I know of Colson, but only because of his life after his involvement in Watergate. He has since converted to Christianity (and become a relatively "big name"), started a prison ministry, and written several popular-level books on Christian philosophy and living.
Yes, they probably did what they did with the notion of damaging people's credibility in mind. But I don't think that politicians are sadists, and they aren't interested in political gain purely for the sake of political gain. They have pet issues that they think they are right about, and they are working towards making their opinion into policy. Why? For the public good? Probably in part.
The nice thing about hydrogen is that you can make it from many different energy-producing processes and ship it fairly easily.
Actually, one of the big obstacles to using hydrogen as a fuel is that it ISN'T very easily transportable. As a gas, you have to employ very high pressures that involve expensive tanks. Compress it all the way to a liquid and you've burned up so much energy that its no longer attractive as a more efficient source. Chemical storage (metal hydrides, etc) is being researched, but AFAIK, it isn't ready to be main-streamed.
We *should* be looking into efficient industrial-sized water electrolysis, or maybe some kind of thermolytic or photolytic process.
That's a great plan, except that the energy to do those things has to come from somewhere. It can't be hydrogen, because it would take more hydrogen than you are making to do it.
The wind, wave, and solar power installations that some think will save the world can easily drive an electrolytic converter, for example, and the only byproduct is oxygen.
Let's be clear about what we're talking about. I'm not sure how much hydrogen you are planning on making (total replacement of hydrocarbon fuels?) but you will have to build enough solar/wind/wave/hydro/whatever installations to nearly match the amount of energy being produced by hydrocarbons for whatever application you are interested in. The "nearly" shows up because hydrogen power IS generally more efficient than hydrocarbon based power. This is a nice theoretical solution, but practically it would be very expensive and difficult, even if it is possible.
So the air is actually *better* downwind of an electrolytic hydrogen plant (if they don't bottle all the oxygen and sell that too), and the system is closed and fully recycling, since burning the hydrogen gives you the water back.
A lot of people consider water vapor to be a green house gas.
They don't even have a reactor yet that produces net power, and they are estimating that the moon has enough helium to supply the earth with energy for a thousand years? What could they possibly be basing this estimate on.
"Gee Bob, some journalist wants to know how much energy is on the moon. Should I assume that the reactor we may or may not be able to come up with will be 99% efficient or 5% efficient?"
"I'd go with 99%. We're running low on grant money."
You are wrong, and it can be easily demonstrated: There are a lot of people who aren't religious, and claim that they aren't because "the evidence" makes religious ideas unbelievable for them. Religion for them has been refuted. Within religions, people swap one set of ideas for other slightly different sets because of whatever passes for evidence for them.
Religious ideas are frequently not subject to empirical validation, because they don't always deal primarily with empirically observable phenomena. For that reason, you will never have the sort of agreement about religious ideas that you have about so-called scientific ideas. Religious ideas are harder to get at. But that doesn't make them categorically the opposite of scientific ideas when it comes to refutability.
Leaving aside the fact that you are being way too sensitive, and that both these words have entered the every-day lexicon stripped of their religious meaning, I am very thankful (and you should be to) that Newton (and many early scientists besides) didn't share your narrow-minded ideas about how we ought to compartmentalize knowledge.
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." Isaac Newton in The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
I am totally in agreement. All ideas that don't come out fully-formed and ready to be manufactured (or at worst, ready for detailed engineering) should be kept to one's self.
You're implying that it is ok to subject a child to any social situation, regardless of its moral value, and leave it up to each child to make their own distinction on whether that situation is correct or incorrect.
No, I'm not. You are reading that in to what I said. If I understand properly, you were trying to claim that watching PBS made your kid more social because the neighbor kids that he would otherwise be hanging out with are jerks. I was just pointing out that while watching TV may result in his being more moral, it would not make him more social. In essence, I was just asking you to distinguish between morality and social skills. When I said that how he decides to respond to peer pressure to do bad stuff is a "separate issue," I was pointing out that this is fundamentally a MORAL issue, and not a social one. I wasn't trying to provide child-rearing advice.
