific bullshit. For it to be a successful science, it would have to be able to make correct predictions about things the answers to which were not already known.
By your lights, scientific inquiry into human behavior is impossible. But I'll be charitable enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't actually mean anything so asinine as to suggest that science can only be useful as a process of discovery and not as a means of explaining and predicting the phenomena we observe.
It is clear that evolutionary biology offers by far the best platform for explaining human behavior currently available to scientific inquiry. It's validity as the force that shaped not only our bodies but our minds and therefore our behavior is absolutely undisputed in the scientific community, despite your ignorant histrionics bandying about the pejorative term 'pseudoscience'. As for our ability to test hypotheses and explain observations, you're obviously unaware of the studies in evolutionary behavior that confirm predictions made about humans by evolutionary theory that are NOT readily apparent via observation but in fact are only borne out by statistical analysis across large populations. You're obviously not aware of all of the findings predicted by evolutionary behavior theory that run contrary to intuition and common sense, which are again borne out only by statistical analysis. And you're obviously not aware of studies that have made observations in other species, both closely and distantly related to humans, that again make predictions about human behavior that are unintuitive but are nevertheless confirmed by statistical analysis.
To give just one example, studies of eating habits in primates and other mammals as well as humans showed that omnivorous species avoided meat during the first stages of pregnancy. This gelled with observations of morning sickness in humans, and led to a prediction that certain chemicals conducive to bacterial and parasitic pathogens would provoke aversion in humans. This in turn led to the prediction that early during pregnancy the female body enters a state of immunosuppression. These predictions, which emerged directly from evolutionary behavior theory, were confirmed in studies of human populations.
So while you're wallowing in the cool muck of your own ignorance, there are a few of us out here doing actual science. If you don't care to join us, or at least read about what we do, then it'd be better for everyone if you clapped that opinionated and woefully uninformed trap of yours shut.
You've obviously never read anything about evolutionary psychology. A good place to start is The Moral Animal by Robert Right and The Third Chimpanzee and Why Sex Is Fun by Jared Diamond. Men and women have entirely different reproductive strategies for entirely biological reasons, and this is born out in their different sexual behaviors and desires. It's you, I'm afraid, who is suffering from 'social conditioning'.
You jest, but there is a fundamental asymmetry here between the sexes that really does pose a problem - at least in the short run. Men, broadly speaking, are sexually interested in women in a purely objective, physical sense. The sexual desires of women, on the other hand, tend to be much more subtle, nuanced, and involve the complexities of personality, social status, behavioral context, and many other non-physical factors. There are of course exceptions, and men of course want companionship as well as sex, but for men the act of sex can be teased out (no pun intended) from intimacy. That doesn't happen to nearly the same extent for women.
The upshot is that it is possible to replicate the object of a man's sexual desires much more easily than the object of a woman's sexual desires, since a man's sexual desires are almost entirely physical. For a replicated male robot to be uber-sexy, it would have to be smart, funny, suave, and have high social status, wealth and power. Obviously, that may all be possible one day but we can all agree that that day is much, much farther off. In the meantime, the asymmetry is going to create a real problem for women.
One caveat: this assumes that sexbots for men will become available sooner than perfect virtual reality. Once we have VR a la the Matrix, robots as sex-replacements will be moot anyway.
Since you worked on the CEV, maybe you can answer a question of mine: how come the spacecraft for manned missions to Mars and space stations like the ISS don't have designs that provide artificial gravity from spin? We seem to hear endless discussion about how to address the 'problem' of microgravity - from astronaut health to cultivating food. Yet, no spinning solutions. How come?
Access to information is the lever that makes all those other goals attainable. How much less effective would we be at our jobs without the internet?
It looks like you missed my point about Western-culture and geek myopia. The whole point is that this is not about us. It's about THEM. The internet is NOT important - AT ALL - if you do not have clean water to drink or food to eat.
The OLPC issue is an interesting one on slashdot because it lays bare the cultural and economic myopia of the geek culture - however smart we may be. The fact that this time the article is being raised by an incendiary pundit is just fuel for the fire, and Dvorak's own pithy quips about sending food instead of laptops is just more of the same geek myopia coming from the other end of the spectrum. Of course sending food only alleviates symptoms and doesn't solve underlying problems, and of course food relief must be temporary because if permanent it would negate the possibility of creating viable food economies. If Dvorak doesn't know this, then he's an ignorant fool, but that is far more charitable than assuming he does know this, in which case he is a malicious bastard.
