The FAQ on their site leads me to believe that what is being attempted is not much different from spell and grammar check along with parsing for some teen/street vernacular. If this is the case you are simply going to exclude those with a poor command of English and those who lack the sort of education you get at Ivy League / Oxbridge type institutions.
More importantly if the stupidity is algorithmically determined then it can be algorithmically fixed. Thus DumbCheck(Tm) will change LOL to "Your remarks are risible in the extreme".
As all readers of this site know stupidity is not the problem. It is trolls, flames and those spoiling for a fight on whatever grounds. "Attitude Filter" seems a much worthier challenge.
complex question - no simple answer - It depends on the offense / the jurisdiction of the parties etc etc - some legislation EU "hate crimes" have wider nets - the worrying trend is to limit speech and to recognise national laws as having Universal jurisdiction - this is a matter widely dealt with in many articles on the net.
I'm sure some material scientist can make a plastic type wine bottle with a screw cap that keeps wine as well as glass and cork. The missing element will be romance. The pop of a cork, the red scarecey visible through green is as much a pleasure as ethylic induced silliness.
I'm afraid the finest lcd screen lacks the rustle of pages, the dog eared charm of an old favorite or the faint thumb marks that remind us of a favorite passage.
I'm not replacing my old Philip K.Dick - Even geeks are sentimental at times
New scientist may be sensationalist and green/left (not my politics) but without it ther would be no press listened to by liberals that was even faintly scientifically literate.
For all it's faults New Scientist is generally honest and this is very important with things like nuclear power and global warming where policy decisions are not simply right or wrong but engender significant costs whatever the decision. Without this honesty a lot of humanities educated readers who would never pick up Nature or the Scientific American would be far less well informed.
I am in a similar but more humble boat than you - I have even less physics skills to come to grips with the issue. I wish someone would try and explain an anomlay in what after all has been cornerstone in our understanding of physics.
The other comments seem to be following the path of reality TV descending into content free pap designed to make the author and reader feel good about being ignorant. A great pity as Slash dot used to be about "Stuff that matter"
PS for gods sake someone explain to this Moron what the html command is to format the above hyperlink
UK nuclear is the most Expensive - because of dody
on
The Law of Disassembly
·
· Score: 1
Add subsisdized public infrastructure (Rail, Road and Ports for megatonnes of coal) Perhaps Military intervention in the Middle East for Oil and Gas. Forget Externals like Acid Rain, sulphur Nox and CO2
Then Coal power looks sooo sexy.
If you want cheap power then build a coal power station with a straight through stack. Buy the coal from a third world country I mean hello there are millions of yellow, brown and black miners a few less no one will miss them. Strip mine it and don't back fill, when those pesky little third worlders get a bit richer they can water ski in them.
Try some real cost comparisons that include externals. Entertain some charitable thoughts about those in the thirld world who might just want a light bulb. Worry a bit about carbon output and then Nuclear does not look so bad. Of course as it's not in your back yard !
The readers of Slashdot seem to be constantly amazed by the fears of others.
It might be an idea to check out the work of Paul Slovic
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/IIFET/2000/papers/slov ic.pdf
He is a psychologist who specializes in the perception of risk, unlike the touchy feely, "so it's your mum's fault" kind of psychologist he attempts a pretty objective psychometric methodology even if he does tend to throw in the odd bit of social constructivism.
There are many reasons why people view a risk as being unacceptable but always among them are Visibility Immediacy and Distance.
So a smokey chimney stack far away is much better than a nuclear power station down the road. You can see smoke, cough straight away when you inhale it and some red neck yokels in mines and power stations get to die not you. On the other hand those nasty nano/nuclear thingammies creep up on you invisibly, kill you slowly and nuclear = mega so it works from a long long way.
Evidence as it applies to alternative technology hardly cracks a mention among factors that make something risky.
Readers should understand that approximately 20% of the Western world is functionally illiterate that means "Danger 2000 volts" is a problem, ask them what a standard deviation is and 95% would think it's something that happens in a gay bar. A rational assessment of risk is simply beyond them.
My view is if you explain Nanotechnology to people you will simply make them more frightened.
