For example, the Mount St. Helens volcano released energy in just one day (18 May 1980) equivalent to 400 million tons of TNT - about 20,000 Hiroshima bombs.
Although I think your criticism of the parent is probably correct, this isn't a very helpful comparison. It's also true that a barrel (42 gallons) of oil contains more energy than a ton of TNT, and a ton of coal contains around 7 times as much. (see this table). A ton of TNT makes a lot bigger hole in the ground, though. What needs to be considered here is not just energy content, but rate. How fast was the energy liberated? Mount Saint Helens was not equivalent in explosive power to 20,000 Hiroshimas, so that bit of trivia is a little misleading.
So companies should invest gobs and gobs of money in R&D when the only thing preventing their having nothing to show for it is the trustworthiness and/or fear of reprisal of every individual employee with damaging knowledge?
This also ignores the fact that many companies derive income from licensing their technologies.
The same way you patent anything else, and for the same reasons. If I am some company, like Google, and I pay people money to spend time thinking up algorithms, it's only fair that I get to use them exclusively for a while. I paid for them, after all. Otherwise, there's no motivation outside of the goodness of my heart for me to keep mathematicians on my payroll.
Anyway, just why, besides what appears to be sincere but baseless moral indignation, shouldn't people be able to hold patents on mathematical expressions? (Please remember, patents aren't forever.)
Also, what's the real difference between holding a patent on performing a chemical reaction in a particular way to increase yields and holding a patent on an algorithm to make web searches provide better results? Is chemistry somehow less real or less true just because it isn't purely intellectual? It seems to me that chemistry is as "owned in common" as philosophy or mathematics. Are you opposed to patents altogether?
Hmm, what caused the Columbia disaster, pieces of foam?
By this, I think the submitter is insinuating that on another occasion a potential problem which appeared minor turned into a disaster, so certainly the manufacturer is underestimating the risks now. But when I put it like that, it's pretty obvious that the submitter is an idiot.
Yes, they are related in the same way that apples and oranges are related because they are both fruit.
Could you please explain to me the (non-superficial) connection between privacy rights and capital punishment? That is, how the fact that Texas executes a lot of people makes them more likely to not honor privacy rights?
First, why do you assume that short-term military spending won't help people in the future? It's not at all obvious that having a powerful, technologically advanced military prevents us from helping people in the future. I would hope that the reverse is true, in fact.
Second, do you think there's a compelling reason to believe that in the absence of military research, people would stop killing one another? Isn't it true that (at least in theory) having better, more accurate weapons means that we kill *fewer* people?
Re:Education required for designing these plants?
on
How Motherboards Are Made
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I would add one discpline no one's mentioned: Industrial engineering.
A prof from a pretty highly ranked department in my field (chemical engineering) once told a friend and me that we were better off at a state school as undergraduates. Top research schools are more likely to allow TAs to teach courses so that their professors can be off doing what brings in the grant money. I've since heard others say the same thing, and I know that at my very poorly ranked (as in, not even in the top 50) state uni, TAs never taught lecture courses.
So, I'm honestly not certain what the extra $$$ gets for you, at least in engineering. It's probably somewhat easier to get into good grad schools (which does make all the difference in the world), but even that effect is not especially pronounced. Two people in my graduating class went directly into MIT's PhD program. Probably the main things are networking (both with profs and other students), ego, and atmosphere.
The stories are stupid. What no one EVER comments on is the research itself, only that it is obviously wrong because M$ funded it. (Of course, that's really just icing on the cake. Any research favoring M$ is automatically wrong, we all know.)
Also, what no one ever mentions when research favors OSS is ideological bias. What's especially interesting about the second thing is that it should be obvious that it exists, because we are neck deep in it here.
In a sense, it is amazing. It seems like behaviors like these should be "easy" because we've had the tools to investigate macroscopic properties of fluids for a really long time.
But think of it this way. Your task is to understand the physics of one ping-pong ball verses the physics of many interacting ping-pong balls. Which do you think will be simpler?
I had hopes that the average slashdotter was different.
This is definitely a trollish thing to say, but why? Consider what the majority of stories are about. The average/.er is probably involved in some kind of IT work requiring certification but not a degree of any kind. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. It's just not the most likely description of someone who has a genuine interest in mathematics.
Which raises the question; why do stem cell researchers get the hatred of the religious fundamentalists but IVF clinics do not?
Ignorance. And I don't say that in an insulting way. I don't consider myself a "religious fundamentalist," but I understand that it's a matter of degree and most/.ers would disagree with me about my self-assessment after a conversation covering the pertient issues. Anyway..