I'm merely a hobbyist geek. But I AM a professional sustainable economic development consult who has spent twenty years living and working in developing countries. In my opinion, the OIRP is not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it is not the ideal use of resources either. At best, it is an important part of the total socioeconomic development package that must be deployed in order to alleviate the plight of penury and destitution that is the lot of hundreds of millions of children living in developing countries around the world. Are there more important individual components within that package? Yes. Access to potable water is more important than access to information. Access to food is more important (although as many posters have pointed out, it is not the biggest problem). Access to electricity is more important. Access to transportation is more important. And, of course, security and health are more important. But does that mean that access to information is unimportant? Of course not.
It may be that the hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of man-years put into the development of this project could not possibly have been better spent address one of the more critical issues I just mentioned. I honestly don't know. What I do know is that the always-hyperbolic nature of the discussion on slashdot shows that the vast majority of readers are not well enough informed about issues of international development to legitimately engage in reasonable and nuanced debate on the subject.
"It had terrific graphics and sound for the price"
"its relatively low cost gave good bang for the buck"
"affordable machines that could do everything quite well"
Had you actually read my post, you would have realized - thanks to not one, not two, but three mentions of C64 value-for-money - that by 'computer' I very obviously meant 'home computer'.
If you're clinically retarded or have some other legitimate excuse for being an idiot, then please accept my apologies.
no PC will ever elicit the same emotions that a C64 did for the owners of them of the time.
I think you're right, for a combination of reasons:
1. The platform was fixed for many years, so it had a uniform, enduring identity like a console rather than an ephemeral one like a modern PC.
2. As a computer, the c64 platform had more power and flexibility than a mere game console, and that gave it an Alladin's Lamp quality of magic and mystery that can only come from being able to crawl under the hood and goof around with things.
3. It was the right thing at the right place at the right time, like Star Wars. The C64 wasn't the very first computer, but when launched it was probably the best. It had terrific graphics and sound for the price, and the games produced on it did tend to outshine those of its contemporaries.
4. Its power and versatility combined with its relatively low cost gave good bang for the buck, and therefore made it a widespread phenomena - unlike the Amiga and other technically superior systems of the era.
5. Lastly, it - more than any other computer at the time - gave us a glimpse of the future. Smart kids using C64s just knew that the future would be filled with affordable machines that could do everything quite well - games, graphics, sound, applications and more. The game consoles didn't do that, nor did the other computers in 1982 which had word processors and spreadsheet apps but scarcely had graphics or sound to speak of. The C64 had it all, and, even though we were little kids, millions of us instinctively knew that it was a portent of the future.
Meh - Guitar Hero is just the most recent abomination. (I have the right to be cranky - I put in the years it takes to be able to play everything in those games on a real guitar). Elsewhere in the thread someone referred to Quake 2 as 'old school'. I don't think so, sonny. You want really classic, really OLD school game music? You've got to go back before the days of audio files, when all music on game systems had to be synthesized by the system itself and not just played back off of a recording.
My vote goes for the C64 Last Ninja soundtrack. Absolutely awesome.
I can think of plenty of things that are more motivating and visionary to spend taxpayer money on.
I think your choice of wording here is poor. If you had used the terms 'pragmatic' and 'scientifically productive' your argument might have stood on firm ground. But to claim that putting human beings on another planet is not 'motivating' or 'visionary' enough is simply asinine. When people look back on the 20th Century, the top of the list of 'visionary' accomplishments is, invariably, NASA putting men on the moon.
As for the argument from pragmatism, I'll simply refer you to the writings of Carl Sagan, who made an extraordinarily eloquent and compelling case for the functional utility of investing in voyages of discovery that push the boundaries of mankind's influence in the universe. And lastly, I'll just remind you and everyone else reading this that the cost of a Mars mission - current estimates put it at $50 to $100 billion - is relatively modest within the context of the annual budget of the United States Federal Government. Spread over 20 years, that sum is very modest indeed.
I couldn't agree more. I have both Yahoo and Google accounts. Virtually no spam in gmail, and when I get I report it. I get half a dozen spam messages a day, and ALWAYS from the same suspects - it's not just Viagra and penis enlargement garbage, but mostly stuff from fairly recognizable companies (I am plagued by iWon.com, even though I've marked at least 200 messages from them as spam). I do report Yahoo spam though, since each it's the same process to report them as delete them - just a different button for trashing them.
