CIO has a pictorial representation of the past six decades of research and development in encryption technology.
And every, single, image in that slide show is ripped directly from Wikipedia. In fact, the entire presentation is little more that a digest of someones Wikitrip.
As Paul Graham(I think) said, "Pay to view content on the internet may as well not exist". Given that information not on the internet is becoming increasingly obsolete, this maxim can be extended to the conclusion that; the only content that will matter is that which is freely available online. People such as journalists or even reviewing researchers are not going to go to the hassle of chasing down sources closeted in dusty libraries or the like, when low hanging fruit such as Wikipedia pages are so easily accessible.
There was a story a few weeks ago about how a copyright black hole is swallowing our culture. Well, it's swallowing more than that. It's swallowing cold hard facts, data, progress and information too. Compound this easily accessible and digestible, though lower quality, alternatives available online at places like Wikipedia, and you are seeing the beginning of a major shift in how our society comes by its information and the truth itself.
For over 5 months Wikipedia had an incorrect start date for World War 2. In the new information regime that is emerging, for a great many (mostly younger) people, for those 5 months, that became the start date for World War 2. The (old) correct date was cloistered away in libraries and pay per view papers or books. The new date was the first hit on a Google search. Which is more likely to become the dominant interpretation?
We have seen it time and again. Cheaper and easier will win out over expensive and difficult. The same is now happening for information. This doesn't necessarily mean that cheap and easy has to be worse, but in the case of finding cold hard facts online, it is. There is no quality control on the internet hive mind. The online or Wikipedia version of the truth is becoming the dominant one, and with the black hole swallowing all the hard facts, how will we ever find the real truth again?
Orwell was right about the outcome, but wrong about the method. You don't need to hide the truth. You just need to make the alternatives easier to find.
"Wheit in the louse of human euents, it becomw necfsaiy foi oneheople to difsobve Ihe hobtical bands which have connected Ihem with anothei, and to afsume amoung thenoweis ofIhe eaith Ihe fehaiate and equal fIaIion to which the Jaws of Valuie and of Vaturies entille them a decent reshectto the ohinions of mankind ieqwies Ihat Ihey fhould declauie Ihe caufes which imhel Ihem tothe fehaiation . __________"
Great, now my manager knows I'm getting projects done and knows what I'm currently working on, and now I know what from my mile long to-do list needs to get done sooner rather than later and can prioritize accordingly.
Hmmmmm, indeed. And his boots now have the most wonderful shine.
It also seems to not jive with the currently understood mechanics of evolution.
Dear Sir,
We are writing to you in relation to views and opinions that you articulated in Slashdot post #29465417 on 18th September last. Saids view on the mechanics of evolution were found by the committee to be grossly nescient and incorrect, and moreover demonstrating of a grievously lack of creative and logical thinking on your part. In the words of one committee member, and I quote: "WTF?!".
Following arbitration on the matter, the committee deeply regrets to inform you that your Geek Credentials and subsequent privileges have been placed in probation pending a completed review by yourself on the basics of the theory of evolution and its predictions. We regret to inform you that until such time as this review has been filed your access to association slide rules and soldering kits will be suspended and you will be restricted to playing only those table top games which restrict themselves to six sided dice. Moreover, while you may still retain them, use of association anti-wedgie underwear is also prohibited during this time.
Enclosed with this letter is a copy of the latest popular science volume The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins. It is hoped that your review can be swiftly completed by a enlightening study of this book and its replete examples. I await your reply and subsequent readmission to full membership with hopeful anticipation.
Yours sincerely
Dexter Cuthbert Chairman Membership Review Committee International Geek and Nerd Association
I wonder how it came to be that one would be permitted to check web-based email in the hospital's pediatric cardiac surgery department?
You mean like gmail, or even hotmail? Get real. Half the world has these or a yahoo address. Telling people they can't access those would be like saying they can't use email at all. Unless the hospital is prepared to provide its own email servers and address and spam filtering and etc, etc, webmail IS a valid substitute for employee email.
A site address has to be highlighted, copied and pasted into an address bar in order for the site to be navigated to. A hyperlinked need only be clicked. Once.
It's obvious to anyone that legally, the hyperlink is no more than text and citation rolled into one entity. But socially and ergonomically, the hyperlink is an invention on par with putting spaces between words and the decimal system. Sure, you could emulate it with older techniques, but you could never replace it.
The people who bring these cases don't care about legalities. They care about just how easy these links, and the internet in general, make it for other people to access material that they don't want anybody seeing, or doing anything they don't want them to do. The issue for the legal beligerants here is not the legality, but the social and cultural effect of me being able to write the church of Scientology believes in an ancient intergalactic emperor called Xenu.
Me writing those words is one thing. Giving a like to a website is another. But merging the together, offing a statement and a place where more can be read is what they detest. It breaks completely the old model they preferred, where media was one way, from distributors to people, and that most information was hard to find and harder to get to. The hyperlink and the internet have the ability to make information equally accessible, anywhere any-time, in a piece of text. What the people bring these case want is to take awy the power of the hyperlink, to try and make it conform to the old rules of distributors liability and one way media. They want to put the genies back in the bottle.
The media and the legal profession hates the hyperlink. The irreverence and convenience with which it provides and uncovers information is in their eyes a blasphemy towards the intricate, esoteric bureaucracy from which they derive their power. When people like Pamela Jones can discuss in a popular way complex laws, suits and legalities using hyperlinked blog posts, this raises questions of why we should defer so much to distributors and legal customs.
These cases are not so much legal battles, as they are social ones.
As to why I feel I should pay lower then the majority; I take care of my self my not smoking, drinking responsibly, and working out six days a week.