Most Christians (like most people generally) aren't in a position to really understand how IVF works. And even when they are, they mostly aren't accustomed to thinking through the moral implications as Christians.
Having said that, opposition to IVF is growing among Christians, you just have to have your ear to the rail to know about it. It isn't widespread enough to make the national news, yet.
Re:Testing - The Anti Quality Process
on
QA != Testing
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· Score: 1
Wow, I might enshrine this one in a text file as a great, real-life example of a red herring.
But the solution is not to prevent progress by placing arbitrary, political and religiously motivated limits on scientific progress.
You can call it whatever ugly names you want. It's always possible for someone to say that your ideas about what is and is not morally permissible are "arbitrary" by simply being a nihilist. But let's hope that this fact doesn't give carte blanche to "scientific progress."
I'd like to resist mentioning Mengele, but the case in point is simply too apt.
Actually thats only in your mind. Creationism has no bearing in anyones mind except the fundementalists and the scientists.
Nice selective editing to undermine what I was saying. The question I was referring to, and indeed that I made explicit, is "Where did we come from?"
No it doesn't.
And etc. You realize that what you say doesn't begin to address what I said about myths, don't you? Not surprising, since you clipped a crucial element out of your first quote.
predictabel
I'm usually not a grammar Nazi, and maybe English isn't your first language. But the word you are searching for is "predictive," not "predictable." I mention it because I think your word choice here probably indicates something about your general level of experience in this discussion. People who've bothered to educate themselves get the "vocabulary words" right.
Anyway, in your final paragraph you once again demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of what I wrote. And I know it's not because I wasn't clear, because other people "got" it. Hint: I wasn't advocating creationism or attacking evolution as science.
Second, I don't have much time to respond right now, because I'm just home for lunch. I think the most important thing you wrote was:
Only to non-biologists. It's actually the exact opposite of a myth....
I don't think that's true. I want to say up front that I haven't read the book, so possibly the quote is out of context, but Dawkins, the popular science writer, has stated that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. There's nothing obviously wrong with tying one's philosophy to the best science. But I think that quote demonstrates that for at least a few scientists, evolutionary biology is more than just a useful tool.
Thats trying to cats creationists as "defenders of the faith" while everybody else is athiests who despise god.
Not my intention. Just an observation about how most people (creationist and atheist alike) respond when the basic assumptions they use to interpret their world are questioned.
Huh? Does the idea of a flat earth threaten to unravel astronomy and planetology? Does the idea of alchemy threaten to unravel chemisty?
Those analogies don't address what I was talking about, really. The ideas Creationism deals with are a great deal more important in nearly everyone's minds than whether mercury can be transmuted into gold. Darwinism is a scientific theory, but it addresses a question of great sigificance to how we view the world and live our lives - where we came from. As a result, I suspect that even in the minds of most scientists, it's taken on the status of a myth. And I'm not using the word myth as a synonym for something false. In the sense I use it, there can be true myths. A myth is just a story that encapsulates some ideas that we identify with.
So, with that in mind, what creationism threatens is not the scientific theory of Darwinism, but the myth of Darwinism.
Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
Be that as it may, I'm not a geologist, and I don't know any geologists personally. I'm betting that fewer than 1% of/.ers are geologists. Very few./ers rely on first-hand scientific knowledge to know that creationism is false.
What they do know is that they've thrown their hat in the ring with a certain myth, and that creationism is a competing myth. Their myth, the story they've identified with, is the framework through which everything passes. If it turns out to be wrong, everything they know is wrong. So, even if I am pretty convinced that creationism, even taken very generally, is wrong (say, because I have it on reliable authority that it's wrong), it's reasurring to throw a few jibes, because on some level, cutting it down makes me more right.
What you call natural, I call childish. I think if the "Athiests" and "critial thinkers" were as sophisticated as you suggest, they wouldn't feel the need to ridicule. Most of the time, insults come from fear or ignorance.
Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world. That's not a comfortable feeling. We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other. Frankly, 99% of the/. community lacks the scientific background to really understand and refute the claims of Creationists.
I think that's a better explanation of the insults than any supposed smartness.
How about a standard keyboard and mouse interface for gaming consoles? That's about the only thing that keeps Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo from having me as a customer. I play computer games, and I like the idea of spending a couple hundred bucks on a console instead of several times that on a computer, but I hate game controllers.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, the Mount St. Helens volcano released energy in just one day (18 May 1980) equivalent to 400 million tons of TNT - about 20,000 Hiroshima bombs.