I think we aren't communicating well here because even in this post, you aren't really distinguishing between good social behaviors, which might be things like looking at people when they talk, not interrupting others when they are talking, not dominating a conversation, which topics are appropriate at different stages of a relationship, etc. We aren't comfortable around people who violate those rules, and we may tend to avoid them (we say they have no social skills) but we don't call them immoral. Or if we do, we don't mean it in the same sense as "Racists are immoral" or "Thieves are immoral."
I admit that not every behavior can be clearly identified as being "moral" or "social." One thing you mentioned is that you've never had to worry about whether your kid would say something inappropriate to a disabled person. My gut feeling is, staring at a disabled person is both rude (contrary to normal rules of politeness, not "social") AND immoral. So in that narrow sense, I'll have to concede to you - seeing a disabled person on TV would probably help your kid to later behave in a more socially acceptable fashion toward real life disabled people.
Watching television does not reduce the sociability of a person.
That's kindof a tricky statement.
Watching television does not reduce the sociability of a person compared to sitting in a quiet room staring at the wall. Yeah, that makes sense. There are a wide variety of activities that would make a person less social than watching TV.. you're going to have to pick one to make your point. You tried to do that by talking about the racist neighbor kids, but I think you're mistaking social skills for morality in that case.
Yeah, I might keep my kid (supposing I had one) in the house to watch Big Bird if I thought he was going to throw rocks at the Mexican kids, but I would do so in the belief that hurting people and racism is wrong, and not that he is learning greater social acumen by watching a faceless, glowing box that he can't communicate with. Clearly if he was out running with the neighbor kids he would at least learn things like which people it is socially acceptable to make fun of (What he decides to do about that is a separate issue, imo).
2) What similarities/differences do you see between our situation (type of government, technology level, awareness of, interest in, and ability to undertake the protection of our civil rights, etc) and the situations out of which the events of 1 were born?
3) How might the similarities/differences in 2 affect the likelyhood of a reoccurence of the event in 1?
I admit that I don't read a lot of history, but since 1) the only technology I can think of that is similar to this one is credit cards 2) credit cards have been around for decades 3) credit cards don't appear to have erroded our civil rights, I'm going to go with the standard "tin foil hat" response you mentioned in your post.
?? I use my PDA all the time, as do many people. I tell it when my meetings are, and it alarms a few minutes before to remind me. I put in all my phone numbers, addresses, etc, and then they are at my fingertips, wherever I go. And, no, I don't have a cell phone that I could put that stuff in. I even have a street map program that gives me directions and lets me search for addresses. Finally, I use it pretty often as a calculator. Could I carry around a "little black book," a bunch of street maps, a scientific calculator, and tie a bunch of strings around my fingers? Yeah, I guess so, and if I did, I wouldn't have any use for the PDA. But I'm pretty happy with having all that functionality in a box that's the size of a deck of cards.
And last time I checked, most people able to use a computer to post to/. had the reading comprehension of at least a 3rd grader. The quotation nowhere implies that there are only 11 stars.
What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
Your point is well taken (about gravity), and I agree with you. Even so, this view of "facts" and "empiricism" and their ability to tell us about the "real world" is in the end an assumption on your part. Where do you get it from? From the "facts?"
It turns out that a whole laundry-list of assumptions goes into "science." Things like, "The experiment we do now will work the same way later provided it is performed under the same conditions." And, "The physical world works according to some discernable rules." Someone who does not (for whatever reason) share those assumptions may very well come up with some "alternative scientific truths." And hopefully you can see that stomping your feet and insisting that "science" proves them wrong will do no good, because the disagreement is about the assumptions behind the science.
Science, as it currently is done, has not been around for "thousands of years." Try "a few hundred" at best. As for the rest of you comment, what the hell are you talking about?