Is there an answer - I don't think on this Earth - It's another reason for a Moon/Mars Colony
Rarely have I seen such a tendentious ill informed article as that about MyDoom.
The article seeks to infer that Linux users and those who support open source are vandals. The words may not be there but the sloppy journalism certainly gives this impression.
My company uses Linux - we paid for installation but because of the generous idealism of the contributors to open source we did not pay for the software. The reason we chose Linux and would have willingly paid for it, is because it is extraordinarily reliable and it performs better than any of the proprietary alternatives.
I resent your implication that I or the vast majority of other users of Linux and Open Source endorse or would even contemplate the attack on SCO.
I for one do not believe that all code should be open source and I have argued this matter with many who disagree. I can tell you that not one was an "Internet Zealot" they were rational polite well informed individuals with a view point different from my own. Not one of them would contemplate acts of vandalism.
Next time you decide to write about this subject find a journalist who knows how to excercise measure and common sense. To imply that millions of individuals, tens of thousands of companies all of whom support the use of Linux and open source are even tenously associated with zealotry and vandalism is grossly irresponsible and absurd.
I constantly see three assertions about Open Source Code and Linux
It's anti profit It will lead to Job Losses in the USA GPL undermines our system of Intelectual property rights.
The bizarre thing is that I have never seen any hard evidence for the first two and I have never read a reasoned legal opinion that supports the third assertion. Ironically many of the readers of slashdot agree with some of these assertions despite supporting Open Source.
ANTI PROFIT For OS to be anti-profit it would mean that total capital employed resulted in a lower return as a result of OS. Well I have never seen such a study. Common sense may indicate that the employment of capital may move out of Redmond into garages dotted over the US and the world but that does not mean returns will be lower. The guys in the garages will make a living and aggregated may provide a higher return on capital than a single corporation developing proprietary software.
JOB LOSSES IN THE US The argument is absurd. Any US corporation can outsource it's production and this applies to software. Windows 200X could be written in Bombay. And if cost benefit criteria dictate it then you can be sure that it will be. On the other hand it is far easier to argue that while a large corporation has the resources to contemplate switching production sites "The guys in garages" for all sorts of non financially accountable reasons may choose to stay at home. Hell they may want to stay close to Mom !
UNDERMINING PROPERTY RIGHTS The notion that the GPL threatens intellectual property rights is the strangest of all notions. The GPL is based upon law. Law that protects intellectual property and allows it's owner to use or dispose of it as he sees fit. This includes vesting it in the public domain and donating it to charity. The position that you should be forbidden to do this is in my view a fundamental attack on property rights.
My own view is that OS should be viewed merely as a new business model where for example in the case of Linux, software providers and installers are forced to consider customer satisfaction to remain competitive not merely a discount on a canned package. In my own experience you don't pay less for a linux installation on a server as opposed to any proprietary OS, what you get is something similarly priced but you know it works. As for the old chestnut about Open source providing no economic incentive for innovation this equally fallacious. Any hardware innovator with a new architecture will have a tremendous incentive to see the open source code is tweaked to optimise his machine. Again this is merely a change of business model.
It may gall those socialist readers of slashdot but there is a strong case to be put that Open source is "The American Way". The Sherman Act was introduced for trust busting but a vibrant software industry has come up with away to challenge oligopoly with no government intervention. If you want to defeat the arguments of SCO better tell your congressmen that Open Source leads to jobs,profits,innovation and the protection of property rights then he just might listen.
'm no engineer but it seems that going to the moon is really not much of a problem, after all Armstrong was there. It looks to someone uninformed like me that Mars represents a small increment in difficulty and that it could probably be done with the same tech that got us to the moon.
I'm an unashamed space nut but I admit that there is simply no consensus that we ought to go there particularly if it costs what ever sum of money the public considers significant, by that I mean a sum likely to have a major impact on other government programs- just check the posts on slashdot if you diagree.
Presently business sees no economic return in going to the moon or beyond - no point in ranting that they are short sighted and wrong the fact remains they don't see it so we can't look to them as an alternative to government.
