seem to recall something about a revolution consisting of a bunch of rag-tag farmers defeating the largest military superpower in the world about 230 years ago...
To prevail, those "ragtag farmers" depended on French aid, Prussian mercenaries, and dirty tricks like burning down the houses of anyone who wouldn't sign up to their rebellion (much of English-speaking Canada is descended from Tories who had to flee the aggression of the revolutionaries). Do you really want to bring foreign players onto US soil and start a civil war against your neighbors just for some illusory "freedom"?
Tesla is a publicly-owned company. Couldn't the shareholders bring a suit against the company's directors for basically giving asssets away for free? The claim "I did it to create an ecosystem that might bring profit in the future" might not go over in court.
go tell that to all those terrorist cells and the vietcong
You mean those groups who caused as much woe for the ordinary population around them as for the supposedly oppressive states they were fighting?
If a rebellion were to break out in the United States against the government, those taking up arms would almost certainly be a minority of the population. The majority of people would be content to accept the state for what it is and try to avoid any of the conflict. We saw that in the American Revolution when those who wanted to stay peaceful and remain part of England had their houses burned down and were driven off to Canada or other British colonies by the "freedom-loving" revolutionaries. We've seen that in states like Syria where only minority of local radicals and foreign adventurers have battled against Assad while the majority of people have just wanted to avoid any of the fighting and go on with their lives.
So great, your right to bear arms not only allows you to wage a futile struggle against a much better-equipped state, it allows you to bring hell and destruction to your neighbors until you are finally put down.
but it's pretty douchey for you to go to Finland, get your advanced degree, then go back to your home country and leave the Finnish taxpayers holding the bill for it all.
How presumptuous of you. I didn't "go back to my home country", and after graduation I became a Finnish taxpayer and some 33% of my salary now goes to the Finnish state.
As for foreign students who do go back to their home country, which seems to be most of them, it is recognized that tuition fees will eventually have to be enacted for the most popular fields (English-language degree programmes), but for other fields, providing education to foreigners is seen as a way for Finland to project soft power.
No, we don't. This discovery deals with peoples living in the area over eight millennia before the Phoenicians are attested and founded their colonies in Spain and Carthage.
I am not surprised to hear such a move being made in Gauteng, one of the country's wealthiest states and fairly decently managed by South African standards. However, South Africa is a country of enormous contrasts, and other parts of the country have abysmal schooling -- before whizbang technological solutions, simply improving teacher qualifications and cutting down on absenteeism would be necessary.
Any discussion of this disease tends to come up with a few posts along the lines of "my back pains are long-term Lyme disease!". This claim has gained wide exposure of late by being in some celebrities' Twitter feeds and now ever more people are jumping on the bandwagon. Let's nip that in the bud right now. Most medical authorities believe this is not a thing, and the "patient advocate" organizations trying to claim it is sound as kooky as the "anti-vaccine crowd" and often downright scary.
If I had cited the book in question as fact, I would have said "Colonists went to Mars in 2026 and had problems with regolith", not mentioned that one creative personality made it a plot point as part of a popular-science presentation. As the other poster responding to you pointed out, fiction can be illustrative of scientific concepts even if the particular story is fiction. I should think that obvious. Well, perhaps you are autistic and that is unfair of me.
An interest in science-fiction is one of the distinguishing features of the nerd, you know, the demographic that Slashdot traditionally targets. If you are uncomfortable with science fiction, you might want to find another news site.
I brought up the work of fiction because 1) it comes from a canon of science-fiction classics that many Slashdotters are likely to have already read, and 2) it is a work of hard science-fiction and uses a fictional story to explore various scientific and technological challenges to colonizing Mars that Robinson had researched for years before the book's publication. Is not one of the attractions of the genre that it allows one to consider science in an entertaining way?
More like the fiction was based on science and provides an entertaining way of getting up to speed with some the possible complications of human settlement of the Red Planet.
A while ago, NASA needed a pen that could write in space. They paid millions of dollars to develop a pen that could write in zero gravity and all conditions of space. The Russians used a pencil.
This is an urban myth and has been thoroughly debunked. Sad to see it being thrown forth on Slashot.
Why not just find a big enough cave or a system of caves which all you would need to do is seal the entrance with a steel door so the cave can be pressurized and oxygen to be flooded in.
In his trilogy beginning with Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson had the colonists struggling with the infiltration of ultrafine particles of dust even in sealed plastic habitats. The Martian regolith may be harmful to human lungs. The same fear is held about lunar regolith. Initial habitats will have to be well-sealed from the local environment before further studies can be done.