Anyway, one thing of value in post-modernism (Unfortunately obscured because the flight from rationalism is a bit too extreme) is that it is, literally, post-modernism. There are a lot of good things about modernistic thinking, but there are a few that aren't so good, too, like a blind faith in Science with a capital S to tell us absolutely everything about everything.
The average CxO is a person with a great deal more expertise and wider variety of skills than the average IT person. I know a lot of IT people who never graduated from college (I mean a 4 year school), and have a very minimal set of professional skills outside of IT. Example: The CEO of ExxonMobil has a degree in engineering. That alone makes him more highly trained (formally speaking) than the bulk of people in IT. As the parent said, execs may be scratching one another's backs, but there's a reason beyond just the "good ole boy" system and nepotism that most of them are where they are.
Something I've wondered a bit about for a while:
People frequently say that black holes are infinitely dense. As a physical quantity, infinity makes no sense to me.
Are black holes genuinely considered by the experts to be actually infinitely dense, or just very, very (but finitely) dense?
Yes, but since when has reason been the hallmark of the Slashdot community? It's News for Nerds (when we're lucky). Even though most nerds pride themselves on their intelligence above all else, the smarts are frustratingly limited to technical topics in many cases. If it had been MY $2.5M, you can believe that I wouldn't say to the FBI that I forbid them to use their l337 skills because of my philosophical conviction that the government has too much ability to snoop. I think the same is probably true for most people, regardless of how loudly they whine.
Yes, you're right. That's totally the same, except for the parts with the camps, the barbed wire, the gas chambers, and the furnaces. I can see your point.
And of course you snipped the part of the post that serves as an objection to the point you are making.
"They are expressing some kind of moral indignation as though they really deserved kudos for what they did, even though it was almost entirely self-serving."
I'm not disputing that they pretty much came right out and said that they were doing it to make gamers look better.
My problem is partially that, as you pointed out, they are ostensibly doing this for press (which I think is low and not even that clever, whether they admit they are doing it for that reason or not). But my bigger problem is that when they don't get the press they want, they turn around and act as though they aren't doing it for press, and that they really are nice guys who just want to help the kids.
If you do good things for people because you love them, you won't care whether it is appreciated by other people. The amount you care is proportional to how selfish your motives were, and accordingly how uncharitible you were really being.
In a sense there is nothing wrong with Child's Play. A bunch of kids got stuff they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. Good resulted, even though good wasn't really intended. The thing that's wrong with it is that the situation was supposed to go something like this, as I understand it:
Step 1: Solicit donations to give to a children's hospital.
Step 2: Invite the press and tell them that GAMERS donated all the goods, and aren't they good people after all, etc, could you please think about it the next time you go to write an article about how they are all violent psycopaths waiting to go off.
The problem is, (and this is a detail that is so obviously true that it is subtle and we miss it) when you are doing "good deeds" to get good press, everyone realizes you are manipulating, and you don't get the good press. Heck, most people assume before they know anything that you are working some angle when you do good deeds.
So the thing that is annoying is, first of all, the whole thing is a front. Second, they don't even have the decency to shrug it off when people realize it's a front. They are expressing some kind of moral indignation as though they really deserved kudos for what they did, even though it was almost entirely self-serving.
I was impressed with Child's Play at first, but PA went too far out of their way to pat themselves and the gaming community on the back for it to last. One thing noticably missing from all of this is any description of how the toys made the kids feel. Isn't that who this was supposed to be mostly about? And now they've whined so much about how they haven't gotten enough credit for having done it.. Well, it's just a bit of a turn-off. If you are doing something for good press (or, the other great reason for charitable giving, to reduce your tax bracket so you can save money) it isn't charity any more. (Hint: The rough meaning of the word "charity" is "love." Hint, Hint: It isn't talking about self-love.)
You mean a fluffy non-technical article with unsubstantiated assumptions made the/. front page because the majority of the/. crowd sympathizes with said assumptions? Never.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I know of Colson, but only because of his life after his involvement in Watergate. He has since converted to Christianity (and become a relatively "big name"), started a prison ministry, and written several popular-level books on Christian philosophy and living.
