Yet, strangely, people aren't dying in the streets from starvation and lack of tyres in France. If the "socialist minded French way" means a reasonably functional country, with happy people enjoying a decently high standard of living while working 3-hour days, why the f*** would I take advice from someone who lives in a country where typical workers grind through 40-hour workweeks (if they are lucky not to need 80 at minimum wage) and still have sucky lives?
I see you didn't bother to read the article summary. When Skype connects users to *actual land-line phones,* they are using the same limited publicly-subsidized infrastructure as every other telco. This is the rationale for regulation, not Skype's internet-only telephony practices.
One big obstacle is, as with SETI, not merely gathering super-sensitive data, but processing all the data to identify E.T.'s air traffic control in trillions of other (natural) radio sources. Just because you're sensitive enough to tell whether a signal is present or absent *when you know exactly what to look for* doesn't mean you'll be able to identify previously unknown signals.
If you're so proudly anti-intellectual that a page long essay is too "ivy league and butlers" for you, why did you even bother with an interview discussing the intersection of paleontology, science, philosophy, and religion? Go back to your football and chips (not that there's anything wrong with those --- the PhDs and pastors I know love them too), and leave scientific/philosophical discussions to folks who don't regard intellectual laziness as a virtue (Harvard degree and butler not required, just a bit of self-motivated interest to grapple with complex issues).
Yes, that's how question-and-answer works in elementary school level discourse. However, you seem to be unaware that larger, deeper scientific/philosophical discourse is often carried out in much longer and more sophisticated literary forms than question-and-answer soundbite quips. People write whole books (or lifetime long series of books) to describe their positions, and answer many questions (I saw far more than one addressed; look harder) within an integrated narrative. Dr. Bakker apparently over-estimated the literacy of the Slashdot population, by not dumbing down his presentation to look like a TV interview.
I'm afraid you misunderstand what I'm trying to say; I apologize for my lack of clarity in trying to make a perhaps overly-subtle point.
I don't mean to be "suggesting that science is really religion, or at the least that religion is a form of science." Rather, that a society/researcher who uses religious terminology for the boundary of scientific knowledge is not necessarily a bad scientist because of that. They are a bad scientist if they refuse to explore and move that boundary with better theories and experimental/observational information. This is, historically, often the case --- religious dogmatism and superstition stands opposed to scientific advancement. But not always: in other eras, scientific inquiry has flourished side-by-side with theological conceptions that encourage (rather than discourage) pressing the boundary between known and unknown ("god did it"). This isn't to justify the cruelty carried out by religious institutions, or to indicate that progress might not have been faster without them.
Exactly, it's a marker for the boundary where you know nothing. Knowing the limits of your knowledge is perhaps the most important part of scientific knowledge: it tells you where to look next. "Gods" isn't necessarily the best way to describe that limit --- in fact, with the modern position of those limits, it's downright absurd to propose that the next link in the chain of causation is protons-quarks-superstrings-tiny-beardly-men. But, for "scientists" in much earlier ages, I wouldn't consider it so silly to describe known data --- "the sun moves across the sky each day" --- within their available frame of understanding --- "some cloud-guy hauls it across in a cart, because that's how stuff gets hauled around every day." This is bad for science if that explanation is used to cut off further inquiry (which it often was). On the other hand, perhaps this piques the interest of those who want to "better understand the gods" to perform increasingly precise measurements of astronomical movements, and carefully scrutinize the results, leading to discovering the next level of more explanatory, scientifically compelling, descriptions.
They made humanity's first ventures into space. They also came up with Lysenkoism, which is great progress if producing mass famine was your goal. It's a mixed bag, just like the religious societies that previously generated both great advances and cruel ideologically-blinded idiocy.
Yes, "gods" isn't an "explanation," only a naming for the boundary of knowledge. It's not about explaining an "unknown with another unknown," but rather explaining a known that lies at the boundary of understanding (e.g. observed movements of the sun across the sky) with an unknown ("a god pulls the sun across the sky"). With more scientific work, the boundary is refined and pushed back ("the earth follows a gravitational geodesic through the spacetime warped by the sun's mass") --- but there is still some boundary of "unknown" at the edge of the "known," no matter what name is given (what causes gravity? gravitons? what causes gravitons? etc.), which is totally ad-hoc (but may eventually become testable with the development of better tests). In ancient societies, "gods" was a perfectly fine name for this boundary of understanding --- the "gods" only overstayed their welcome when they become a barrier to further exploration rather than an inspiration for seeking deeper knowledge.
