Because this how the Nobel Prizes operate normally. They give the prize to people who's work has stood the test of time and has proven to be correct, and useful. This is why everybody was so flabbergasted when they gave one to Obama, not only had his work not stood the test of time, he hadn't even done any of it yet. He was a glaring exception to the way the prize is normally awarded.
I'm at work so I'm not going to take the time to dig up sources, but I remember reading about studies where they found that most humans are happiest when they feel like they've accomplished something. Contrary to popular belief not everybody wants to just goof off all the time. The whole world wouldn't grind to a halt if you were able to have a decent life without working.
I think instead what would happen is we would see a huge resurgence in art and creativity. How many people do you know that have ideas for books, music, or movies but never do anything about it because they have to spend all their time doing busywork they hate just so they don't starve to death? And there are plenty of philanthropic people who would love designing systems to feed/house/teach everybody on the planet if the resources were allocated for it.
You said yourself most people who work hard don't get shit for it. Why are we allowing a system to continue where 1% of the population gets to hold on to 90% of the resources? We keep telling our kids to work hard and they might win the billionaire lottery, even though we all know it is exceedingly unlikely.
A lot of what you are saying used to make sense. Then we had to go and invent robots. Now a small percentage of people CAN produce everything everybody else needs to live. Economics is long overdue for a major rethinking. We have more people than work to go around, and its just going to keep getting worse. You can whine about it not being fair that poor people get stuff for free all you want, but eventually we are going to have to give a whole lot of people free stuff. If we don't, they are going to get real real hungry and decide to come take your stuff, and probably kill you while they do it.
As a species we can either accept this and build a wonderful world where everybody can live a decent life without working if they want, or keep fighting it and end up living in a post apocalyptic hellscape with people killing each other for scarce resources after civilization collapses.
They should give it to Nottingham, because then we'll get to see updates on all the great research being done. If you haven't already I suggest subscribing to their awesome YouTube channels:
Did your brain shut off when I said the word lawyer, or did you just stop reading? Because IMMEDIATELY afterwards I admit that this guy was not acting very smart by blindly following his lawyers advice. So now, according to you, I deserve to have my testicles removed because.. what? I wasn't explicit enough in calling this guy a dumbass? And yes, I think if a lawyer gives his client some incredibly bad advice, he deserves at least SOME of the blame when his client follows it and has his life completely ruined.
UV-C (280-100 nm) is utterly hostile to biology - the upper atmosphere filters this range out so life never evolved mechanisms to deal with it. Actually, UV-C is hostile to damn near everything: just from my own experience, it bleaches everything, and most plastics will degrade and become brittle with mere hours of exposure. I've test-fired a 185nm lamp in the open for a few seconds (wearing goggles!) and even across the room you can instantly smell ozone forming as it starts ripping oxygen apart. Stay away!
Next month's Slashdot headline: WickedLasers introduces 185nm 5W "My 1st Death Ray" for $150;-)
The other terrible thing about the sex offender registries is all the horrible regulations one has to live with if you end up on the list. My dad has a friend who lost the lawyer lottery (and admittedly wasn't smart enough to realize it at the time) and was advised to plead guilty to a sex crime when his ex wife convinced their daughter to claim he had touched her inappropriately in the middle of their ugly divorce. He now isn't allowed to live within 5000 yards of any schools or daycare facilities. He just rented an apartment and was told after moving in that somebody living nearby is running a daycare in their house so he has 10 days to find a new place to live. There is a database of daycares you can check before you move somewhere, and the database said his new address was in the clear. It was only after he paid his non-refundable deposit and moved all of his stuff into the place that the sheriff came by and said "Oops, turns out there IS a daycare nearby. Too bad, get out within 10 days or you go to jail for a felony. have a nice day!"
Terrorist watch, no-fly, felony, and sex offender lists are the new yellow stars. Anybody who claims America doesn't have classes or a caste system is either misinformed or lying.
I grew up attached to a computer. I have ad blocking in my wetware. I simply don't even notice web advertisements anymore, unless they have sound.
I did recently start using adblock, but that was because I started noticing increased load times and companies tracking me with social media buttons. My visual cortex started filtering out banner ads years ago.
I just wish we could access and manually edit their database on us. Some of the info they have on us is bound to be wrong, due to things like your roommate using your computer. I was so happy to discover the other day that YouTube finally allows you to edit your viewing history. I was getting really terrible recommendations because, as I found out when I was able to view my history, my roommate had used my computer and didn't log out of my YouTube account before looking up foot fetish and crappy anime videos.