I asked for a citation (with it being understood that I was looking for formal research on this subject), and instead you give me a rambling anecdotal account based on your experience of "yoga".
I'm so much happier now that I KNOW how to use my eyes and no longer need to constantly deteriote my eyes by using glasses. Side benefit/of learning to use your body properly, it's free!
Could you please provide a citation that human beings can "learn" to use their eyes to correct for flaws like myopia? I'm very interested, as before I had only heard of the Bates method, which has been shown in a number of studies for decades now to not work.
Even if Bruce Lee had more practical strength, he practiced his art full-time to reach what he was. Again, you don't seem to appreciate the value of a technology that would allow people to gain strength or agility without spending the valuable time doing so.
Who knows how it would work in real life, but in Stephenson's novel, the strength provided by this technology was as great -- or even greater than -- a professional bodybuilder. Sure, humans can exercise, but do you expect them to exercise full-time, giving up on all their other work and interests?
When humans do work, humans get paid. When a robot does work, the owner of the robot gets paid. In our present economy, who is in a better position to buy a robot costing tens of thousands of dollars, an ordinary worker or a corporation? The fear is that this will increase the wealth gap significantly. The transition to a robot workforce replacing a human one would thus require a massive restructuring of the economy, either such things as a larger welfare state to support the unemployed, or a transition to an entirely different kind of economy altogether.
Yes, I am aware that the ease of constructing robots will increase over time and the costs may go down, but that may play out at a longer timescale than the appearance of mass unemployment.
There's got to be some way to integrate technology with existing human body parts so that the enhancements don't require hacking off a limb one was born with. Whatever happened to Neal Stephenson's vision in The Diamond Age of crawling robotic bugs exerting muscle fibers directly, so that you would gain enormous strength without even having to exercise? Keeping one's own arm but enhanced is definitely preferable to a foreign combination of metal and plastic being grafted on, at least for contemporary humans.
It's certainly the best way to learn certain obscure languages. As a linguist working with several minority languages of Russia and languages of Central Asia, I am acquainted with hobbyists who took up an interest in one or another of these, and none was able to reach real proficiency without going through a university course in it at some point. Speaking a language to a degree sufficient for employment requires more than just buying a Teach Yourself book (which doesn't even exist for the world's smaller languages) or chatting on Skype with an untrained native speaker. It requires guidance from a trained instructor, and access to a wide array of publications (which usually aren't online and aren't even in English but in Russia or another scholarly lingua franca you must learn first) which give training both in grammar and in pragmatics/cultural background, and some sort of certification of skills.
Universities are ideal places for teaching the languages useful to the areal studies needs of a country's military or government. Even the US military's own language school (Defense Language Institute, where I learned Chinese many years ago) came to be structured according to a quasi-university model.
Humanities departments are being slashed left and right at lower-ranking universities for budgetary reasons. It's getting to the point where a rigorous education in the humanities is becoming limited to universities with very large endowments, and it is increasingly popular for these universities to admit students regardless of their financial background, offering many of them full scholarships.
Furthermore, I did my undergraduate studies in a field of the humanities at a US university and left with under US$50,000 of debt, as did those classmates I've talked with about it, and I daresay your figure of $150k+ is not at all typical. When it comes to graduate education, I left to Finland where universities do not charge fees (all university education is free), but friends in the US who chose the same academic course reported all or the vast majority of their fees being covered by acceptance of teaching duties or grants.
As for the job outlook after graduation, I'm convinced that a humanities degree is no liability provided one is prepared to start one's own business in something or freelance. I turned my studies in obscure languages into a freelance translation career that is giving me a decent middle class income. Those stereotypical "useless degrees in art history" haven't hindered friends of mine -- in my city at the moment, the cultural scene is booming and graduates in an art field can easily find a job, even if it is a conventional 9-5 administrative position instead of something daringly creative.
In other news, who cares? When was the last time something important was done as a result of studying the humanities?
Constantly. During the Soviet era, scholars studying the minority peoples of Russia were a key part of US military readiness, espionage and political negotiations. Indiana University at Bloomington in particular was commissioned for a number of projects by the Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, and three-letter agencies. After the invasion of Afghanistan, people who had studied Dari and Pashto were in high demand for dealing with locals -- of course one can debate the wisdom of that particular invasion, but when a truly necessary military mission rolls around, it would be nice to have qualified personnel for it. In Finland, I've seen great demand for locals with skills in Somali (and, before that, Vietnamese) to deal with the arrival of refugees.