Although I think your criticism of the parent is probably correct, this isn't a very helpful comparison. It's also true that a barrel (42 gallons) of oil contains more energy than a ton of TNT, and a ton of coal contains around 7 times as much. (see this table). A ton of TNT makes a lot bigger hole in the ground, though. What needs to be considered here is not just energy content, but rate. How fast was the energy liberated? Mount Saint Helens was not equivalent in explosive power to 20,000 Hiroshimas, so that bit of trivia is a little misleading.
So companies should invest gobs and gobs of money in R&D when the only thing preventing their having nothing to show for it is the trustworthiness and/or fear of reprisal of every individual employee with damaging knowledge?
This also ignores the fact that many companies derive income from licensing their technologies.
How can you patent a mathematical expression?
The same way you patent anything else, and for the same reasons. If I am some company, like Google, and I pay people money to spend time thinking up algorithms, it's only fair that I get to use them exclusively for a while. I paid for them, after all. Otherwise, there's no motivation outside of the goodness of my heart for me to keep mathematicians on my payroll.
Anyway, just why, besides what appears to be sincere but baseless moral indignation, shouldn't people be able to hold patents on mathematical expressions? (Please remember, patents aren't forever.)
Also, what's the real difference between holding a patent on performing a chemical reaction in a particular way to increase yields and holding a patent on an algorithm to make web searches provide better results? Is chemistry somehow less real or less true just because it isn't purely intellectual? It seems to me that chemistry is as "owned in common" as philosophy or mathematics. Are you opposed to patents altogether?
Wow.
Hmm, what caused the Columbia disaster, pieces of foam?
By this, I think the submitter is insinuating that on another occasion a potential problem which appeared minor turned into a disaster, so certainly the manufacturer is underestimating the risks now. But when I put it like that, it's pretty obvious that the submitter is an idiot.
I did an internship at Pantex, which is a nuclear weapons facility. It's all clear as day and can be zoomed to the maximum extent, which surprises me.
Yes, they are related in the same way that apples and oranges are related because they are both fruit.
Could you please explain to me the (non-superficial) connection between privacy rights and capital punishment? That is, how the fact that Texas executes a lot of people makes them more likely to not honor privacy rights?
Because those two things have a lot to do with one another. Uh huh.
There are at least two false dilemmas, here.
First, why do you assume that short-term military spending won't help people in the future? It's not at all obvious that having a powerful, technologically advanced military prevents us from helping people in the future. I would hope that the reverse is true, in fact.
Second, do you think there's a compelling reason to believe that in the absence of military research, people would stop killing one another? Isn't it true that (at least in theory) having better, more accurate weapons means that we kill *fewer* people?
I would add one discpline no one's mentioned: Industrial engineering.
A prof from a pretty highly ranked department in my field (chemical engineering) once told a friend and me that we were better off at a state school as undergraduates. Top research schools are more likely to allow TAs to teach courses so that their professors can be off doing what brings in the grant money. I've since heard others say the same thing, and I know that at my very poorly ranked (as in, not even in the top 50) state uni, TAs never taught lecture courses.
So, I'm honestly not certain what the extra $$$ gets for you, at least in engineering. It's probably somewhat easier to get into good grad schools (which does make all the difference in the world), but even that effect is not especially pronounced. Two people in my graduating class went directly into MIT's PhD program. Probably the main things are networking (both with profs and other students), ego, and atmosphere.
The stories are stupid. What no one EVER comments on is the research itself, only that it is obviously wrong because M$ funded it. (Of course, that's really just icing on the cake. Any research favoring M$ is automatically wrong, we all know.)
Also, what no one ever mentions when research favors OSS is ideological bias. What's especially interesting about the second thing is that it should be obvious that it exists, because we are neck deep in it here.
In a sense, it is amazing. It seems like behaviors like these should be "easy" because we've had the tools to investigate macroscopic properties of fluids for a really long time.
But think of it this way. Your task is to understand the physics of one ping-pong ball verses the physics of many interacting ping-pong balls. Which do you think will be simpler?
I had hopes that the average slashdotter was different.
/.er is probably involved in some kind of IT work requiring certification but not a degree of any kind. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. It's just not the most likely description of someone who has a genuine interest in mathematics.
This is definitely a trollish thing to say, but why? Consider what the majority of stories are about. The average
Which raises the question; why do stem cell researchers get the hatred of the religious fundamentalists but IVF clinics do not?
/.ers would disagree with me about my self-assessment after a conversation covering the pertient issues. Anyway..