I think you have a bit more googling left to do yourself on "scientific method," especially the changes in philosophical underpinnings occurring over the past century or so (shifting away from an absolutist view of "axioms and proven facts" to "best explanations for known observations, allowing room for modification as better data is available"). Using "gods" to denote "causes effecting the world whose basis is beyond the scope of present understanding" is in itself no less scientific than giving those causes names like "gravity" or "Higgs boson." Now, the "gods" explanation rapidly becomes non-scientific once better causal mechanisms are available (better either in the sense of more fully/accurately predicting observable phenomena, or at least in the "Occam's Razor" sense of having less unnecessary "baggage" that comes with the typical "gods" explanation). But having a "place holder" term for the ontological boundaries of the known scientific chain of causality is not itself un-scientific; only a refusal to work to push those boundaries farther back is.
So, you characterize mcgrew as "religious right" based on a post where he claims "the US is in no way a Christain nation" and that what gays do "is none of my business"? I'd love to live in your country --- our religious right is far worse here, and makes mcgrew look like a godless commie.
Yep, then made it far enough past fifth grade to know that "proper sentences" --- though certainly having their place --- are not the end-all be-all of written communication.
Maybe you need to up your anti-ADHD meds. To those of us with attention spans greater than a squirrel and reading comprehension skills beyond the fourth grade level, Dr. Bakker's prose is quite comprehensible (whether we agree or not).
P.S.: Here's a pop quiz (multiple choice) on history during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, to check whether you are competent to comment:
1) Afghanistan shared a border with: a) the USSR b) the USA
2) The Soviet-aligned Afghan Government pushed through major reforms including: a) equal rights to women, universal education and land reform b) restoration of Islamic fundamentalist rule
3) President Carter, in 1979, signed a directive to fund: a) the Mujahideen, a proto-Taliban terrorist fundamentalist guerilla resistance force b) food aid for Afghan children displaced by wartime violence
If you answered (a) in all cases, you were correct. If you answered (b), you need to stop fellating Joe McCarthy's corpse.
Afghanistan has been a permanent clusterf**k throughout modern history, and the Soviets certainly didn't help the situation. Their response in the Soviet-Afghan war destroyed the country they came to "help," leaving behind only bombed-out villages and landmine fields. However, it's hardly an example that contradicts my claim of American aggression vs. Soviet internal focus (at least "internal" within a limited sphere of influence, which quite reasonably includes *border countries* with Soviet-aligned governments): when America is buying missile launchers for terrorists on your doorstep, I wouldn't consider it "trying to conquer the world" to respond with military force at the behest of allied governments.
You mean the war summarized in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan ?
The one where the democratically elected Afghani government called for help from the Soviet Union *after* the US had covertly poured billions of dollars into training terrorist jihadi groups --- excuse me, "democracy loving freedom fighters" --- to rampage around the country? Yeah, US funding/training for those great up-and-coming Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters like Osama Bin Laden really worked out great for the Free World --- Go Team America!
You've obviously been doing too much of something that's not helpful for reading comprehension. I suggest checking in to a rehab center before you kill your remaining brain cell.
Actually, that was never a "prime Soviet ambition," except in the minds of the McCarthy-era US propaganda machine. Communist doctrine held by the Soviet leadership was focused on dealing with all the internal difficulties of managing their own economy. Yes, they hoped that workers in other countries would see their shining example and start their own revolutions (and they did provide friendly support for that). America, however, was the country exporting weapons and training dictators' death squads to brutally suppress left-leaning democratic movements across the globe.
Wolfram has previously "jumped on-board" with comparing himself to Isaac Newton. He wrote and self-published a five-inch-thick book of pretty cellular-automata doodles and ego-stroking sophistry that was supposed to revolutionize all of science --- about a decade ago. Haven't heard much about it since (at least the book was cheap per kilogram, and good for a few laughs). He's a sharp mathematician/programmer, but I wouldn't put too much stock in his grandiose predictions.