Yes, they probably did what they did with the notion of damaging people's credibility in mind. But I don't think that politicians are sadists, and they aren't interested in political gain purely for the sake of political gain. They have pet issues that they think they are right about, and they are working towards making their opinion into policy. Why? For the public good? Probably in part.
The nice thing about hydrogen is that you can make it from many different energy-producing processes and ship it fairly easily.
Actually, one of the big obstacles to using hydrogen as a fuel is that it ISN'T very easily transportable. As a gas, you have to employ very high pressures that involve expensive tanks. Compress it all the way to a liquid and you've burned up so much energy that its no longer attractive as a more efficient source. Chemical storage (metal hydrides, etc) is being researched, but AFAIK, it isn't ready to be main-streamed.
We *should* be looking into efficient industrial-sized water electrolysis, or maybe some kind of thermolytic or photolytic process.
That's a great plan, except that the energy to do those things has to come from somewhere. It can't be hydrogen, because it would take more hydrogen than you are making to do it.
The wind, wave, and solar power installations that some think will save the world can easily drive an electrolytic converter, for example, and the only byproduct is oxygen.
Let's be clear about what we're talking about. I'm not sure how much hydrogen you are planning on making (total replacement of hydrocarbon fuels?) but you will have to build enough solar/wind/wave/hydro/whatever installations to nearly match the amount of energy being produced by hydrocarbons for whatever application you are interested in. The "nearly" shows up because hydrogen power IS generally more efficient than hydrocarbon based power. This is a nice theoretical solution, but practically it would be very expensive and difficult, even if it is possible.
So the air is actually *better* downwind of an electrolytic hydrogen plant (if they don't bottle all the oxygen and sell that too), and the system is closed and fully recycling, since burning the hydrogen gives you the water back.
A lot of people consider water vapor to be a green house gas.
They don't even have a reactor yet that produces net power, and they are estimating that the moon has enough helium to supply the earth with energy for a thousand years? What could they possibly be basing this estimate on.
"Gee Bob, some journalist wants to know how much energy is on the moon. Should I assume that the reactor we may or may not be able to come up with will be 99% efficient or 5% efficient?"
"I'd go with 99%. We're running low on grant money."
religion is about control
Prove it.
You are wrong, and it can be easily demonstrated: There are a lot of people who aren't religious, and claim that they aren't because "the evidence" makes religious ideas unbelievable for them. Religion for them has been refuted. Within religions, people swap one set of ideas for other slightly different sets because of whatever passes for evidence for them.
Religious ideas are frequently not subject to empirical validation, because they don't always deal primarily with empirically observable phenomena. For that reason, you will never have the sort of agreement about religious ideas that you have about so-called scientific ideas. Religious ideas are harder to get at. But that doesn't make them categorically the opposite of scientific ideas when it comes to refutability.
Leaving aside the fact that you are being way too sensitive, and that both these words have entered the every-day lexicon stripped of their religious meaning, I am very thankful (and you should be to) that Newton (and many early scientists besides) didn't share your narrow-minded ideas about how we ought to compartmentalize knowledge.
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." Isaac Newton in The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
I am totally in agreement. All ideas that don't come out fully-formed and ready to be manufactured (or at worst, ready for detailed engineering) should be kept to one's self.
You're implying that it is ok to subject a child to any social situation, regardless of its moral value, and leave it up to each child to make their own distinction on whether that situation is correct or incorrect.
No, I'm not. You are reading that in to what I said. If I understand properly, you were trying to claim that watching PBS made your kid more social because the neighbor kids that he would otherwise be hanging out with are jerks. I was just pointing out that while watching TV may result in his being more moral, it would not make him more social. In essence, I was just asking you to distinguish between morality and social skills. When I said that how he decides to respond to peer pressure to do bad stuff is a "separate issue," I was pointing out that this is fundamentally a MORAL issue, and not a social one. I wasn't trying to provide child-rearing advice.