And the day you are stricken low by a chronic condition, or indeed simply grow older? Will you then be satisfied in paying increased premiums for the rest for your life?
This is the important point about insurance. Instead of spreading costs evenly across the system, so that people who are better off now support those in hard times (this is the whole theory of insurance), we instead simply pass on all the burden to the people who can't afford it and who need the most help. In return for (slightly) reduced premiums when we are in the prime of our health, we face the risk of essentially little, none and very expensive insurance right when we need it most.
This situation has come about because we invited risk based premiums in the door when we allowed smokers, obese people and similar people to be charged higher rates. You can justify it any way you want, but it was based more on righteousness more than hard facts. If we really based risk assessment on facts, we'd have situations where groups like West Africans and Ashkenazi Jews were charged higher premiums because of hereditary disorders like Sickle Cells disease and Cystic fibrosis. But, we don't do that because it would be socially and morally unacceptable and repugnant.
But condemning smokers and obese people is a pasttime de jour, so we lumped them with what essentially amounted to a sumptuary tax, for no other reason than it made us feel superior. And now we pay the price for our pious schadenfreude, every time someone who gets sick, or old or has an accident is forced to pay more for being a bigger "leech" on all those healthy insurance payers.
It's good that you keeper yourself healthy. And you currently enjoy windfalls because of that. It would be nice if you could be healthy forever. But sooner or later, time will take its toll, and when it does the insurance system which you now support will seem a lot less friendly and rewarding, and a lot more harsh and punitive. Here's hoping you saved enough on payments to cover yourself in old age. But I doubt that's the case. Insurance is still a gamble, and the house always wins.
Give me six months and a soundboard and I'll reproduce and then better the best violin you've ever heard. Only problem is, you'll never accept the results.
You want to know why Stradivarius violins are regarded as being of unparalleled? It's because they are regarded as being unparalleled. Do you seriously think that in over 300 years of violin making that noone has yet beaten what must be by now ancient and squeaky artifacts?
This kind of "Golden Age" worship is not based on any objective assessment of quality or sound harmonics or anything else. When violins are so good that there is no realistic way to tell the difference, people need to make up myths and stick to accepted scripts in order to be accepted as "knowladgeable". It's like how in blind tastings no-one can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. Blind test it and I guarantee you that 99.99% of professional music lovers wouldn't be able to tell a Stradivarius from a cubase.
You're telling me that one guy in the 1600 managed to get his hands on all the fungus infested trees in Europe brought on by the cold and "that's" what's making these things sound so good? When people have to resort to such Grade A bullshit like that, you know they're getting desperate. I find it far more plausible that the Emperor has no clothes, and that violins can only approach a theoretical limit of sound quality before physical forces, feedback, etc become dominant over the diminishing returns.
There's no secret to Stradivarius violins. If people want to throw money away on mythical violins, let them. The ones from your local dealer will sound just as good, and in any case, violins don't have any effect on human penis size.
The insurers want information that will enable them to remove expensive-to-insure people from coverage where possible, or at least to put them in a much more expensive pool.
If insurers can charge you more based on the likelihood of of your having an accident, then what's the point of insurance? I thought insurance was a way for everybody to pay in so that everybody was covered. If some people are going to get charged more than others, then isn't the whole collective model completely broken?
I get charged more for car insurance because of the way I was born, not because of the way I behave. How is that just? Because insurance is a private industry? If a private industry stopped hiring people because of the way they were born, would that be just too?
Charging people more for insurance because they are male, are fat or even smoke is wrong. It is wrong to apply your personal morals to condemn these people and hurt them financially for living their own lives, whilst maintaining the pretense of collective security. Why must we jump through all the humps the insurance industry puts in front of us to get our golden stars and premiums like good little boys and girls? People agree that fat people should pay more, then complain when people with family medial histories get their premiums sliced. What is the difference? Choice? I didn't choose to be born male and have higher car insurance payments.
People got up on their moral high horse about smokers premiums, and drinkers premiums, and leechers, and the willfully unhealthy and look where it got them. Sick kids with sickle cell disease or leukemia being told to drop dead because they've gotten too many treatments already. People with chronic conditions being charged out of house and home because their bodies are unable to become healthy again. A system of insurance that punishes the people who need it and "rewards" only those who never use it, yet who still have to pay for it.
What is insurance? Is it a collective rainy day fund? Or is it an elaborate system of loan sharking that milks the vulnerable for every penny they have until their final gasp? You'd better ask yourself, if smokes, or fatty or young drivers don't deserve a fair deal, then why do you?
Have you read Feyerabend, or are you just assuming what's in his book? Contrary to popular belief, Feyerabend is not arguing against science or even against method (despite the title), but rather pointing out that the so-called "scientific method" is fundamentally flawed, whether you take the naive empiricist view, the Popperian view, or Lakatos's more complex model of science.
I don't have to read his books. If that's his thesis, I know it's full of shit. The scientific method is real, and it works. It's more than the pot-boiler Observation, Hypothesis, Testing cycle that scientific anthropologists came up with. It's an entire way of life and work and study of the natural word. Those people who study the world and things in it the closest, with the most scrutiny and the most honestly are the ones whose science is the best. If you think books by Philosophers of science can tell you anything about science, you're a bigger fool than Feyerabend, Popper and Lakatos put together. Frankly, I am disgusted by these frauds. Like most philosophers, they warble on at length about topics they really have next to no understanding of.
But, anyhow, why let the facts about a person stand in your way of being a "jerk"?
There are facts young man, and there are anti-facts; things that are factually correct, but whose naive interpretation will lead one to conclude falsehoods. They easily mislead the unwary.
Even Newton's Principia assumes a Tychonic system, even in later editions.