I,m sure you are all aware of the X-Prize http://www.xprize.org/press/what.html what is signicant about it is not just the intention - it's that the investment made by the participants bears no relation to the reward.
Historically there are many examples of government offering prizes for things they just can't justify spending the money on. It's a win win for government. If it succeeds they show foresight if it fails they spent their money on better things.
What about a government funded X-prize II - 500 million dollars for the first human spending six months on the moon. 500 million to be divided among other organisations that solved specific problems that would enable such a period on the moon.
How about the readers of slashdot design the rules. I offer my own ideas;
1. 500 m for living six months on the moon 2. 100 m for a reuseable rentry vehicle with a 10 tonne payload 3. 50 million dollars for designing and building a closed ecology weighing less than 5 tonnes that provided food and processed waste to allow a human to live for six months. 4. 10 million dollars for a rocket engine or other propulsion system that delivered weighed X tonnes requiring Y fuel giving Z thrust/specific impulse 5. 10 m illion dollars for an effective drug based therapy to cure low gravity induced decalcification 6. Once a design/build has won a prize - for space use purposes only the technology enters the public domain. 7 10 million dollars for Solar cells that weigh X that give Y watts of power that can be errected by one man. 8. etc etc etc
How about exemption from health and safety legislation so the families dying astronauts don't sue - and just like the early explorers on earth they will die. How about designing rules so that all the sciences get a slice of the pie not just engineering and materials science.
Much more fun thinking of a way to make it happen at a cost that does not offend rather than indulging in Bush Bashing - trotting out old arguments about child poverty, tech spinoff and the efficiencies of unmanned programs.
Is ther really anyone against the idea of going to the moon and beyond if it's done cheaply and without signifcantly detracting from other government programs ?
Sorry if this is a bit of topic - but sick of the old flames much prefer seeing such a well educated group of people coming up with answers.
Slashdot Mirror
The FAQ on their site leads me to believe that what is being attempted is not much different from spell and grammar check along with parsing for some teen/street vernacular. If this is the case you are simply going to exclude those with a poor command of English and those who lack the sort of education you get at Ivy League / Oxbridge type institutions. More importantly if the stupidity is algorithmically determined then it can be algorithmically fixed. Thus DumbCheck(Tm) will change LOL to "Your remarks are risible in the extreme". As all readers of this site know stupidity is not the problem. It is trolls, flames and those spoiling for a fight on whatever grounds. "Attitude Filter" seems a much worthier challenge.
complex question - no simple answer - It depends on the offense / the jurisdiction of the parties etc etc - some legislation EU "hate crimes" have wider nets - the worrying trend is to limit speech and to recognise national laws as having Universal jurisdiction - this is a matter widely dealt with in many articles on the net.
I'm sure some material scientist can make a plastic type wine bottle with a screw cap that keeps wine as well as glass and cork. The missing element will be romance. The pop of a cork, the red scarecey visible through green is as much a pleasure as ethylic induced silliness. I'm afraid the finest lcd screen lacks the rustle of pages, the dog eared charm of an old favorite or the faint thumb marks that remind us of a favorite passage. I'm not replacing my old Philip K.Dick - Even geeks are sentimental at times
New scientist may be sensationalist and green/left (not my politics) but without it ther would be no press listened to by liberals that was even faintly scientifically literate. For all it's faults New Scientist is generally honest and this is very important with things like nuclear power and global warming where policy decisions are not simply right or wrong but engender significant costs whatever the decision. Without this honesty a lot of humanities educated readers who would never pick up Nature or the Scientific American would be far less well informed.
I am in a similar but more humble boat than you - I have even less physics skills to come to grips with the issue. I wish someone would try and explain an anomlay in what after all has been cornerstone in our understanding of physics. The other comments seem to be following the path of reality TV descending into content free pap designed to make the author and reader feel good about being ignorant. A great pity as Slash dot used to be about "Stuff that matter"
The old sit by the fire - the young go hunting and the middle aged hesitate As one well middle aged - I wish it were not true
Could this be another reason why bosses want to outsource US based software employees ?
Thanks - appreciated Guy
I just listened to a microbiologist on the radio who compared the 1918 strain to the present situation.