I think we aren't communicating well here because even in this post, you aren't really distinguishing between good social behaviors, which might be things like looking at people when they talk, not interrupting others when they are talking, not dominating a conversation, which topics are appropriate at different stages of a relationship, etc. We aren't comfortable around people who violate those rules, and we may tend to avoid them (we say they have no social skills) but we don't call them immoral. Or if we do, we don't mean it in the same sense as "Racists are immoral" or "Thieves are immoral."
I admit that not every behavior can be clearly identified as being "moral" or "social." One thing you mentioned is that you've never had to worry about whether your kid would say something inappropriate to a disabled person. My gut feeling is, staring at a disabled person is both rude (contrary to normal rules of politeness, not "social") AND immoral. So in that narrow sense, I'll have to concede to you - seeing a disabled person on TV would probably help your kid to later behave in a more socially acceptable fashion toward real life disabled people.
Anyway, this is getting really rambly.
Watching television does not reduce the sociability of a person.
That's kindof a tricky statement.
Watching television does not reduce the sociability of a person compared to sitting in a quiet room staring at the wall. Yeah, that makes sense. There are a wide variety of activities that would make a person less social than watching TV.. you're going to have to pick one to make your point. You tried to do that by talking about the racist neighbor kids, but I think you're mistaking social skills for morality in that case.
Yeah, I might keep my kid (supposing I had one) in the house to watch Big Bird if I thought he was going to throw rocks at the Mexican kids, but I would do so in the belief that hurting people and racism is wrong, and not that he is learning greater social acumen by watching a faceless, glowing box that he can't communicate with. Clearly if he was out running with the neighbor kids he would at least learn things like which people it is socially acceptable to make fun of (What he decides to do about that is a separate issue, imo).
I'll bite.
1) Which historical events are you referring to?
2) What similarities/differences do you see between our situation (type of government, technology level, awareness of, interest in, and ability to undertake the protection of our civil rights, etc) and the situations out of which the events of 1 were born?
3) How might the similarities/differences in 2 affect the likelyhood of a reoccurence of the event in 1?
I admit that I don't read a lot of history, but since 1) the only technology I can think of that is similar to this one is credit cards 2) credit cards have been around for decades 3) credit cards don't appear to have erroded our civil rights, I'm going to go with the standard "tin foil hat" response you mentioned in your post.
?? I use my PDA all the time, as do many people. I tell it when my meetings are, and it alarms a few minutes before to remind me. I put in all my phone numbers, addresses, etc, and then they are at my fingertips, wherever I go. And, no, I don't have a cell phone that I could put that stuff in. I even have a street map program that gives me directions and lets me search for addresses. Finally, I use it pretty often as a calculator. Could I carry around a "little black book," a bunch of street maps, a scientific calculator, and tie a bunch of strings around my fingers? Yeah, I guess so, and if I did, I wouldn't have any use for the PDA. But I'm pretty happy with having all that functionality in a box that's the size of a deck of cards.
And last time I checked, most people able to use a computer to post to /. had the reading comprehension of at least a 3rd grader. The quotation nowhere implies that there are only 11 stars.
What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
Your point is well taken (about gravity), and I agree with you. Even so, this view of "facts" and "empiricism" and their ability to tell us about the "real world" is in the end an assumption on your part. Where do you get it from? From the "facts?"
It turns out that a whole laundry-list of assumptions goes into "science." Things like, "The experiment we do now will work the same way later provided it is performed under the same conditions." And, "The physical world works according to some discernable rules." Someone who does not (for whatever reason) share those assumptions may very well come up with some "alternative scientific truths." And hopefully you can see that stomping your feet and insisting that "science" proves them wrong will do no good, because the disagreement is about the assumptions behind the science.
Science, as it currently is done, has not been around for "thousands of years." Try "a few hundred" at best. As for the rest of you comment, what the hell are you talking about?