Are you seriously suggesting that Issac Newton solved the three body problem, or alternatively, solved the two body problem in a rotating reference frame? Because if you are, I'm calling you a liar. I ask the earnest question; do you have any idea of just how comprehensive the Principia Mathematica is on the topic or rotating reference frames? Do you even know which equations/systems Newton even solved?
Ah, yes, that same Kepler who published his third law in the Harmonices mundi, which he discovered while looking for musical harmonic intervals in the heavens. Do you remember those wonderful glissandi that the planets make as they move? Oh, yeah, and all the astrology in that treatise? We're really talking about modern science here -- what were those churchmen thinking?
Yeah, Kepler did come up with some crazy shit. But do you know how he came up with the rules that actually worked? Cold hard mathematical calculation. Years of it. He didn't sit at a desk spewing out brain farts for 20 years in order to produce his three laws. He toiled extensively, rigorously, and exactingly on tables, figures and data to come to the final answer. Fun fact, Kepler was actually a numerical prodigy. Read up on prosthaphaeresis to get a sense of just how dedicated and self correcting this man was. And after all that, if he wanted to come up with crazy shit in his spare time, well, I can't say I begrudge the man.
Really, before you have a tirade, go back and actually read all those books that you mention in your post. You might realize how very different -- and unscientific -- everyone sounds to a modern reader, on both sides of the Galilean controversy.
Modern reader? Does that mean everyone whose taken time out of existentialism club to read works on the philosophy of science? Yeah, that'll really qualify you to understand the debate.
Man I am being an ass-hole in these posts, but I can tell you that it really ticks me off when pretentious humanities students with delusions of grandeur write reams of opinionated prose on topics they only think they understand; And oh do they think it. But what pisses me off even more is when people who read this tripe get themselves so overinflated on hot air that they sail off into Fantasia and then get indignant when unread Philistines like myself simply fail to let go our dogmati
Science-infatuated people today have a very unfortunate tendency to overstate Galileo's scientific case, and understate the objections of his contemporary astronomer colleagues--which were very good objections, when judged by contemporary standards. The aforementioned book by Feyerabend goes at length about this; Galileo needed to overturn Aristotelian mechanics to really win the scientific contest, and he didn't manage to overturn it.
Horseshit. You've been drinking Feyerabend's Kool aid too much.
Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus alone was enough to disprove the Ptolemic system , or at the very least, cause it to be modified into something like the Tychonic system. Once Jupiter's moons had been observed, another pillar of the Ptolemic and indeed human thought had been broken. There are celestial bodies that can orbit other celestial bodies. Boom. Blown, out of the water. The rest was just maths. The main work had already been done.
Again, there's a point that Feyerabend makes that is crucial here: the Copernican system only overcame the Ptolemaic one after being developed for at least 200 years, over which there were all kinds of serious objections that needed to be overcome.
There were fuck all serious objections to be overcome. The Ptolemic system hadn't a leg to stand on. This wasn't even the first time a Heliocentric model had been proposed. The only thing holding it up was tradition and deference to the church (who employed too many astronomers). Keeping the whole rotten structure aloft required torturous, torturous intellectual atrocities like the Tychonic model. You didn't have to be an astronomer to see what was going on, even in those days.
The Copernican system was published in 1543. In 1609 Kepler dropped the intellectual equivalent of the atomic bomb in the form of his first two laws of planetary motion in the Astronomia Nova. That's 66 years, not 200. Unless you want to include the publishing for the third law in 1619. That gives you 76 years. The Ptolmeic system toppled before Galileo was even....
Holy Presentation Order Batman!! Turns out Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy in 1633, a full 24 years after Kepler published his laws of motion for planets. What a kick in the balls. Not only did his theory have observational evidence, but it even had scientific data backing it up. Pity those churchmen were so keen on reason and justice in their verdicts, eh? Oh well, at least they didn't, you know, burn him at the stake or anything. No, they were far too enlightened for anything like that.
Yeah, maybe Galileo was a bit of a jerk. Kind of like how I'm being a bit of a jerk right now. But that doesn't change the fact that he was scientifically and ethically justified both his heliocentric theories and methods, and that the church was a dogmatic, intolerant and tyrannical censor, prepared to use any means to stifle progress it saw as unfit. And it also doesn't change the fact that both Feyerabend and yourself are gross historical revisionists with an axe to grind against the honest and correct assessment of what happened to Galileo and its meaning for the interface of science, religion and politics.
Stellar parallax....? Some people spend too much time on Wikipedia.
You know, I've never got the Leia in the Gold Bikini thing, and to be honest, I don't know anyone who does. Yes, she's wearing a bikini, but it's nothing that wasn't in every second 80's film and even BayWatch.
I think it's a generational thing. I must watched that film at the age of 9 or 10, whereas older people saw it first in their late teens or twenties. First time I even remembered Leia had worn it was when an almost 40 year old cast playing late twentysomethings brought it up on a show called "Friends". Turns out the bikini is now a sex fantasy fetish for a lot of older nerds. In retrospect, it's obvious to me now, but I still regard it as a low point of nerd-dom in general.
On the information super highway, mousemat underhand Pages choc full of banners, sites filled up with spam Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light Plain simple front page, with a clean white design I surfed down to the site There they stood in the doorway; Names were Page and Brin And I was thinking that this site could be made out of fail or made out of win Then I clicked on the search link, and they showed me the way There were posts all over the interwebs, I thought I read them say...
Welcome to the hotel googleplexia Such a lovely page (Such a lovely page) Such a lovely cage Plenty of hits at the hotel googleplexia Be it far or near(Be it far or near) You can find it here
They got web search and Youtube, they got scholar and trends They got gchat and email, and know all your friends Click about and see websites, can't see a threat You might not remember, but they never forget
I called Larry and Sergey Asked, "why put this online?" They said, we know everything you've done since, 1999 And still I click web search results by night and day Seems wrong but the results are so right Can almost hear them say...