9 99 94578
He warned that a double carrier of bird flu and regular flu could incubate a mutation of a kind that no one has any immunities to.
There is some info in this New Scientist article on double infection
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
PS for gods sake someone explain to this Moron what the html command is to format the above hyperlink
Add subsisdized public infrastructure (Rail, Road and Ports for megatonnes of coal)
Perhaps Military intervention in the Middle East for Oil and Gas.
Forget Externals like Acid Rain, sulphur Nox and CO2
Then Coal power looks sooo sexy.
If you want cheap power then build a coal power station with a straight through stack. Buy the coal from a third world country I mean hello there are millions of yellow, brown and black miners a few less no one will miss them. Strip mine it and don't back fill, when those pesky little third worlders get a bit richer they can water ski in them.
Try some real cost comparisons that include externals. Entertain some charitable thoughts about those in the thirld world who might just want a light bulb. Worry a bit about carbon output and then Nuclear does not look so bad. Of course as it's not in your back yard !
The readers of Slashdot seem to be constantly amazed by the fears of others.
v ic.pdf
It might be an idea to check out the work of Paul Slovic
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/IIFET/2000/papers/slo
He is a psychologist who specializes in the perception of risk, unlike the touchy feely, "so it's your mum's fault" kind of psychologist he attempts a pretty objective psychometric methodology even if he does tend to throw in the odd bit of social constructivism.
There are many reasons why people view a risk as being unacceptable but always among them are Visibility Immediacy and Distance.
So a smokey chimney stack far away is much better than a nuclear power station down the road. You can see smoke, cough straight away when you inhale it and some red neck yokels in mines and power stations get to die not you. On the other hand those nasty nano/nuclear thingammies creep up on you invisibly, kill you slowly and nuclear = mega so it works from a long long way.
Evidence as it applies to alternative technology hardly cracks a mention among factors that make something risky.
Readers should understand that approximately 20% of the Western world is functionally illiterate that means "Danger 2000 volts" is a problem, ask them what a standard deviation is and 95% would think it's something that happens in a gay bar. A rational assessment of risk is simply beyond them.
My view is if you explain Nanotechnology to people you will simply make them more frightened.
Is there an answer - I don't think on this Earth - It's another reason for a Moon/Mars Colony
Rarely have I seen such a tendentious ill informed article as that about MyDoom.
The article seeks to infer that Linux users and those who support open source are vandals. The words may not be there but the sloppy journalism certainly gives this impression.
My company uses Linux - we paid for installation but because of the generous idealism of the contributors to open source we did not pay for the software. The reason we chose Linux and would have willingly paid for it, is because it is extraordinarily reliable and it performs better than any of the proprietary alternatives.
I resent your implication that I or the vast majority of other users of Linux and Open Source endorse or would even contemplate the attack on SCO.
I for one do not believe that all code should be open source and I have argued this matter with many who disagree. I can tell you that not one was an "Internet Zealot" they were rational polite well informed individuals with a view point different from my own. Not one of them would contemplate acts of vandalism.
Next time you decide to write about this subject find a journalist who knows how to excercise measure and common sense. To imply that millions of individuals, tens of thousands of companies all of whom support the use of Linux and open source are even tenously associated with zealotry and vandalism is grossly irresponsible and absurd.
Deborah Jin the team leader gives more of an idea of her work in this article. http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/4/7
I constantly see three assertions about Open Source Code and Linux
It's anti profit
It will lead to Job Losses in the USA
GPL undermines our system of Intelectual property rights.
The bizarre thing is that I have never seen any hard evidence for the first two and I have never read a reasoned legal opinion that supports the third assertion. Ironically many of the readers of slashdot agree with some of these assertions despite supporting Open Source.
ANTI PROFIT
For OS to be anti-profit it would mean that total capital employed resulted in a lower return as a result of OS. Well I have never seen such a study. Common sense may indicate that the employment of capital may move out of Redmond into garages dotted over the US and the world but that does not mean returns will be lower. The guys in the garages will make a living and aggregated may provide a higher return on capital than a single corporation developing proprietary software.