Then again students can't challenge tenured professors without risking their future careers
Tenured faculty shouldn't even be teaching, inasmuch as one of the keys to getting tenure is a strong list of publications, showing that it is better to have these particular scholars concentrating on research.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. Let's hear it for usurpation of power by a wreckless armed majority!
To prevail, those "ragtag farmers" depended on French aid, Prussian mercenaries, and dirty tricks like burning down the houses of anyone who wouldn't sign up to their rebellion (much of English-speaking Canada is descended from Tories who had to flee the aggression of the revolutionaries). Do you really want to bring foreign players onto US soil and start a civil war against your neighbors just for some illusory "freedom"?
Tesla is a publicly-owned company. Couldn't the shareholders bring a suit against the company's directors for basically giving asssets away for free? The claim "I did it to create an ecosystem that might bring profit in the future" might not go over in court.
You mean those groups who caused as much woe for the ordinary population around them as for the supposedly oppressive states they were fighting?
If a rebellion were to break out in the United States against the government, those taking up arms would almost certainly be a minority of the population. The majority of people would be content to accept the state for what it is and try to avoid any of the conflict. We saw that in the American Revolution when those who wanted to stay peaceful and remain part of England had their houses burned down and were driven off to Canada or other British colonies by the "freedom-loving" revolutionaries. We've seen that in states like Syria where only minority of local radicals and foreign adventurers have battled against Assad while the majority of people have just wanted to avoid any of the fighting and go on with their lives.
So great, your right to bear arms not only allows you to wage a futile struggle against a much better-equipped state, it allows you to bring hell and destruction to your neighbors until you are finally put down.
Wide gun ownership in Virgina didn't stop the Virginia Tech massacre, the sort of violence where a gun owner cracks that Perens is warning against.
How presumptuous of you. I didn't "go back to my home country", and after graduation I became a Finnish taxpayer and some 33% of my salary now goes to the Finnish state.
As for foreign students who do go back to their home country, which seems to be most of them, it is recognized that tuition fees will eventually have to be enacted for the most popular fields (English-language degree programmes), but for other fields, providing education to foreigners is seen as a way for Finland to project soft power.
No, we don't. This discovery deals with peoples living in the area over eight millennia before the Phoenicians are attested and founded their colonies in Spain and Carthage.
I am not surprised to hear such a move being made in Gauteng, one of the country's wealthiest states and fairly decently managed by South African standards. However, South Africa is a country of enormous contrasts, and other parts of the country have abysmal schooling -- before whizbang technological solutions, simply improving teacher qualifications and cutting down on absenteeism would be necessary.
Any discussion of this disease tends to come up with a few posts along the lines of "my back pains are long-term Lyme disease!". This claim has gained wide exposure of late by being in some celebrities' Twitter feeds and now ever more people are jumping on the bandwagon. Let's nip that in the bud right now. Most medical authorities believe this is not a thing, and the "patient advocate" organizations trying to claim it is sound as kooky as the "anti-vaccine crowd" and often downright scary.
If I had cited the book in question as fact, I would have said "Colonists went to Mars in 2026 and had problems with regolith", not mentioned that one creative personality made it a plot point as part of a popular-science presentation. As the other poster responding to you pointed out, fiction can be illustrative of scientific concepts even if the particular story is fiction. I should think that obvious. Well, perhaps you are autistic and that is unfair of me.
An interest in science-fiction is one of the distinguishing features of the nerd, you know, the demographic that Slashdot traditionally targets. If you are uncomfortable with science fiction, you might want to find another news site.
This article notes that scientists are worried about the high content of perchlorate and silicates in Mars regolith.
I brought up the work of fiction because 1) it comes from a canon of science-fiction classics that many Slashdotters are likely to have already read, and 2) it is a work of hard science-fiction and uses a fictional story to explore various scientific and technological challenges to colonizing Mars that Robinson had researched for years before the book's publication. Is not one of the attractions of the genre that it allows one to consider science in an entertaining way?
More like the fiction was based on science and provides an entertaining way of getting up to speed with some the possible complications of human settlement of the Red Planet.
This is an urban myth and has been thoroughly debunked. Sad to see it being thrown forth on Slashot.
In his trilogy beginning with Red Mars , Kim Stanley Robinson had the colonists struggling with the infiltration of ultrafine particles of dust even in sealed plastic habitats. The Martian regolith may be harmful to human lungs. The same fear is held about lunar regolith. Initial habitats will have to be well-sealed from the local environment before further studies can be done.