Welcome to the hotel googleplexia Such a lovely page (Such a lovely page) Such a lovely cage Livin' your life at the hotel googleplexia Looks like a paradise (Looks like a paradise), if you're a private eye....
Then a got a bad feeling what if they stop being nice They said; "Your just a customer here, and we know your price" And in the marketers chambers, They gathered for the feast Troll all the data on people's lives And they will never cease
Last thing I remember, I had said I'd take no more Need to get private data back To the way it was before Relax said the G-man We have programmed to deceive You can checkout any time you like, But your data can never leave!
Welcome to the hotel googleplexia Such a lovely page (Such a lovely page) Such a lovely cage Plenty of hits at the hotel googleplexia Be it far or near(Be it far or near) You can find it here
You want to know why science is not popular in the first place? Because we (as a society, we can't just blame the "education system", after all, parents, they're YOUR kids) as a society are teaching our kids to be consumerist, apathetic, self-centered brats.
That's not the reason. People have always been consumerist. And to a certain extent, people have always been apathetic about science. I'm of the belief that what has changed is not the amount or type of education people have received in science, but how they have perceived it.
There was a time that when a respected scientist made a statement on something, people sat up and (politely) paid attention. Remember Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster? Name me from memory one other member of the committee? Carl Sagan was frankly, sensationalist in the way he went about things. But nevertheless people watched his programs. Scientists didn't have to be attention seeks to get respect either.
Einstein was 20 years past the media hype that surrounded his results, but such was his stature as senior physicist that it took only one short letter signed by him to convince Roosevelt that an atomic bomb was a) feasible and b) worth spending $2 billion on research and development for. Going farther back, scientists like Stokes and Kelvin sat on many important committees and inquiries deciding and investigating important issues of the day.
Once upon a time, governments would request that scientific societies produce reports or conduct studies into important matters. Nowadays, governments question, condemn or ignore such reports.
What happened? Why did Jane Fonda movies about a meltdown burrowing to the center of the earth or movies about instant freezing ice storms have more impact on our Nuclear and environmental policies than sound science? When Steven Weinberg asked the US congress to fund the Superconducting Super Collider, why did they find it so easy to decline him? The money? The Europeans have spent that amount and tenfold more on CERN and the LHC. Why, after Daubert v. Merrell Dow, do lay judges have to decide weather a scientists is actually an expert in a particular field. How did George Deutsch, a man with only a high school diploma, come to be in charge of NASA press releases?
Scientists are not respected in our society anymore. Lay people with no knowledge of the field whatsoever feel free to argue with, nitpick and outright dismiss studies and experiments. Paid think tanks command more influence than the Royal Society when it comes to science and education policy. Science by press release has become a bigger way to gain fame and funding than a mountain of research papers.
Society is to blame for this state of affairs. But should we really be looking at the education system, or parents, or teenagers, or the TV? What caused the change in attitude to science in the Anglophone world? The media? Marketers? Politicians? The legal system? All of the above? None of the above? Whatever did it, we'd best go about fixing it, because it sure as hell won't correct itself.
You filthy communist!!! By what right, by what right, should anyone have to give up their God given birthright to own in perpetuity not only the physical manifestations of , but also the copyrights on any images of, the few known fossils of extinct species of general and scientific interest!? What right to the people have to the bones of dinosaurs lying under my land, just because I happen to live in their national state and am protected by the laws and statues which it passes?!
Is it just that I be denied the right to auction and sell these priceless anthropological treasures to wealthy, cloistered individuals who will hoard them in secret for eternity? What kind of country do we live in if the profits and pleasures of the few can be superseded by the benefit, progress and interests of the many? A Communist country, That's What!!!
I found these bones by chance on my own property. Or at least, these bones were found on property belonging to me. Do you know what that means? It means that God has chosen me, and blessed me with this bountiful roll of the dice that I may enjoy it. And His Will trumps the wants of the People. If He wanted the bones to be in a museum, He would have had them found on Government property on on some altruist hippy's plot.
If it was found on their property then Folks have a RIGHT to do whatever they want with the their country's natural heritage, without restriction or regulation!! It's in the CONSTITUTION!!! If the Founding Father's had wanted there to be things that people shouldn't exclusively own, then they would have explicitly said so. They didn't, because they were great men, who recognised the benefit of cultured men being able to hang ancient lizard bones in their private study, instead of forfeiting them for the masses to paw!!
The media shouted loudly that "something should be done" and "more checks need to be put in place to stop this happening again". And now the government has agreed and proposed for more checks, the same papers are crying "nanny state, too much bureaucracy!". Ironic.
It's been a while since the last big, juicy pedophile headline, and I'll bet that infuriates the blocklieters that support this legislation no end. Their last major hurrah was Madeleine McCann and that went so overboard that I think the public has become quite cloyed at the whole business. The tepid response to the Dugard case could be the first sign that the public is finally becoming bored with child molestation stories.
At least, that's what I'd like to think. In reality, the next three year old's abduction will the viewing public the arousing dose of outrage it so craves.
I guess I feel sorry for the grandparent poster more than anything else. The guy's got at least 9 spelling/grammatical errors in his post that I could count. He's clearly a bit challenged and his employer's really taking advantage of him.
Ladies and Gentlemen; I give you, The Petty Bourgeoisie.
You're making a good deal of references without sources, can you please cite some?
Aaawwww, shove it up your ass!! You an all the other citation Nazi's who will not allow a single item or point you disagree with to be made anywhere, anytime without an impeccable peer reviewed source, properly cited and referenced.