Yahoo either doesn't filter spam in general as well as Google - meaning it doesn't apply spam reporting to all accounts - or it doesn't build a personal filter based on individual users' spam reporting. Or both. Maybe someone on/. actually knows, but my guess is that Google DOES do the latter - build a personal filter based on each users' spam reporting. It wouldn't be terribly difficult, and I can see it vastly improving performance above generic filtering alone.
Slashdot Mirror
The incandescent versus CFL issue probably isn't the best example. While it's true that incandescent bulbs are inefficient, most CFL's still contain mercury and other toxins that are harmful to the environment both during production and after consumption. And while most incandescent bulbs are wasteful in terms of heat, that energy is not actually wasted all the time. In my house in the winter, any heat the bulbs put out is heat the furnace doesn't have to put out. It's not a perfectly even exchange, since the furnace runs on gas, but it's not entirely one-sided.
Also, most incandescent bulbs may not last as long as most CFLs, but that is almost certainly a product of planned obsolescence and not a genuine technological limitation. Everyone has an incandescent bulb in the house that, for whatever reason, never burns out. There are incandescent bulbs still working that were made in the Edison era a century ago. It IS possible to make an incandescent bulb that will never burn out. But then nobody would ever buy more bulbs, would they? Not much profit in making good bulbs then, and so Phillips and GE et al make bulbs that last just long enough so that you can't quite remember when you last replaced them - typically around 6 months.
And lastly, CFLs are not necessarily the best alternative technology option we have. As I understand it, LED bulbs are likely to be the best choice. I haven't seen them yet myself, but I hear they're OK and improving, and of course they are very efficient and last more or less forever.
So what you're saying is that it's Miller Time ?
Long story short, Infopath is NOT the easy, simple solution to digitizing government case-based paperwork shuffling I thought it was. Unless INfopath 2007 is radically different, and from the online demos and testdrives I tried it doesn't seem to be, there's still a hole in the market there that could be filled.
Thanks for schooling me!
One partial explanation: since it's harder to infringe upon hardware patents, that makes them easier to protect than software patents. Possibly, your list of examples is all hardware and no software simply because MS has done a good job of genuinely protecting their intellectual property by keeping everyone unaware of what it is, and what it does. Maybe a stretch, I grant you, but a possibility nonetheless.
Alternatively, it could just be the M$ really is resting on it's laurels, especially when it comes to Office. I just started working a second job in an office to help save up for grad school, and it is simply staggering how inefficient the workflow in my office is. We basically do case-based paperwork for immigration applications to the US government. There are 6 people in the office, and if anything I am underestimating when I claim that at least 80 percent of our work could be completely eliminated with halfway decent software.
Now here's the funny thing: we are the employee immigration services office for a major top-tier university, we use a small company's proprietary software solution, and we are cited nationwide as an example of 'best practices' in the immigration 'industry'. It's absolutely ridiculous.
If I could sit down with the engineers at Google or Microsoft for a whole day and talk them through our process - and if they really listened - we could all enjoy software that really did eliminate a big chunk of the monkeywork that Dilbert et al make so much fun of. And not just for this one office procedure, but for thousands like it in organizations and businesses across the country. Sadly, Google and Microsoft won't return my calls...
It's ironic too, because I'm actually someone qualified to evaluate workflow - my training is in organizational and workflow management. Ahhh, how tragic this silly life is...
Seriously, if any of you fellow slashdotters actually work for a big vendor, you should get in touch. Microsoft needs a simple, highly customizable, wizard-driven workflow-optimizing app called - wait for it - "Workflow" in its Office suite, expressly for this purpose.
You create a perfect opportunity to draw an elucidating analogy: gawking at someone playing guitar hero would be just like gawking at someone playing All Pro Football 2k8. Yes, gaming skills can be impressive. But there IS a difference between being an elite athlete on a real football field and being an elite gamer when people are looking not at the skill but at the game. Transpose (no pun intended...) said analogy to Guitar Hero and playing a real guitar, and the point is the same: At the moment it is not as 'cool' to be a star gamer as it is to be a star football player or a real guitar virtuoso. That may change one day, but for right now that's just how it is.