There are non-gravitational forces that are important on the galaxy formation scale --- specifically, collisions/drag from interstellar gas (on the micro scale, due to electromagnetic intermolecular interactions) is necessary to collapse a big gob of mass into a galactic disk. If all particles were like dark matter, only weakly or non-interacting except through gravity, then galactic disks would never form (you'd just have big, amorphous volumes of particles whizzing past each other).
I think what happened was the 1950's picture of dinosaurs as stupid, slow, lumbering reptilian oafs gave way to a modern concept of more "bird-like" dinos: agile, intelligent/wily, social pack/flock animals, that wouldn't be outmatched by poor old Cynognathus.
Uhhh...you expect grammar nazis to care about logic? Really? You must be new here.
As for TFA frankly ALL hybrids might as well be toys for the rich because if you remove all the government subsidies? The math just doesn't work. The problem is we haven't had a real breakthrough in battery tech in years and the lithium batteries just don't make economic sense. From the tests I've seen depending on where you live and whether you own a climate controlled garage (because of differences in temps affecting battery life) you are looking at 5-7 years on the battery. Now from what I read the batteries in something like the Leaf or Prius cost around $20,000 to replace yet thanks to government subsidies these cars only cost $24k-$39k depending on feature set so already you have a car that is gonna be practically worthless on the used car market (because the battery costs more than the used car is worth)
Unfortunately, you seem to be reading "studies" put out by FUD-spewing shills. Most of the "facts" in your analysis are simply incorrect.
(A) "the lithium batteries just don't make economic sense": the Prius and Honda hybrids use NiMH batteries, not Lithium tech (which is coming into use in newer vehicles, e.g. Tesla and Chevy Volt); focusing on Lithium while bashing the Prius shows your ignorance of the subject.
(B) "you are looking at 5-7 years on the battery," "practically worthless on the used car market": the Prius was introduced in Japan in 1997, and on the world market in 2000. They aren't dropping dead on the road --- real life longevity/reliability is quite high, with a decade and a half of data to back it up. Feel free to check actual used car prices to see whether a Prius is "practically worthless."
(C) "...batteries in something like the Leaf or Prius cost around $20,000 to replace yet thanks to government subsidies these cars only cost $24k-$39k": many ridiculous (and intentionally deceptive) estimates of "OMG huge gov subsidies" are floating around with no basis in fact. They are usually based on highly faulty economics, e.g. dividing (Gov. subsidy for building big new factory)/(# of batteries produced per year) to produce "scary" numbers, while ignoring that the factory will continue producing batteries for decades. Actual Prius battery replacement from Toyota is ~$4k, and might need to be done (if ever) after ~300,000 miles.
At which point, the Republican congresscritters will suddenly become quite silent on the issue, at least for a couple months to exceed the news media and public's attention span. After that, loud Republican support for whatever expanded domestic drone programs the President needs to keep us safe from terrorists and other scary brown people.
We don't need trustworthy faces for robots, because actual robots don't need faces. They'll just be useful non-anthropomorphic appliances --- the dryer that spits out clothes folded and sorted by wearer; the bed that monitors biological activity and gently sets an elderly person on their feet when they're ready to get up in the morning (with hot coffee already waiting, brewed during the earlier stages of awakening).
I think the real challenge is designing trustworthy robot "hands." No mother will hand her baby over to a set of hooked pincer claws on backwards-jointed insect limbs --- but useful robots need complex, flexible, agile physical manipulators to perform real-world tasks. So, how does one design these to give the impression of innocuous gentleness and solidity, rather than being an alien flesh-rending spider? What could lift a baby from its crib to change a diaper, or steady an elderly person moving about the house, without totally freaking out onlookers?
How much of Apple's potential target market for trendy style gadgets is old enough to have made gadget decisions 20 years ago? There's a whole generation who have only seen watches in old movies, and might be eager to jump on the "brand new fashion style" of having something big and clunky strapped to their wrist.
Yes, I know high end mechanical watches sell for crazy sums. But there's only a tiny percentage of people who buy them, and it's not Apple's target market. You don't typically see teens walking around with Patek Phillipe chronometers --- but you do see a lot of little white earbuds. The point of my post is that Apple could drive a huge number of people who *weren't* previously in the high-end watch market into spending *much more* than they ever would have considered reasonable before.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet, strangely, people aren't dying in the streets from starvation and lack of tyres in France. If the "socialist minded French way" means a reasonably functional country, with happy people enjoying a decently high standard of living while working 3-hour days, why the f*** would I take advice from someone who lives in a country where typical workers grind through 40-hour workweeks (if they are lucky not to need 80 at minimum wage) and still have sucky lives?