A curse on Wikipedia and the [citation needed] meme. It would all be very well if the meme people actually promoted critical thinking, healthy scepticism and proper fact checking. But as it is, the meme just promotes the petty and frankly groundless rebuttals typified by the parent post. Instead of actually bothering to critique specific points in the grandparent, the whole thing is simply tarnished with the [citation needed] brush in a fairly transparent attempt to outright dismiss it.
Considering that the meme originated on Wikipedia, it's not surprising that its purpose has twisted beyond its ostensible meaning. [citation needed] was always just another example of the stonewalling, wiki-lawyering and petty bureaucracy that thrive in that institution. From there, it has moved smoothly into the mainstream as a general purpose discussion terminating cliche. I have never seen actual honest debaters of any kind ask for citations in this way. Its a rhetorical technique, not an honest rebuttal.
There are points in the grandparent which could have done with some justification. Maybe. The one about the 60% feeling entitled to "steal" IP. The Android and iPhone being sunk by piracy was pretty speculative. Android developers (?!) making 1/8 less than iPhone developers. It would be nice to have all these things confirmed, but I'm not going to dismiss the entirety of the post and lower the tone of the debate by jumping up and yelling; "[Citation Needed]!! [Citation Needed]!!! Unless you can prove it to me, it's not true!!!!"
So, take your tricks back to the playground or some other net forum. Adults are talking.
Traditional market-based sources of funding can evaporate after a major disaster but there will always be people who believe in the mission statement and they don't change with the political winds.
Name me one company, just one, that has provided a significant and continuous source of funding for a major project that it believed in, even when the going got tough.
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
If it's not EXPLICITLY stated in the US Constitution then they don't; and it is TYRANNICAL for any government to force anyone facing extreme danger to be properly informed of that fact! America isn't a COMMUNIST country, at least not yet.
Slashdot Mirror
And every, single, image in that slide show is ripped directly from Wikipedia. In fact, the entire presentation is little more that a digest of someones Wikitrip.
As Paul Graham(I think) said, "Pay to view content on the internet may as well not exist". Given that information not on the internet is becoming increasingly obsolete, this maxim can be extended to the conclusion that; the only content that will matter is that which is freely available online. People such as journalists or even reviewing researchers are not going to go to the hassle of chasing down sources closeted in dusty libraries or the like, when low hanging fruit such as Wikipedia pages are so easily accessible.
There was a story a few weeks ago about how a copyright black hole is swallowing our culture. Well, it's swallowing more than that. It's swallowing cold hard facts, data, progress and information too. Compound this easily accessible and digestible, though lower quality, alternatives available online at places like Wikipedia, and you are seeing the beginning of a major shift in how our society comes by its information and the truth itself.
For over 5 months Wikipedia had an incorrect start date for World War 2. In the new information regime that is emerging, for a great many (mostly younger) people, for those 5 months, that became the start date for World War 2. The (old) correct date was cloistered away in libraries and pay per view papers or books. The new date was the first hit on a Google search. Which is more likely to become the dominant interpretation?
We have seen it time and again. Cheaper and easier will win out over expensive and difficult. The same is now happening for information. This doesn't necessarily mean that cheap and easy has to be worse, but in the case of finding cold hard facts online, it is. There is no quality control on the internet hive mind. The online or Wikipedia version of the truth is becoming the dominant one, and with the black hole swallowing all the hard facts, how will we ever find the real truth again?
Orwell was right about the outcome, but wrong about the method. You don't need to hide the truth. You just need to make the alternatives easier to find.
"Wheit in the louse of human euents, it becomw necfsaiy foi oneheople to difsobve Ihe hobtical bands which have connected Ihem with anothei, and to afsume amoung thenoweis ofIhe eaith Ihe fehaiate and equal fIaIion to which the Jaws of Valuie and of Vaturies entille them a decent reshectto the ohinions of mankind ieqwies Ihat Ihey fhould declauie Ihe caufes which imhel Ihem tothe fehaiation . __________"
And so A Nation, is born.
Hmmmmm, indeed. And his boots now have the most wonderful shine.
I am afraid I found your "couldn't" so perturbing that I simply could not go on.
Dear Sir,
We are writing to you in relation to views and opinions that you articulated in Slashdot post #29465417 on 18th September last. Saids view on the mechanics of evolution were found by the committee to be grossly nescient and incorrect, and moreover demonstrating of a grievously lack of creative and logical thinking on your part. In the words of one committee member, and I quote: "WTF?!".
Following arbitration on the matter, the committee deeply regrets to inform you that your Geek Credentials and subsequent privileges have been placed in probation pending a completed review by yourself on the basics of the theory of evolution and its predictions. We regret to inform you that until such time as this review has been filed your access to association slide rules and soldering kits will be suspended and you will be restricted to playing only those table top games which restrict themselves to six sided dice. Moreover, while you may still retain them, use of association anti-wedgie underwear is also prohibited during this time.
Enclosed with this letter is a copy of the latest popular science volume The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins. It is hoped that your review can be swiftly completed by a enlightening study of this book and its replete examples. I await your reply and subsequent readmission to full membership with hopeful anticipation.
Yours sincerely
Dexter Cuthbert
Chairman
Membership Review Committee
International Geek and Nerd Association
P.S. We mean it about the underwear.
You mean like gmail, or even hotmail? Get real. Half the world has these or a yahoo address. Telling people they can't access those would be like saying they can't use email at all. Unless the hospital is prepared to provide its own email servers and address and spam filtering and etc, etc, webmail IS a valid substitute for employee email.
It's a system that can automate itself, enabling you to fire al lot your existing engineers.