JOB LOSSES IN THE US
The argument is absurd. Any US corporation can outsource it's production and this applies to software. Windows 200X could be written in Bombay. And if cost benefit criteria dictate it then you can be sure that it will be. On the other hand it is far easier to argue that while a large corporation has the resources to contemplate switching production sites "The guys in garages" for all sorts of non financially accountable reasons may choose to stay at home. Hell they may want to stay close to Mom !
UNDERMINING PROPERTY RIGHTS
The notion that the GPL threatens intellectual property rights is the strangest of all notions. The GPL is based upon law. Law that protects intellectual property and allows it's owner to use or dispose of it as he sees fit. This includes vesting it in the public domain and donating it to charity. The position that you should be forbidden to do this is in my view a fundamental attack on property rights.
My own view is that OS should be viewed merely as a new business model where for example in the case of Linux, software providers and installers are forced to consider customer satisfaction to remain competitive not merely a discount on a canned package. In my own experience you don't pay less for a linux installation on a server as opposed to any proprietary OS, what you get is something similarly priced but you know it works. As for the old chestnut about Open source providing no economic incentive for innovation this equally fallacious. Any hardware innovator with a new architecture will have a tremendous incentive to see the open source code is tweaked to optimise his machine. Again this is merely a change of business model.
It may gall those socialist readers of slashdot but there is a strong case to be put that Open source is "The American Way". The Sherman Act was introduced for trust busting but a vibrant software industry has come up with away to challenge oligopoly with no government intervention. If you want to defeat the arguments of SCO better tell your congressmen that Open Source leads to jobs,profits,innovation and the protection of property rights then he just might listen.
'm no engineer but it seems that going to the moon is really not much of a problem, after all Armstrong was there. It looks to someone uninformed like me that Mars represents a small increment in difficulty and that it could probably be done with the same tech that got us to the moon.
I'm an unashamed space nut but I admit that there is simply no consensus that we ought to go there particularly if it costs what ever sum of money the public considers significant, by that I mean a sum likely to have a major impact on other government programs- just check the posts on slashdot if you diagree.
Presently business sees no economic return in going to the moon or beyond - no point in ranting that they are short sighted and wrong the fact remains they don't see it so we can't look to them as an alternative to government.
I,m sure you are all aware of the X-Prize http://www.xprize.org/press/what.html what is signicant about it is not just the intention - it's that the investment made by the participants bears no relation to the reward.
Historically there are many examples of government offering prizes for things they just can't justify spending the money on. It's a win win for government. If it succeeds they show foresight if it fails they spent their money on better things.
What about a government funded X-prize II - 500 million dollars for the first human spending six months on the moon. 500 million to be divided among other organisations that solved specific problems that would enable such a period on the moon.
How about the readers of slashdot design the rules. I offer my own ideas;
1. 500 m for living six months on the moon
2. 100 m for a reuseable rentry vehicle with a 10 tonne payload
3. 50 million dollars for designing and building a closed ecology weighing less than 5 tonnes that provided food and processed waste to allow a human to live for six months.
4. 10 million dollars for a rocket engine or other propulsion system that delivered weighed X tonnes requiring Y fuel giving Z thrust/specific impulse
5. 10 m illion dollars for an effective drug based therapy to cure low gravity induced decalcification
6. Once a design/build has won a prize - for space use purposes only the technology enters the public domain.
7 10 million dollars for Solar cells that weigh X that give Y watts of power that can be errected by one man.
8. etc etc etc
How about exemption from health and safety legislation so the families dying astronauts don't sue - and just like the early explorers on earth they will die. How about designing rules so that all the sciences get a slice of the pie not just engineering and materials science.
Much more fun thinking of a way to make it happen at a cost that does not offend rather than indulging in Bush Bashing - trotting out old arguments about child poverty, tech spinoff and the efficiencies of unmanned programs.
Is ther really anyone against the idea of going to the moon and beyond if it's done cheaply and without signifcantly detracting from other government programs ?
Sorry if this is a bit of topic - but sick of the old flames much prefer seeing such a well educated group of people coming up with answers.