I'm trying to visualize the end-game for online office applications. In the old days, dumb terminals accessed more powerful computers in order to provide more feature-rich functionality. Later, as personal computers got more powerful, feature-rich apps have moved onto users' machines while online apps have become 'lite' versions because of bandwidth and processor limitations. Now that processing and memory capacity are already so massive that virtually any device has enough power to run virtually any office application, what I want to know is what will happen when bandwidth is no longer an issue. Then it truly wouldn't matter where the application was run - all that would matter would be the interface itself: the monitor and input devices. For example, you mentioned accessing all your documents from computers away from home - with massive bandwidth, why connect to a centralized online service instead of just connecting to your home computer?
Maybe this mindset where prediction is the 'gold standard' is peculiar to physics, I don't know. In other, less abstract and more tangible scientific fields the paramount thing seems to be for a theory to gel with all existing evidence. If it does so better than any other theory, we lend it credence. Appealing to nonsense like Intelligent Design as bullshit explanations is nonsensical precisely because they are so much less parsimonious, so much less logical, and so much less in agreement with all observations and evidence than good scientific theory. Logically, a theory that is in perfect agreement with observed reality, predictions aside, is going to be unavoidably credible. I'm not sure why this is so difficult a concept for folks to understand.
While you've grudgingly acknowledged the value of explaining observed phenomena, you're still clumsily claiming that prediction of new phenomena alone is the gold standard by which science can be said to be science. You were wrong in the beginning, and are still wrong now.
Scientific theories, as structures of logically coherent hypotheses, must agree with observed reality. That is all. The more they agree, the better we say they are and the more useful they tend to be at predicting future observations. So long as a scientific theory consistently offers a logically coherent explanation of observed reality, we give it credence until new evidence comes along that contradicts the theory. If ever such evidence comes along, or if a theory comes along that does a better job of explaining observed reality - better meaning it possesses greater elegance, comprehensiveness and simplicity which we lump together under the term 'parsimony' - we either modify the original theory or toss the theory out.
Again, all a scientific theory must do in order to be science is logically and consistently explain observed reality, and - crucially - be willing to be subject to new evidence and continuous criticism. THAT, and that alone, is the scientific method. Countless theories have been refuted by new evidence. Countless new observations have required theories to be modified because they defied prediction. It happens every day. But before that happens, they ARE science so long as they are logical and open to new evidence and criticism, even if they later turn out to be wrong. Before we had better evidence, it was perfectly reasonable to posit a flat Earth, for example. The difference between science and your 'storytelling' is that science continuously improves itself through self-criticism. These theories are the 'stories' which you claim to be bullshit, from evolutionary biology to quantum mechanics and cosmology. Sadly, these 'stories' - these explanations of observed reality - are all we have. If it's all just bullshit to you, I suggest you consider a line of work either in the clergy or in math, the only field of science which can be said to ever actually 'prove' anything. You seem to think that a theory's ability to predict future observations 'proves' it to be correct, and that it must otherwise be false. In the rest of science, you never prove anything; you simply have theories - 'stories' - that explain what we see.
One last time: a theory's ability to make predictions is icing on the cake; it is not a litmus test or a definitional criteria for science itself. My guess is that you're confusing testing with prediction. You don't need to be able to make predictions to test a theory. To test a theory, all you have to do is confirm that it squares with all existing observations and evidence. If it does so, it's a good theory; if it doesn't, it's probably wrong.
The theory of evolution itself provides a perfect example of why your personal definition of good science is flawed. Evolutionary theory existed for more than a century only as an explanation, with zero predictive power. Only with the advent of microbiology and genetics in the second half of the 20th Century did we actually get to see "evolution in action". Fundies, whom you sound just like, love to criticize evolutionary theory as 'bad science' or 'pseudoscience' for this very reason. We don't take them seriously, and we don't take people like yourself seriously, and the reason why is that explanatory power alone is enough to make something good science. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is widely regarded as the the most powerful and most profound scientific insight in the history of mankind. Yet if you were to be consistent, you would condemn it as pseudoscience because of the difficulty in testing its predictions over short spaces of time - the same difficulty faced by all of the evolutionary sciences, including human behavior aka psychology.