A site address has to be highlighted, copied and pasted into an address bar in order for the site to be navigated to. A hyperlinked need only be clicked. Once.
It's obvious to anyone that legally, the hyperlink is no more than text and citation rolled into one entity. But socially and ergonomically, the hyperlink is an invention on par with putting spaces between words and the decimal system. Sure, you could emulate it with older techniques, but you could never replace it.
The people who bring these cases don't care about legalities. They care about just how easy these links, and the internet in general, make it for other people to access material that they don't want anybody seeing, or doing anything they don't want them to do. The issue for the legal beligerants here is not the legality, but the social and cultural effect of me being able to write the church of Scientology believes in an ancient intergalactic emperor called Xenu.
Me writing those words is one thing. Giving a like to a website is another. But merging the together, offing a statement and a place where more can be read is what they detest. It breaks completely the old model they preferred, where media was one way, from distributors to people, and that most information was hard to find and harder to get to. The hyperlink and the internet have the ability to make information equally accessible, anywhere any-time, in a piece of text. What the people bring these case want is to take awy the power of the hyperlink, to try and make it conform to the old rules of distributors liability and one way media. They want to put the genies back in the bottle.
The media and the legal profession hates the hyperlink. The irreverence and convenience with which it provides and uncovers information is in their eyes a blasphemy towards the intricate, esoteric bureaucracy from which they derive their power. When people like Pamela Jones can discuss in a popular way complex laws, suits and legalities using hyperlinked blog posts, this raises questions of why we should defer so much to distributors and legal customs.
These cases are not so much legal battles, as they are social ones.
And the day you are stricken low by a chronic condition, or indeed simply grow older? Will you then be satisfied in paying increased premiums for the rest for your life?
This is the important point about insurance. Instead of spreading costs evenly across the system, so that people who are better off now support those in hard times (this is the whole theory of insurance), we instead simply pass on all the burden to the people who can't afford it and who need the most help. In return for (slightly) reduced premiums when we are in the prime of our health, we face the risk of essentially little, none and very expensive insurance right when we need it most.
This situation has come about because we invited risk based premiums in the door when we allowed smokers, obese people and similar people to be charged higher rates. You can justify it any way you want, but it was based more on righteousness more than hard facts. If we really based risk assessment on facts, we'd have situations where groups like West Africans and Ashkenazi Jews were charged higher premiums because of hereditary disorders like Sickle Cells disease and Cystic fibrosis. But, we don't do that because it would be socially and morally unacceptable and repugnant.
But condemning smokers and obese people is a pasttime de jour, so we lumped them with what essentially amounted to a sumptuary tax, for no other reason than it made us feel superior. And now we pay the price for our pious schadenfreude, every time someone who gets sick, or old or has an accident is forced to pay more for being a bigger "leech" on all those healthy insurance payers.
It's good that you keeper yourself healthy. And you currently enjoy windfalls because of that. It would be nice if you could be healthy forever. But sooner or later, time will take its toll, and when it does the insurance system which you now support will seem a lot less friendly and rewarding, and a lot more harsh and punitive. Here's hoping you saved enough on payments to cover yourself in old age. But I doubt that's the case. Insurance is still a gamble, and the house always wins.
Give me six months and a soundboard and I'll reproduce and then better the best violin you've ever heard. Only problem is, you'll never accept the results.
You want to know why Stradivarius violins are regarded as being of unparalleled? It's because they are regarded as being unparalleled. Do you seriously think that in over 300 years of violin making that noone has yet beaten what must be by now ancient and squeaky artifacts?
This kind of "Golden Age" worship is not based on any objective assessment of quality or sound harmonics or anything else. When violins are so good that there is no realistic way to tell the difference, people need to make up myths and stick to accepted scripts in order to be accepted as "knowladgeable". It's like how in blind tastings no-one can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. Blind test it and I guarantee you that 99.99% of professional music lovers wouldn't be able to tell a Stradivarius from a cubase.
You're telling me that one guy in the 1600 managed to get his hands on all the fungus infested trees in Europe brought on by the cold and "that's" what's making these things sound so good? When people have to resort to such Grade A bullshit like that, you know they're getting desperate. I find it far more plausible that the Emperor has no clothes, and that violins can only approach a theoretical limit of sound quality before physical forces, feedback, etc become dominant over the diminishing returns.
There's no secret to Stradivarius violins. If people want to throw money away on mythical violins, let them. The ones from your local dealer will sound just as good, and in any case, violins don't have any effect on human penis size.
If insurers can charge you more based on the likelihood of of your having an accident, then what's the point of insurance? I thought insurance was a way for everybody to pay in so that everybody was covered. If some people are going to get charged more than others, then isn't the whole collective model completely broken?
I get charged more for car insurance because of the way I was born, not because of the way I behave. How is that just? Because insurance is a private industry? If a private industry stopped hiring people because of the way they were born, would that be just too?
Charging people more for insurance because they are male, are fat or even smoke is wrong. It is wrong to apply your personal morals to condemn these people and hurt them financially for living their own lives, whilst maintaining the pretense of collective security. Why must we jump through all the humps the insurance industry puts in front of us to get our golden stars and premiums like good little boys and girls? People agree that fat people should pay more, then complain when people with family medial histories get their premiums sliced. What is the difference? Choice? I didn't choose to be born male and have higher car insurance payments.
People got up on their moral high horse about smokers premiums, and drinkers premiums, and leechers, and the willfully unhealthy and look where it got them. Sick kids with sickle cell disease or leukemia being told to drop dead because they've gotten too many treatments already. People with chronic conditions being charged out of house and home because their bodies are unable to become healthy again. A system of insurance that punishes the people who need it and "rewards" only those who never use it, yet who still have to pay for it.