I see you didn't bother to read the article summary. When Skype connects users to *actual land-line phones,* they are using the same limited publicly-subsidized infrastructure as every other telco. This is the rationale for regulation, not Skype's internet-only telephony practices.
One big obstacle is, as with SETI, not merely gathering super-sensitive data, but processing all the data to identify E.T.'s air traffic control in trillions of other (natural) radio sources. Just because you're sensitive enough to tell whether a signal is present or absent *when you know exactly what to look for* doesn't mean you'll be able to identify previously unknown signals.
If you're so proudly anti-intellectual that a page long essay is too "ivy league and butlers" for you, why did you even bother with an interview discussing the intersection of paleontology, science, philosophy, and religion? Go back to your football and chips (not that there's anything wrong with those --- the PhDs and pastors I know love them too), and leave scientific/philosophical discussions to folks who don't regard intellectual laziness as a virtue (Harvard degree and butler not required, just a bit of self-motivated interest to grapple with complex issues).
Yes, that's how question-and-answer works in elementary school level discourse. However, you seem to be unaware that larger, deeper scientific/philosophical discourse is often carried out in much longer and more sophisticated literary forms than question-and-answer soundbite quips. People write whole books (or lifetime long series of books) to describe their positions, and answer many questions (I saw far more than one addressed; look harder) within an integrated narrative. Dr. Bakker apparently over-estimated the literacy of the Slashdot population, by not dumbing down his presentation to look like a TV interview.
I'm afraid you misunderstand what I'm trying to say; I apologize for my lack of clarity in trying to make a perhaps overly-subtle point.
I don't mean to be "suggesting that science is really religion, or at the least that religion is a form of science." Rather, that a society/researcher who uses religious terminology for the boundary of scientific knowledge is not necessarily a bad scientist because of that. They are a bad scientist if they refuse to explore and move that boundary with better theories and experimental/observational information. This is, historically, often the case --- religious dogmatism and superstition stands opposed to scientific advancement. But not always: in other eras, scientific inquiry has flourished side-by-side with theological conceptions that encourage (rather than discourage) pressing the boundary between known and unknown ("god did it"). This isn't to justify the cruelty carried out by religious institutions, or to indicate that progress might not have been faster without them.
Exactly, it's a marker for the boundary where you know nothing. Knowing the limits of your knowledge is perhaps the most important part of scientific knowledge: it tells you where to look next. "Gods" isn't necessarily the best way to describe that limit --- in fact, with the modern position of those limits, it's downright absurd to propose that the next link in the chain of causation is protons-quarks-superstrings-tiny-beardly-men. But, for "scientists" in much earlier ages, I wouldn't consider it so silly to describe known data --- "the sun moves across the sky each day" --- within their available frame of understanding --- "some cloud-guy hauls it across in a cart, because that's how stuff gets hauled around every day." This is bad for science if that explanation is used to cut off further inquiry (which it often was). On the other hand, perhaps this piques the interest of those who want to "better understand the gods" to perform increasingly precise measurements of astronomical movements, and carefully scrutinize the results, leading to discovering the next level of more explanatory, scientifically compelling, descriptions.
They made humanity's first ventures into space. They also came up with Lysenkoism, which is great progress if producing mass famine was your goal. It's a mixed bag, just like the religious societies that previously generated both great advances and cruel ideologically-blinded idiocy.
Yes, "gods" isn't an "explanation," only a naming for the boundary of knowledge. It's not about explaining an "unknown with another unknown," but rather explaining a known that lies at the boundary of understanding (e.g. observed movements of the sun across the sky) with an unknown ("a god pulls the sun across the sky"). With more scientific work, the boundary is refined and pushed back ("the earth follows a gravitational geodesic through the spacetime warped by the sun's mass") --- but there is still some boundary of "unknown" at the edge of the "known," no matter what name is given (what causes gravity? gravitons? what causes gravitons? etc.), which is totally ad-hoc (but may eventually become testable with the development of better tests). In ancient societies, "gods" was a perfectly fine name for this boundary of understanding --- the "gods" only overstayed their welcome when they become a barrier to further exploration rather than an inspiration for seeking deeper knowledge.