Ignorance. And I don't say that in an insulting way. I don't consider myself a "religious fundamentalist," but I understand that it's a matter of degree and most
Most Christians (like most people generally) aren't in a position to really understand how IVF works. And even when they are, they mostly aren't accustomed to thinking through the moral implications as Christians.
Having said that, opposition to IVF is growing among Christians, you just have to have your ear to the rail to know about it. It isn't widespread enough to make the national news, yet.
Wow, I might enshrine this one in a text file as a great, real-life example of a red herring.
But the solution is not to prevent progress by placing arbitrary, political and religiously motivated limits on scientific progress.
You can call it whatever ugly names you want. It's always possible for someone to say that your ideas about what is and is not morally permissible are "arbitrary" by simply being a nihilist. But let's hope that this fact doesn't give carte blanche to "scientific progress."
I'd like to resist mentioning Mengele, but the case in point is simply too apt.
And cue the other multitude of *anonymous* ignorant people to once again misidentify opposition to stem cell research with opposition to science.
Actually thats only in your mind. Creationism has no bearing in anyones mind except the fundementalists and the scientists.
Nice selective editing to undermine what I was saying. The question I was referring to, and indeed that I made explicit, is "Where did we come from?"
No it doesn't.
And etc. You realize that what you say doesn't begin to address what I said about myths, don't you? Not surprising, since you clipped a crucial element out of your first quote.
predictabel
I'm usually not a grammar Nazi, and maybe English isn't your first language. But the word you are searching for is "predictive," not "predictable." I mention it because I think your word choice here probably indicates something about your general level of experience in this discussion. People who've bothered to educate themselves get the "vocabulary words" right.
Anyway, in your final paragraph you once again demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of what I wrote. And I know it's not because I wasn't clear, because other people "got" it. Hint: I wasn't advocating creationism or attacking evolution as science.
First, thanks for the serious response.
Second, I don't have much time to respond right now, because I'm just home for lunch. I think the most important thing you wrote was:
Only to non-biologists. It's actually the exact opposite of a myth....
I don't think that's true. I want to say up front that I haven't read the book, so possibly the quote is out of context, but Dawkins, the popular science writer, has stated that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. There's nothing obviously wrong with tying one's philosophy to the best science. But I think that quote demonstrates that for at least a few scientists, evolutionary biology is more than just a useful tool.
Thats trying to cats creationists as "defenders of the faith" while everybody else is athiests who despise god.
Not my intention. Just an observation about how most people (creationist and atheist alike) respond when the basic assumptions they use to interpret their world are questioned.
Huh? Does the idea of a flat earth threaten to unravel astronomy and planetology? Does the idea of alchemy threaten to unravel chemisty?
/.ers are geologists. Very few ./ers rely on first-hand scientific knowledge to know that creationism is false.
Those analogies don't address what I was talking about, really. The ideas Creationism deals with are a great deal more important in nearly everyone's minds than whether mercury can be transmuted into gold. Darwinism is a scientific theory, but it addresses a question of great sigificance to how we view the world and live our lives - where we came from. As a result, I suspect that even in the minds of most scientists, it's taken on the status of a myth. And I'm not using the word myth as a synonym for something false. In the sense I use it, there can be true myths. A myth is just a story that encapsulates some ideas that we identify with.
So, with that in mind, what creationism threatens is not the scientific theory of Darwinism, but the myth of Darwinism.
Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
Be that as it may, I'm not a geologist, and I don't know any geologists personally. I'm betting that fewer than 1% of
What they do know is that they've thrown their hat in the ring with a certain myth, and that creationism is a competing myth. Their myth, the story they've identified with, is the framework through which everything passes. If it turns out to be wrong, everything they know is wrong. So, even if I am pretty convinced that creationism, even taken very generally, is wrong (say, because I have it on reliable authority that it's wrong), it's reasurring to throw a few jibes, because on some level, cutting it down makes me more right.
What you call natural, I call childish. I think if the "Athiests" and "critial thinkers" were as sophisticated as you suggest, they wouldn't feel the need to ridicule. Most of the time, insults come from fear or ignorance.
/. community lacks the scientific background to really understand and refute the claims of Creationists.
Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world. That's not a comfortable feeling. We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other. Frankly, 99% of the
I think that's a better explanation of the insults than any supposed smartness.
How about a standard keyboard and mouse interface for gaming consoles? That's about the only thing that keeps Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo from having me as a customer. I play computer games, and I like the idea of spending a couple hundred bucks on a console instead of several times that on a computer, but I hate game controllers.
Hm. The computer I'm running now has (only) Win Xp on a primary slave and boots just fine.