What is insurance? Is it a collective rainy day fund? Or is it an elaborate system of loan sharking that milks the vulnerable for every penny they have until their final gasp? You'd better ask yourself, if smokes, or fatty or young drivers don't deserve a fair deal, then why do you?
I don't have to read his books. If that's his thesis, I know it's full of shit. The scientific method is real, and it works. It's more than the pot-boiler Observation, Hypothesis, Testing cycle that scientific anthropologists came up with. It's an entire way of life and work and study of the natural word. Those people who study the world and things in it the closest, with the most scrutiny and the most honestly are the ones whose science is the best. If you think books by Philosophers of science can tell you anything about science, you're a bigger fool than Feyerabend, Popper and Lakatos put together. Frankly, I am disgusted by these frauds. Like most philosophers, they warble on at length about topics they really have next to no understanding of.
There are facts young man, and there are anti-facts; things that are factually correct, but whose naive interpretation will lead one to conclude falsehoods. They easily mislead the unwary.
Are you seriously suggesting that Issac Newton solved the three body problem, or alternatively, solved the two body problem in a rotating reference frame? Because if you are, I'm calling you a liar. I ask the earnest question; do you have any idea of just how comprehensive the Principia Mathematica is on the topic or rotating reference frames? Do you even know which equations/systems Newton even solved?
Yeah, Kepler did come up with some crazy shit. But do you know how he came up with the rules that actually worked? Cold hard mathematical calculation. Years of it. He didn't sit at a desk spewing out brain farts for 20 years in order to produce his three laws. He toiled extensively, rigorously, and exactingly on tables, figures and data to come to the final answer. Fun fact, Kepler was actually a numerical prodigy. Read up on prosthaphaeresis to get a sense of just how dedicated and self correcting this man was. And after all that, if he wanted to come up with crazy shit in his spare time, well, I can't say I begrudge the man.
Modern reader? Does that mean everyone whose taken time out of existentialism club to read works on the philosophy of science? Yeah, that'll really qualify you to understand the debate.
Man I am being an ass-hole in these posts, but I can tell you that it really ticks me off when pretentious humanities students with delusions of grandeur write reams of opinionated prose on topics they only think they understand; And oh do they think it. But what pisses me off even more is when people who read this tripe get themselves so overinflated on hot air that they sail off into Fantasia and then get indignant when unread Philistines like myself simply fail to let go our dogmati
Horseshit. You've been drinking Feyerabend's Kool aid too much.
Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus alone was enough to disprove the Ptolemic system , or at the very least, cause it to be modified into something like the Tychonic system. Once Jupiter's moons had been observed, another pillar of the Ptolemic and indeed human thought had been broken. There are celestial bodies that can orbit other celestial bodies. Boom. Blown, out of the water. The rest was just maths. The main work had already been done.
There were fuck all serious objections to be overcome. The Ptolemic system hadn't a leg to stand on. This wasn't even the first time a Heliocentric model had been proposed. The only thing holding it up was tradition and deference to the church (who employed too many astronomers). Keeping the whole rotten structure aloft required torturous, torturous intellectual atrocities like the Tychonic model. You didn't have to be an astronomer to see what was going on, even in those days.
The Copernican system was published in 1543. In 1609 Kepler dropped the intellectual equivalent of the atomic bomb in the form of his first two laws of planetary motion in the Astronomia Nova. That's 66 years, not 200. Unless you want to include the publishing for the third law in 1619. That gives you 76 years. The Ptolmeic system toppled before Galileo was even....
Holy Presentation Order Batman!! Turns out Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy in 1633, a full 24 years after Kepler published his laws of motion for planets. What a kick in the balls. Not only did his theory have observational evidence, but it even had scientific data backing it up. Pity those churchmen were so keen on reason and justice in their verdicts, eh? Oh well, at least they didn't, you know, burn him at the stake or anything. No, they were far too enlightened for anything like that.
Yeah, maybe Galileo was a bit of a jerk. Kind of like how I'm being a bit of a jerk right now. But that doesn't change the fact that he was scientifically and ethically justified both his heliocentric theories and methods, and that the church was a dogmatic, intolerant and tyrannical censor, prepared to use any means to stifle progress it saw as unfit. And it also doesn't change the fact that both Feyerabend and yourself are gross historical revisionists with an axe to grind against the honest and correct assessment of what happened to Galileo and its meaning for the interface of science, religion and politics.
Stellar parallax....? Some people spend too much time on Wikipedia.
You know, I've never got the Leia in the Gold Bikini thing, and to be honest, I don't know anyone who does. Yes, she's wearing a bikini, but it's nothing that wasn't in every second 80's film and even BayWatch.
I think it's a generational thing. I must watched that film at the age of 9 or 10, whereas older people saw it first in their late teens or twenties. First time I even remembered Leia had worn it was when an almost 40 year old cast playing late twentysomethings brought it up on a show called "Friends". Turns out the bikini is now a sex fantasy fetish for a lot of older nerds. In retrospect, it's obvious to me now, but I still regard it as a low point of nerd-dom in general.
It's just a bikini.
On the information super highway, mousemat underhand
Pages choc full of banners, sites filled up with spam
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
Plain simple front page, with a clean white design
I surfed down to the site
There they stood in the doorway;
Names were Page and Brin
And I was thinking that this site
could be made out of fail or made out of win
Then I clicked on the search link, and they showed me the way
There were posts all over the interwebs,
I thought I read them say...
Welcome to the hotel googleplexia
Such a lovely page (Such a lovely page)
Such a lovely cage
Plenty of hits at the hotel googleplexia
Be it far or near(Be it far or near)
You can find it here
They got web search and Youtube, they got scholar and trends
They got gchat and email, and know all your friends
Click about and see websites, can't see a threat
You might not remember, but they never forget
I called Larry and Sergey
Asked, "why put this online?"