Mall parking lots are a fairly common target of thieves from what I understand. Many simply walk down the line of cars trying doors to find an unlocked one, taking anything of value they find.
"They weren't" sounds fine and conveys the same meaning. Yeah, we have to bend a couple more grammatical "rules" to make it work, but as I said before, English is rife with such "exceptions" already.
Well, hopefully prices will come down in the future and more people will be able to afford it. Might as well build it prepared to handle increased volume.
In my opinion, we've got a perfectly functional neuter pronoun: "they" I don't understand why certain people insist that it's not proper when it's been used in this fashion in common parlance for ages. It's not like we don't have plenty of other examples of words with multiple meanings.
You might notice history has worked this way. The US is a sovereign nation because it was able to become so via arms. They said "We aren't subject to Crown law anymore." The Crown disagreed with that and a war was fought, the French agreed with the US and backed them up, and the US won, that made them sovereign. Was shit the British could do at that point, they had been defeated.
That's what I was thinking. What if your former employer is planning on doing something that could kill lots of people and the regulators/police/media don't believe you or are complicit in the scheme? Never is a pretty strong word.
The Wal-Mart in my town sells "Cola." No brand name. It's cheaper than (and tastes worse than) their store brand "Sam's Cola." I've bought it a couple times for parties where most of the people are going to be too high or drunk to notice that they're drinking $0.50 2 liters of caffeinated sugar water with brown food coloring.
I'm pretty sure you can safely contain 1 gram of thorium somewhere in your two ton car. A decent sized chunk of steel wrapped in a couple layers of kevlar and rubber in case it fractures should be sufficient. There could be other problems with this proposal, but "oh noes! teh nuculars will escape!" isn't it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to avoid it. By all means run the models and animal trials and don't approve anything for human trials that looks like it could kill tons of people. All I'm saying is if the science of today says it's safe, we should give it a chance. Especially if it's the sort of thing that's going to SAVE millions from starvation, but even if it's not! Accidents work both ways you know. Those guys goofing off making glowing pets might be the ones to stumble on a cure for those cancers you seem to be so worried about. You can't shut down a whole line of research just because your gut tells you it could be dangerous.
We should be encouraging creative thinking and new areas of development. We should also be encouraging basic rigor and safety protocols, of course, punishing those who act irresponsibly. But we can't punish those who honestly tried to safely make the world a better, more interesting, more awesome place, and ran into some unforeseeable consequences.
Imagine if Fleming had developed penicillin, started the antibiotic revolution saving countless lives, and then we discovered 20 years later that it caused anyone who had taken it to drop dead suddenly years down the line. Should we have lynched him for giving those people who probably would have died of infection 20 more years of happy healthy life? When the science of the day had NO WAY of knowing that would happen?
Should we test every new drug and GMO food by giving it to a small sample of people and locking them in a bubble for the rest of their natural life to control the experiment and make sure nothing bad happens to them, just on the off chance it could kill millions even though there is no known mechanism for it to do that? Even when NOT releasing it means millions of people will definitely die from starvation or disease?
My point is, sometimes, shit happens. Yes we should try to avoid it where possible, but not to the extent that we never learn anything new, such as WHY shit happens and how to prevent it.
Boo fucking Hoo. Some people might possibly have health problems we can't foresee in ten years is your reasoning to stop the advancement of biology and nutrition science? I am so sick of the whole "we can't do anything that might possibly be dangerous" attitude. Shit Happens. People Die. Live with it (or don't, if you're one of the unlucky few). If you want to live in an absolutely safe environment your local mental institution has a nice padded cell for you. Out here in the real world us human beings have to take risks to get anywhere in life.
You've got to watch out with that one. Around here if a cop drives by and sees a beer in the cup holder of your riding mower, even on your own private property, you get an instant go to jail, lose your license, pay thousands of dollars on lawyers and fines, full blown DWI.
Not needing to pay $60+ a month to tether a mobile laptop legally would certainly be cool to companies and their short-range travellers / roaming techs. 12000 sqr miles is not that much really. It represents a rectangle 400 x 30 miles.
That's some odd gear you've got if the signal propagates in a rectangle. I think the reference you were looking for is a 62 mile diameter circle.