I asked for a citation (with it being understood that I was looking for formal research on this subject), and instead you give me a rambling anecdotal account based on your experience of "yoga".
Could you please provide a citation that human beings can "learn" to use their eyes to correct for flaws like myopia? I'm very interested, as before I had only heard of the Bates method, which has been shown in a number of studies for decades now to not work.
Even if Bruce Lee had more practical strength, he practiced his art full-time to reach what he was. Again, you don't seem to appreciate the value of a technology that would allow people to gain strength or agility without spending the valuable time doing so.
Who knows how it would work in real life, but in Stephenson's novel, the strength provided by this technology was as great -- or even greater than -- a professional bodybuilder. Sure, humans can exercise, but do you expect them to exercise full-time, giving up on all their other work and interests?
When humans do work, humans get paid. When a robot does work, the owner of the robot gets paid. In our present economy, who is in a better position to buy a robot costing tens of thousands of dollars, an ordinary worker or a corporation? The fear is that this will increase the wealth gap significantly. The transition to a robot workforce replacing a human one would thus require a massive restructuring of the economy, either such things as a larger welfare state to support the unemployed, or a transition to an entirely different kind of economy altogether.
Yes, I am aware that the ease of constructing robots will increase over time and the costs may go down, but that may play out at a longer timescale than the appearance of mass unemployment.
There's got to be some way to integrate technology with existing human body parts so that the enhancements don't require hacking off a limb one was born with. Whatever happened to Neal Stephenson's vision in The Diamond Age of crawling robotic bugs exerting muscle fibers directly, so that you would gain enormous strength without even having to exercise? Keeping one's own arm but enhanced is definitely preferable to a foreign combination of metal and plastic being grafted on, at least for contemporary humans.
It's certainly the best way to learn certain obscure languages. As a linguist working with several minority languages of Russia and languages of Central Asia, I am acquainted with hobbyists who took up an interest in one or another of these, and none was able to reach real proficiency without going through a university course in it at some point. Speaking a language to a degree sufficient for employment requires more than just buying a Teach Yourself book (which doesn't even exist for the world's smaller languages) or chatting on Skype with an untrained native speaker. It requires guidance from a trained instructor, and access to a wide array of publications (which usually aren't online and aren't even in English but in Russia or another scholarly lingua franca you must learn first) which give training both in grammar and in pragmatics/cultural background, and some sort of certification of skills.
Universities are ideal places for teaching the languages useful to the areal studies needs of a country's military or government. Even the US military's own language school (Defense Language Institute, where I learned Chinese many years ago) came to be structured according to a quasi-university model.
Humanities departments are being slashed left and right at lower-ranking universities for budgetary reasons. It's getting to the point where a rigorous education in the humanities is becoming limited to universities with very large endowments, and it is increasingly popular for these universities to admit students regardless of their financial background, offering many of them full scholarships.
Furthermore, I did my undergraduate studies in a field of the humanities at a US university and left with under US$50,000 of debt, as did those classmates I've talked with about it, and I daresay your figure of $150k+ is not at all typical. When it comes to graduate education, I left to Finland where universities do not charge fees (all university education is free), but friends in the US who chose the same academic course reported all or the vast majority of their fees being covered by acceptance of teaching duties or grants.
As for the job outlook after graduation, I'm convinced that a humanities degree is no liability provided one is prepared to start one's own business in something or freelance. I turned my studies in obscure languages into a freelance translation career that is giving me a decent middle class income. Those stereotypical "useless degrees in art history" haven't hindered friends of mine -- in my city at the moment, the cultural scene is booming and graduates in an art field can easily find a job, even if it is a conventional 9-5 administrative position instead of something daringly creative.
Constantly. During the Soviet era, scholars studying the minority peoples of Russia were a key part of US military readiness, espionage and political negotiations. Indiana University at Bloomington in particular was commissioned for a number of projects by the Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, and three-letter agencies. After the invasion of Afghanistan, people who had studied Dari and Pashto were in high demand for dealing with locals -- of course one can debate the wisdom of that particular invasion, but when a truly necessary military mission rolls around, it would be nice to have qualified personnel for it. In Finland, I've seen great demand for locals with skills in Somali (and, before that, Vietnamese) to deal with the arrival of refugees.
Tenured faculty shouldn't even be teaching, inasmuch as one of the keys to getting tenure is a strong list of publications, showing that it is better to have these particular scholars concentrating on research.