The trouble with evolution is that it really can explain just about everything. Certainly it does, ultimately, explain everything, even if we see conflicting or diametrically opposed scenarios played out simultaneously. Far from being evidence that evolution is wrong, what this reveals is that reality is more complex than we care to admit: multiple strategies are used simultaneously, opposite approaches do work and often run complementary to one another. The complexity makes simplistic, one-dimensional explanations (such as why women have large breasts) likely to be partial explanations at best. Your example illustrates an important point I was making earlier: there is, in fact, no way to tease out psychology from biology - that is the whole crux of the science. You may think that by framing the question as, 'why do men like large breasts?' you're talking about psychology, but of course the same question can be framed as, 'why do women have large breasts?' Maybe this is a difficult concept for you, I don't know - you were confused as to whether a behavioral prediction (women will avoid certain foods during early pregnancy) constitutes psychology or biology. The point, in simple terms, is that evolutionary behavior emerges from biology - a point I made very early on. When you call that pseudoscience, you're right out on the thin ice with creationists.
I'll end this exchange by offering what is, I hope, an example that will better illustrate the power of evolution to explain and predict human behavior than my previous one. Back in the 60s and 70s when scientists like EO Wilson were helping evolution establish itself as an explanatory platform for human behavior, biologists were learning interesting things about other animals' biology and behavior, including primates: that the physiological features of sexual dimorphism (difference in size between males and females) and testes size tended to correspond with certain reproductive strategies. High dimorphism and large testes correlated strongly with polyandry, or what we would call female promiscuity. In chimps, for examples, males are much larger than females and have massive testicles. The prevailing explanation for why is that males fight one another to have access to mates, and there is a great deal of competition between the sperm of different males within a female who has had sex with more than one partner in a short space of time. In species where monogamy is the dominant strategy, dimorphism is minimal and testes size is low. Humans are somewhere in th
By your lights, scientific inquiry into human behavior is impossible. But I'll be charitable enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't actually mean anything so asinine as to suggest that science can only be useful as a process of discovery and not as a means of explaining and predicting the phenomena we observe.
It is clear that evolutionary biology offers by far the best platform for explaining human behavior currently available to scientific inquiry. It's validity as the force that shaped not only our bodies but our minds and therefore our behavior is absolutely undisputed in the scientific community, despite your ignorant histrionics bandying about the pejorative term 'pseudoscience'. As for our ability to test hypotheses and explain observations, you're obviously unaware of the studies in evolutionary behavior that confirm predictions made about humans by evolutionary theory that are NOT readily apparent via observation but in fact are only borne out by statistical analysis across large populations. You're obviously not aware of all of the findings predicted by evolutionary behavior theory that run contrary to intuition and common sense, which are again borne out only by statistical analysis. And you're obviously not aware of studies that have made observations in other species, both closely and distantly related to humans, that again make predictions about human behavior that are unintuitive but are nevertheless confirmed by statistical analysis.
To give just one example, studies of eating habits in primates and other mammals as well as humans showed that omnivorous species avoided meat during the first stages of pregnancy. This gelled with observations of morning sickness in humans, and led to a prediction that certain chemicals conducive to bacterial and parasitic pathogens would provoke aversion in humans. This in turn led to the prediction that early during pregnancy the female body enters a state of immunosuppression. These predictions, which emerged directly from evolutionary behavior theory, were confirmed in studies of human populations.
So while you're wallowing in the cool muck of your own ignorance, there are a few of us out here doing actual science. If you don't care to join us, or at least read about what we do, then it'd be better for everyone if you clapped that opinionated and woefully uninformed trap of yours shut.
You've obviously never read anything about evolutionary psychology. A good place to start is The Moral Animal by Robert Right and The Third Chimpanzee and Why Sex Is Fun by Jared Diamond. Men and women have entirely different reproductive strategies for entirely biological reasons, and this is born out in their different sexual behaviors and desires. It's you, I'm afraid, who is suffering from 'social conditioning'.
The upshot is that it is possible to replicate the object of a man's sexual desires much more easily than the object of a woman's sexual desires, since a man's sexual desires are almost entirely physical. For a replicated male robot to be uber-sexy, it would have to be smart, funny, suave, and have high social status, wealth and power. Obviously, that may all be possible one day but we can all agree that that day is much, much farther off. In the meantime, the asymmetry is going to create a real problem for women.
One caveat: this assumes that sexbots for men will become available sooner than perfect virtual reality. Once we have VR a la the Matrix, robots as sex-replacements will be moot anyway.
Since you worked on the CEV, maybe you can answer a question of mine: how come the spacecraft for manned missions to Mars and space stations like the ISS don't have designs that provide artificial gravity from spin? We seem to hear endless discussion about how to address the 'problem' of microgravity - from astronaut health to cultivating food. Yet, no spinning solutions. How come?