Looking at the replies here, I guess I've been spared from the worst of it! I suppose that's because we mostly deal with adults who were at least mature enough to interact with a bank and get a mortgage at one point. The other thing that helps prevent us from receiving the worst of the "fuck the bank for taking my house, I'm goanna turn it into a shithole first!" is a program we participate in called "Cash for Keys" where we pay the people getting kicked out enough money to cover their moving expenses and their first months rent at a new place if they calmly move out without trashing the place. Of course there are always those people who, upon realizing they're getting foreclosed upon, refuse to answer the phone and the door until the sheriff shows up to remove them, so they never even get the message that we are trying to give them money to move along peacefully. Some of those places have lots of holes in the drywall or some missing appliances, but generally if they're not smart enough to negotiate with the bank they're not creative enough to pour concrete down the plumbing or into the air conditioner. The most expensive thing we have to deal with on a regular basis* is the external component of A/C units getting stolen for the copper in them when a property sits vacant for a while, and it's not obvious whether it was the former tenant or just some random poor person looking to make a quick couple bucks.
*That is caused by somebody destroying something, repairing a septic tank costs an arm and a leg but that's generally caused by normal wear and tear or mother nature rearranging the bit of earth it's stuck in.
Also, when you have your phone stolen you're out maybe a few hundreds bucks, but when your apartment is trashed you're out tens of thousands.
That seems a bit high to me, especially if you do some of the repairs yourself. You could maybe end up paying that much if you left all of your nice furniture in the apartment you were renting, and replaced it with new equal value stuff after it was ruined, but in general fixing up a junked apartment should only cost you a few thousand tops I would think.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "trashed." if they punch a few holes in the walls, mess up the paint, and stain the carpets, the repairs shouldn't ruin you financially. If they tear out all the drywall, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring, and appliances, leaving you with nothing but a room full of 2x4s holding up the ceiling, then yeah, you could end up paying tens of thousands. But I've never seen a place THAT trashed, and I work for a real estate company that specializes in selling foreclosed properties.
Yeah, I used to watch every TED video in Miro, but I started having to wade through too much crap and now I've fallen so far behind it would take me a few weeks of watching videos and nothing else to catch up.
Slashdot Mirror
Because this how the Nobel Prizes operate normally. They give the prize to people who's work has stood the test of time and has proven to be correct, and useful. This is why everybody was so flabbergasted when they gave one to Obama, not only had his work not stood the test of time, he hadn't even done any of it yet. He was a glaring exception to the way the prize is normally awarded.
I'm at work so I'm not going to take the time to dig up sources, but I remember reading about studies where they found that most humans are happiest when they feel like they've accomplished something. Contrary to popular belief not everybody wants to just goof off all the time. The whole world wouldn't grind to a halt if you were able to have a decent life without working.
I think instead what would happen is we would see a huge resurgence in art and creativity. How many people do you know that have ideas for books, music, or movies but never do anything about it because they have to spend all their time doing busywork they hate just so they don't starve to death? And there are plenty of philanthropic people who would love designing systems to feed/house/teach everybody on the planet if the resources were allocated for it.
You said yourself most people who work hard don't get shit for it. Why are we allowing a system to continue where 1% of the population gets to hold on to 90% of the resources? We keep telling our kids to work hard and they might win the billionaire lottery, even though we all know it is exceedingly unlikely.
A lot of what you are saying used to make sense. Then we had to go and invent robots. Now a small percentage of people CAN produce everything everybody else needs to live. Economics is long overdue for a major rethinking. We have more people than work to go around, and its just going to keep getting worse. You can whine about it not being fair that poor people get stuff for free all you want, but eventually we are going to have to give a whole lot of people free stuff. If we don't, they are going to get real real hungry and decide to come take your stuff, and probably kill you while they do it.
As a species we can either accept this and build a wonderful world where everybody can live a decent life without working if they want, or keep fighting it and end up living in a post apocalyptic hellscape with people killing each other for scarce resources after civilization collapses.
They should give it to Nottingham, because then we'll get to see updates on all the great research being done. If you haven't already I suggest subscribing to their awesome YouTube channels:
http://www.youtube.com/periodicvideos ( http://www.periodicvideos.com/ for the table you can click on to see each elements video)
http://www.youtube.com/user/BackstageScience
http://www.youtube.com/user/sixtysymbols
http://www.youtube.com/user/nottinghamscience
http://www.youtube.com/user/PhilosophyFile
Did your brain shut off when I said the word lawyer, or did you just stop reading? Because IMMEDIATELY afterwards I admit that this guy was not acting very smart by blindly following his lawyers advice. So now, according to you, I deserve to have my testicles removed because.. what? I wasn't explicit enough in calling this guy a dumbass? And yes, I think if a lawyer gives his client some incredibly bad advice, he deserves at least SOME of the blame when his client follows it and has his life completely ruined.