I think you have a bit more googling left to do yourself on "scientific method," especially the changes in philosophical underpinnings occurring over the past century or so (shifting away from an absolutist view of "axioms and proven facts" to "best explanations for known observations, allowing room for modification as better data is available"). Using "gods" to denote "causes effecting the world whose basis is beyond the scope of present understanding" is in itself no less scientific than giving those causes names like "gravity" or "Higgs boson." Now, the "gods" explanation rapidly becomes non-scientific once better causal mechanisms are available (better either in the sense of more fully/accurately predicting observable phenomena, or at least in the "Occam's Razor" sense of having less unnecessary "baggage" that comes with the typical "gods" explanation). But having a "place holder" term for the ontological boundaries of the known scientific chain of causality is not itself un-scientific; only a refusal to work to push those boundaries farther back is.
So, you characterize mcgrew as "religious right" based on a post where he claims "the US is in no way a Christain nation" and that what gays do "is none of my business"? I'd love to live in your country --- our religious right is far worse here, and makes mcgrew look like a godless commie.
Yep, then made it far enough past fifth grade to know that "proper sentences" --- though certainly having their place --- are not the end-all be-all of written communication.
Maybe you need to up your anti-ADHD meds. To those of us with attention spans greater than a squirrel and reading comprehension skills beyond the fourth grade level, Dr. Bakker's prose is quite comprehensible (whether we agree or not).
P.S.: Here's a pop quiz (multiple choice) on history during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, to check whether you are competent to comment:
1) Afghanistan shared a border with:
a) the USSR
b) the USA
2) The Soviet-aligned Afghan Government pushed through major reforms including:
a) equal rights to women, universal education and land reform
b) restoration of Islamic fundamentalist rule
3) President Carter, in 1979, signed a directive to fund:
a) the Mujahideen, a proto-Taliban terrorist fundamentalist guerilla resistance force
b) food aid for Afghan children displaced by wartime violence
If you answered (a) in all cases, you were correct. If you answered (b), you need to stop fellating Joe McCarthy's corpse.
Afghanistan has been a permanent clusterf**k throughout modern history, and the Soviets certainly didn't help the situation. Their response in the Soviet-Afghan war destroyed the country they came to "help," leaving behind only bombed-out villages and landmine fields. However, it's hardly an example that contradicts my claim of American aggression vs. Soviet internal focus (at least "internal" within a limited sphere of influence, which quite reasonably includes *border countries* with Soviet-aligned governments): when America is buying missile launchers for terrorists on your doorstep, I wouldn't consider it "trying to conquer the world" to respond with military force at the behest of allied governments.
You mean the war summarized in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan ?
The one where the democratically elected Afghani government called for help from the Soviet Union *after* the US had covertly poured billions of dollars into training terrorist jihadi groups --- excuse me, "democracy loving freedom fighters" --- to rampage around the country? Yeah, US funding/training for those great up-and-coming Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters like Osama Bin Laden really worked out great for the Free World --- Go Team America!
You've obviously been doing too much of something that's not helpful for reading comprehension. I suggest checking in to a rehab center before you kill your remaining brain cell.
Actually, that was never a "prime Soviet ambition," except in the minds of the McCarthy-era US propaganda machine. Communist doctrine held by the Soviet leadership was focused on dealing with all the internal difficulties of managing their own economy. Yes, they hoped that workers in other countries would see their shining example and start their own revolutions (and they did provide friendly support for that). America, however, was the country exporting weapons and training dictators' death squads to brutally suppress left-leaning democratic movements across the globe.
Wolfram has previously "jumped on-board" with comparing himself to Isaac Newton. He wrote and self-published a five-inch-thick book of pretty cellular-automata doodles and ego-stroking sophistry that was supposed to revolutionize all of science --- about a decade ago. Haven't heard much about it since (at least the book was cheap per kilogram, and good for a few laughs). He's a sharp mathematician/programmer, but I wouldn't put too much stock in his grandiose predictions.