Saturn V would have been closer, at 118,000kg. Too bad NASA lost the plans for it...
HEY! Put a warning on that accursed, godforsaken, nightmare-causing site in your sig, you bastard, you almost got me fired!
The truly asinine thing here is that the moronic executives at Best Buy don't recognize fantastic free advertising when they see it.
It looks like you missed my point about Western-culture and geek myopia. The whole point is that this is not about us. It's about THEM. The internet is NOT important - AT ALL - if you do not have clean water to drink or food to eat.
I'm merely a hobbyist geek. But I AM a professional sustainable economic development consult who has spent twenty years living and working in developing countries. In my opinion, the OIRP is not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it is not the ideal use of resources either. At best, it is an important part of the total socioeconomic development package that must be deployed in order to alleviate the plight of penury and destitution that is the lot of hundreds of millions of children living in developing countries around the world. Are there more important individual components within that package? Yes. Access to potable water is more important than access to information. Access to food is more important (although as many posters have pointed out, it is not the biggest problem). Access to electricity is more important. Access to transportation is more important. And, of course, security and health are more important. But does that mean that access to information is unimportant? Of course not.
It may be that the hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of man-years put into the development of this project could not possibly have been better spent address one of the more critical issues I just mentioned. I honestly don't know. What I do know is that the always-hyperbolic nature of the discussion on slashdot shows that the vast majority of readers are not well enough informed about issues of international development to legitimately engage in reasonable and nuanced debate on the subject.
If ever there was a perfect example of useless electrosmog, that sentence is it.
"It had terrific graphics and sound for the price"
"its relatively low cost gave good bang for the buck"
"affordable machines that could do everything quite well"
Had you actually read my post, you would have realized - thanks to not one, not two, but three mentions of C64 value-for-money - that by 'computer' I very obviously meant 'home computer'.
If you're clinically retarded or have some other legitimate excuse for being an idiot, then please accept my apologies.
I think you're right, for a combination of reasons:
1. The platform was fixed for many years, so it had a uniform, enduring identity like a console rather than an ephemeral one like a modern PC.
2. As a computer, the c64 platform had more power and flexibility than a mere game console, and that gave it an Alladin's Lamp quality of magic and mystery that can only come from being able to crawl under the hood and goof around with things.
3. It was the right thing at the right place at the right time, like Star Wars. The C64 wasn't the very first computer, but when launched it was probably the best. It had terrific graphics and sound for the price, and the games produced on it did tend to outshine those of its contemporaries.
4. Its power and versatility combined with its relatively low cost gave good bang for the buck, and therefore made it a widespread phenomena - unlike the Amiga and other technically superior systems of the era.
5. Lastly, it - more than any other computer at the time - gave us a glimpse of the future. Smart kids using C64s just knew that the future would be filled with affordable machines that could do everything quite well - games, graphics, sound, applications and more. The game consoles didn't do that, nor did the other computers in 1982 which had word processors and spreadsheet apps but scarcely had graphics or sound to speak of. The C64 had it all, and, even though we were little kids, millions of us instinctively knew that it was a portent of the future.
My vote goes for the C64 Last Ninja soundtrack. Absolutely awesome.
I think your choice of wording here is poor. If you had used the terms 'pragmatic' and 'scientifically productive' your argument might have stood on firm ground. But to claim that putting human beings on another planet is not 'motivating' or 'visionary' enough is simply asinine. When people look back on the 20th Century, the top of the list of 'visionary' accomplishments is, invariably, NASA putting men on the moon.
As for the argument from pragmatism, I'll simply refer you to the writings of Carl Sagan, who made an extraordinarily eloquent and compelling case for the functional utility of investing in voyages of discovery that push the boundaries of mankind's influence in the universe. And lastly, I'll just remind you and everyone else reading this that the cost of a Mars mission - current estimates put it at $50 to $100 billion - is relatively modest within the context of the annual budget of the United States Federal Government. Spread over 20 years, that sum is very modest indeed.
Yahoo either doesn't filter spam in general as well as Google - meaning it doesn't apply spam reporting to all accounts - or it doesn't build a personal filter based on individual users' spam reporting. Or both. Maybe someone on /. actually knows, but my guess is that Google DOES do the latter - build a personal filter based on each users' spam reporting. It wouldn't be terribly difficult, and I can see it vastly improving performance above generic filtering alone.