UV-C (280-100 nm) is utterly hostile to biology - the upper atmosphere filters this range out so life never evolved mechanisms to deal with it. Actually, UV-C is hostile to damn near everything: just from my own experience, it bleaches everything, and most plastics will degrade and become brittle with mere hours of exposure. I've test-fired a 185nm lamp in the open for a few seconds (wearing goggles!) and even across the room you can instantly smell ozone forming as it starts ripping oxygen apart. Stay away!
Next month's Slashdot headline: WickedLasers introduces 185nm 5W "My 1st Death Ray" for $150 ;-)
The other terrible thing about the sex offender registries is all the horrible regulations one has to live with if you end up on the list. My dad has a friend who lost the lawyer lottery (and admittedly wasn't smart enough to realize it at the time) and was advised to plead guilty to a sex crime when his ex wife convinced their daughter to claim he had touched her inappropriately in the middle of their ugly divorce. He now isn't allowed to live within 5000 yards of any schools or daycare facilities. He just rented an apartment and was told after moving in that somebody living nearby is running a daycare in their house so he has 10 days to find a new place to live. There is a database of daycares you can check before you move somewhere, and the database said his new address was in the clear. It was only after he paid his non-refundable deposit and moved all of his stuff into the place that the sheriff came by and said "Oops, turns out there IS a daycare nearby. Too bad, get out within 10 days or you go to jail for a felony. have a nice day!"
Terrorist watch, no-fly, felony, and sex offender lists are the new yellow stars. Anybody who claims America doesn't have classes or a caste system is either misinformed or lying.
Someone on Slashdot mentioning the antisocial list is actually what got me to install adblock in the first place. :)
I grew up attached to a computer. I have ad blocking in my wetware. I simply don't even notice web advertisements anymore, unless they have sound.
I did recently start using adblock, but that was because I started noticing increased load times and companies tracking me with social media buttons. My visual cortex started filtering out banner ads years ago.
I just wish we could access and manually edit their database on us. Some of the info they have on us is bound to be wrong, due to things like your roommate using your computer. I was so happy to discover the other day that YouTube finally allows you to edit your viewing history. I was getting really terrible recommendations because, as I found out when I was able to view my history, my roommate had used my computer and didn't log out of my YouTube account before looking up foot fetish and crappy anime videos.
Mall parking lots are a fairly common target of thieves from what I understand. Many simply walk down the line of cars trying doors to find an unlocked one, taking anything of value they find.
"They weren't" sounds fine and conveys the same meaning. Yeah, we have to bend a couple more grammatical "rules" to make it work, but as I said before, English is rife with such "exceptions" already.
Well, hopefully prices will come down in the future and more people will be able to afford it. Might as well build it prepared to handle increased volume.
In my opinion, we've got a perfectly functional neuter pronoun: "they" I don't understand why certain people insist that it's not proper when it's been used in this fashion in common parlance for ages. It's not like we don't have plenty of other examples of words with multiple meanings.
You might notice history has worked this way. The US is a sovereign nation because it was able to become so via arms. They said "We aren't subject to Crown law anymore." The Crown disagreed with that and a war was fought, the French agreed with the US and backed them up, and the US won, that made them sovereign. Was shit the British could do at that point, they had been defeated.
FTFY. ;-)
That's what I was thinking. What if your former employer is planning on doing something that could kill lots of people and the regulators/police/media don't believe you or are complicit in the scheme? Never is a pretty strong word.
The Wal-Mart in my town sells "Cola." No brand name. It's cheaper than (and tastes worse than) their store brand "Sam's Cola." I've bought it a couple times for parties where most of the people are going to be too high or drunk to notice that they're drinking $0.50 2 liters of caffeinated sugar water with brown food coloring.
I'm pretty sure you can safely contain 1 gram of thorium somewhere in your two ton car. A decent sized chunk of steel wrapped in a couple layers of kevlar and rubber in case it fractures should be sufficient. There could be other problems with this proposal, but "oh noes! teh nuculars will escape!" isn't it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to avoid it. By all means run the models and animal trials and don't approve anything for human trials that looks like it could kill tons of people. All I'm saying is if the science of today says it's safe, we should give it a chance. Especially if it's the sort of thing that's going to SAVE millions from starvation, but even if it's not! Accidents work both ways you know. Those guys goofing off making glowing pets might be the ones to stumble on a cure for those cancers you seem to be so worried about. You can't shut down a whole line of research just because your gut tells you it could be dangerous.