There are non-gravitational forces that are important on the galaxy formation scale --- specifically, collisions/drag from interstellar gas (on the micro scale, due to electromagnetic intermolecular interactions) is necessary to collapse a big gob of mass into a galactic disk. If all particles were like dark matter, only weakly or non-interacting except through gravity, then galactic disks would never form (you'd just have big, amorphous volumes of particles whizzing past each other).
I think what happened was the 1950's picture of dinosaurs as stupid, slow, lumbering reptilian oafs gave way to a modern concept of more "bird-like" dinos: agile, intelligent/wily, social pack/flock animals, that wouldn't be outmatched by poor old Cynognathus.
Uhhh...you expect grammar nazis to care about logic? Really? You must be new here.
As for TFA frankly ALL hybrids might as well be toys for the rich because if you remove all the government subsidies? The math just doesn't work. The problem is we haven't had a real breakthrough in battery tech in years and the lithium batteries just don't make economic sense. From the tests I've seen depending on where you live and whether you own a climate controlled garage (because of differences in temps affecting battery life) you are looking at 5-7 years on the battery. Now from what I read the batteries in something like the Leaf or Prius cost around $20,000 to replace yet thanks to government subsidies these cars only cost $24k-$39k depending on feature set so already you have a car that is gonna be practically worthless on the used car market (because the battery costs more than the used car is worth)
Unfortunately, you seem to be reading "studies" put out by FUD-spewing shills. Most of the "facts" in your analysis are simply incorrect.
(A) "the lithium batteries just don't make economic sense": the Prius and Honda hybrids use NiMH batteries, not Lithium tech (which is coming into use in newer vehicles, e.g. Tesla and Chevy Volt); focusing on Lithium while bashing the Prius shows your ignorance of the subject.
(B) "you are looking at 5-7 years on the battery," "practically worthless on the used car market": the Prius was introduced in Japan in 1997, and on the world market in 2000. They aren't dropping dead on the road --- real life longevity/reliability is quite high, with a decade and a half of data to back it up. Feel free to check actual used car prices to see whether a Prius is "practically worthless."
(C) "...batteries in something like the Leaf or Prius cost around $20,000 to replace yet thanks to government subsidies these cars only cost $24k-$39k": many ridiculous (and intentionally deceptive) estimates of "OMG huge gov subsidies" are floating around with no basis in fact. They are usually based on highly faulty economics, e.g. dividing (Gov. subsidy for building big new factory)/(# of batteries produced per year) to produce "scary" numbers, while ignoring that the factory will continue producing batteries for decades. Actual Prius battery replacement from Toyota is ~$4k, and might need to be done (if ever) after ~300,000 miles.
At which point, the Republican congresscritters will suddenly become quite silent on the issue, at least for a couple months to exceed the news media and public's attention span. After that, loud Republican support for whatever expanded domestic drone programs the President needs to keep us safe from terrorists and other scary brown people.
We don't need trustworthy faces for robots, because actual robots don't need faces. They'll just be useful non-anthropomorphic appliances --- the dryer that spits out clothes folded and sorted by wearer; the bed that monitors biological activity and gently sets an elderly person on their feet when they're ready to get up in the morning (with hot coffee already waiting, brewed during the earlier stages of awakening).
I think the real challenge is designing trustworthy robot "hands." No mother will hand her baby over to a set of hooked pincer claws on backwards-jointed insect limbs --- but useful robots need complex, flexible, agile physical manipulators to perform real-world tasks. So, how does one design these to give the impression of innocuous gentleness and solidity, rather than being an alien flesh-rending spider? What could lift a baby from its crib to change a diaper, or steady an elderly person moving about the house, without totally freaking out onlookers?
How much of Apple's potential target market for trendy style gadgets is old enough to have made gadget decisions 20 years ago? There's a whole generation who have only seen watches in old movies, and might be eager to jump on the "brand new fashion style" of having something big and clunky strapped to their wrist.
Yes, I know high end mechanical watches sell for crazy sums. But there's only a tiny percentage of people who buy them, and it's not Apple's target market. You don't typically see teens walking around with Patek Phillipe chronometers --- but you do see a lot of little white earbuds. The point of my post is that Apple could drive a huge number of people who *weren't* previously in the high-end watch market into spending *much more* than they ever would have considered reasonable before.