Anyway, one thing of value in post-modernism (Unfortunately obscured because the flight from rationalism is a bit too extreme) is that it is, literally, post-modernism. There are a lot of good things about modernistic thinking, but there are a few that aren't so good, too, like a blind faith in Science with a capital S to tell us absolutely everything about everything.
The average CxO is a person with a great deal more expertise and wider variety of skills than the average IT person. I know a lot of IT people who never graduated from college (I mean a 4 year school), and have a very minimal set of professional skills outside of IT. Example: The CEO of ExxonMobil has a degree in engineering. That alone makes him more highly trained (formally speaking) than the bulk of people in IT. As the parent said, execs may be scratching one another's backs, but there's a reason beyond just the "good ole boy" system and nepotism that most of them are where they are.
Something I've wondered a bit about for a while: People frequently say that black holes are infinitely dense. As a physical quantity, infinity makes no sense to me. Are black holes genuinely considered by the experts to be actually infinitely dense, or just very, very (but finitely) dense?
Yes, but since when has reason been the hallmark of the Slashdot community? It's News for Nerds (when we're lucky). Even though most nerds pride themselves on their intelligence above all else, the smarts are frustratingly limited to technical topics in many cases. If it had been MY $2.5M, you can believe that I wouldn't say to the FBI that I forbid them to use their l337 skills because of my philosophical conviction that the government has too much ability to snoop. I think the same is probably true for most people, regardless of how loudly they whine.
Yes, you're right. That's totally the same, except for the parts with the camps, the barbed wire, the gas chambers, and the furnaces. I can see your point.
Yeah, and then there is the widespread enslavement and killing of the Jews, the queers, and the dissenters...
Oh wait.
And of course you snipped the part of the post that serves as an objection to the point you are making.
"They are expressing some kind of moral indignation as though they really deserved kudos for what they did, even though it was almost entirely self-serving."
I'm not disputing that they pretty much came right out and said that they were doing it to make gamers look better.
My problem is partially that, as you pointed out, they are ostensibly doing this for press (which I think is low and not even that clever, whether they admit they are doing it for that reason or not). But my bigger problem is that when they don't get the press they want, they turn around and act as though they aren't doing it for press, and that they really are nice guys who just want to help the kids.
If you do good things for people because you love them, you won't care whether it is appreciated by other people. The amount you care is proportional to how selfish your motives were, and accordingly how uncharitible you were really being.
In a sense there is nothing wrong with Child's Play. A bunch of kids got stuff they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. Good resulted, even though good wasn't really intended. The thing that's wrong with it is that the situation was supposed to go something like this, as I understand it:
Step 1: Solicit donations to give to a children's hospital.
Step 2: Invite the press and tell them that GAMERS donated all the goods, and aren't they good people after all, etc, could you please think about it the next time you go to write an article about how they are all violent psycopaths waiting to go off.
The problem is, (and this is a detail that is so obviously true that it is subtle and we miss it) when you are doing "good deeds" to get good press, everyone realizes you are manipulating, and you don't get the good press. Heck, most people assume before they know anything that you are working some angle when you do good deeds.
So the thing that is annoying is, first of all, the whole thing is a front. Second, they don't even have the decency to shrug it off when people realize it's a front. They are expressing some kind of moral indignation as though they really deserved kudos for what they did, even though it was almost entirely self-serving.
I was impressed with Child's Play at first, but PA went too far out of their way to pat themselves and the gaming community on the back for it to last. One thing noticably missing from all of this is any description of how the toys made the kids feel. Isn't that who this was supposed to be mostly about? And now they've whined so much about how they haven't gotten enough credit for having done it.. Well, it's just a bit of a turn-off. If you are doing something for good press (or, the other great reason for charitable giving, to reduce your tax bracket so you can save money) it isn't charity any more. (Hint: The rough meaning of the word "charity" is "love." Hint, Hint: It isn't talking about self-love.)
You mean a fluffy non-technical article with unsubstantiated assumptions made the /. front page because the majority of the /. crowd sympathizes with said assumptions? Never. :)
.. is someone's half-baked undergradute essay on ethics "news for nerds?"