We should be encouraging creative thinking and new areas of development. We should also be encouraging basic rigor and safety protocols, of course, punishing those who act irresponsibly. But we can't punish those who honestly tried to safely make the world a better, more interesting, more awesome place, and ran into some unforeseeable consequences.
Imagine if Fleming had developed penicillin, started the antibiotic revolution saving countless lives, and then we discovered 20 years later that it caused anyone who had taken it to drop dead suddenly years down the line. Should we have lynched him for giving those people who probably would have died of infection 20 more years of happy healthy life? When the science of the day had NO WAY of knowing that would happen?
Should we test every new drug and GMO food by giving it to a small sample of people and locking them in a bubble for the rest of their natural life to control the experiment and make sure nothing bad happens to them, just on the off chance it could kill millions even though there is no known mechanism for it to do that? Even when NOT releasing it means millions of people will definitely die from starvation or disease?
My point is, sometimes, shit happens. Yes we should try to avoid it where possible, but not to the extent that we never learn anything new, such as WHY shit happens and how to prevent it.
Boo fucking Hoo. Some people might possibly have health problems we can't foresee in ten years is your reasoning to stop the advancement of biology and nutrition science? I am so sick of the whole "we can't do anything that might possibly be dangerous" attitude. Shit Happens. People Die. Live with it (or don't, if you're one of the unlucky few). If you want to live in an absolutely safe environment your local mental institution has a nice padded cell for you. Out here in the real world us human beings have to take risks to get anywhere in life.
You've got to watch out with that one. Around here if a cop drives by and sees a beer in the cup holder of your riding mower, even on your own private property, you get an instant go to jail, lose your license, pay thousands of dollars on lawyers and fines, full blown DWI.
Not needing to pay $60+ a month to tether a mobile laptop legally would certainly be cool to companies and their short-range travellers / roaming techs. 12000 sqr miles is not that much really. It represents a rectangle 400 x 30 miles.
That's some odd gear you've got if the signal propagates in a rectangle. I think the reference you were looking for is a 62 mile diameter circle.
Looking at the replies here, I guess I've been spared from the worst of it! I suppose that's because we mostly deal with adults who were at least mature enough to interact with a bank and get a mortgage at one point. The other thing that helps prevent us from receiving the worst of the "fuck the bank for taking my house, I'm goanna turn it into a shithole first!" is a program we participate in called "Cash for Keys" where we pay the people getting kicked out enough money to cover their moving expenses and their first months rent at a new place if they calmly move out without trashing the place. Of course there are always those people who, upon realizing they're getting foreclosed upon, refuse to answer the phone and the door until the sheriff shows up to remove them, so they never even get the message that we are trying to give them money to move along peacefully. Some of those places have lots of holes in the drywall or some missing appliances, but generally if they're not smart enough to negotiate with the bank they're not creative enough to pour concrete down the plumbing or into the air conditioner. The most expensive thing we have to deal with on a regular basis* is the external component of A/C units getting stolen for the copper in them when a property sits vacant for a while, and it's not obvious whether it was the former tenant or just some random poor person looking to make a quick couple bucks.
*That is caused by somebody destroying something, repairing a septic tank costs an arm and a leg but that's generally caused by normal wear and tear or mother nature rearranging the bit of earth it's stuck in.
Also, when you have your phone stolen you're out maybe a few hundreds bucks, but when your apartment is trashed you're out tens of thousands.
That seems a bit high to me, especially if you do some of the repairs yourself. You could maybe end up paying that much if you left all of your nice furniture in the apartment you were renting, and replaced it with new equal value stuff after it was ruined, but in general fixing up a junked apartment should only cost you a few thousand tops I would think.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "trashed." if they punch a few holes in the walls, mess up the paint, and stain the carpets, the repairs shouldn't ruin you financially. If they tear out all the drywall, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring, and appliances, leaving you with nothing but a room full of 2x4s holding up the ceiling, then yeah, you could end up paying tens of thousands. But I've never seen a place THAT trashed, and I work for a real estate company that specializes in selling foreclosed properties.
Yeah, I used to watch every TED video in Miro, but I started having to wade through too much crap and now I've fallen so far behind it would take me a few weeks of watching videos and nothing else to catch up.