They said, we know everything you've done since, 1999
And still I click web search results by night and day
Seems wrong but the results are so right
Can almost hear them say...
Welcome to the hotel googleplexia
Such a lovely page (Such a lovely page)
Such a lovely cage
Livin' your life at the hotel googleplexia
Looks like a paradise (Looks like a paradise),
if you're a private eye....
Then a got a bad feeling
what if they stop being nice
They said; "Your just a customer here, and we know your price"
And in the marketers chambers,
They gathered for the feast
Troll all the data on people's lives
And they will never cease
Last thing I remember,
I had said I'd take no more
Need to get private data back
To the way it was before
Relax said the G-man
We have programmed to deceive
You can checkout any time you like,
But your data can never leave!
Welcome to the hotel googleplexia
Such a lovely page (Such a lovely page)
Such a lovely cage
Plenty of hits at the hotel googleplexia
Be it far or near(Be it far or near)
You can find it here
That's not the reason. People have always been consumerist. And to a certain extent, people have always been apathetic about science. I'm of the belief that what has changed is not the amount or type of education people have received in science, but how they have perceived it.
There was a time that when a respected scientist made a statement on something, people sat up and (politely) paid attention. Remember Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster? Name me from memory one other member of the committee? Carl Sagan was frankly, sensationalist in the way he went about things. But nevertheless people watched his programs. Scientists didn't have to be attention seeks to get respect either.
Einstein was 20 years past the media hype that surrounded his results, but such was his stature as senior physicist that it took only one short letter signed by him to convince Roosevelt that an atomic bomb was a) feasible and b) worth spending $2 billion on research and development for. Going farther back, scientists like Stokes and Kelvin sat on many important committees and inquiries deciding and investigating important issues of the day.
Once upon a time, governments would request that scientific societies produce reports or conduct studies into important matters. Nowadays, governments question, condemn or ignore such reports.
What happened? Why did Jane Fonda movies about a meltdown burrowing to the center of the earth or movies about instant freezing ice storms have more impact on our Nuclear and environmental policies than sound science? When Steven Weinberg asked the US congress to fund the Superconducting Super Collider, why did they find it so easy to decline him? The money? The Europeans have spent that amount and tenfold more on CERN and the LHC. Why, after Daubert v. Merrell Dow, do lay judges have to decide weather a scientists is actually an expert in a particular field. How did George Deutsch, a man with only a high school diploma, come to be in charge of NASA press releases?
Scientists are not respected in our society anymore. Lay people with no knowledge of the field whatsoever feel free to argue with, nitpick and outright dismiss studies and experiments. Paid think tanks command more influence than the Royal Society when it comes to science and education policy. Science by press release has become a bigger way to gain fame and funding than a mountain of research papers.
Society is to blame for this state of affairs. But should we really be looking at the education system, or parents, or teenagers, or the TV? What caused the change in attitude to science in the Anglophone world? The media? Marketers? Politicians? The legal system? All of the above? None of the above? Whatever did it, we'd best go about fixing it, because it sure as hell won't correct itself.
You filthy communist!!! By what right, by what right, should anyone have to give up their God given birthright to own in perpetuity not only the physical manifestations of , but also the copyrights on any images of, the few known fossils of extinct species of general and scientific interest!? What right to the people have to the bones of dinosaurs lying under my land, just because I happen to live in their national state and am protected by the laws and statues which it passes?!
Is it just that I be denied the right to auction and sell these priceless anthropological treasures to wealthy, cloistered individuals who will hoard them in secret for eternity? What kind of country do we live in if the profits and pleasures of the few can be superseded by the benefit, progress and interests of the many? A Communist country, That's What!!!
I found these bones by chance on my own property. Or at least, these bones were found on property belonging to me. Do you know what that means? It means that God has chosen me, and blessed me with this bountiful roll of the dice that I may enjoy it. And His Will trumps the wants of the People. If He wanted the bones to be in a museum, He would have had them found on Government property on on some altruist hippy's plot.
If it was found on their property then Folks have a RIGHT to do whatever they want with the their country's natural heritage, without restriction or regulation!! It's in the CONSTITUTION!!! If the Founding Father's had wanted there to be things that people shouldn't exclusively own, then they would have explicitly said so. They didn't, because they were great men, who recognised the benefit of cultured men being able to hang ancient lizard bones in their private study, instead of forfeiting them for the masses to paw!!
I just thank God everyday that this isn't Europe!
It's been a while since the last big, juicy pedophile headline, and I'll bet that infuriates the blocklieters that support this legislation no end. Their last major hurrah was Madeleine McCann and that went so overboard that I think the public has become quite cloyed at the whole business. The tepid response to the Dugard case could be the first sign that the public is finally becoming bored with child molestation stories.
At least, that's what I'd like to think. In reality, the next three year old's abduction will the viewing public the arousing dose of outrage it so craves.
I still remember. It was the SUV... no wait, the Tank, ...or was it the mini? Aaahhh, was it a Toyota?
I think the arts students would be more likely to carve an image her vulva.
There's a sh syntax?! I just thought the developers all suffered from dyslexia.
Ladies and Gentlemen; I give you, The Petty Bourgeoisie.
Aaawwww, shove it up your ass!! You an all the other citation Nazi's who will not allow a single item or point you disagree with to be made anywhere, anytime without an impeccable peer reviewed source, properly cited and referenced.
A curse on Wikipedia and the [citation needed] meme. It would all be very well if the meme people actually promoted critical thinking, healthy scepticism and proper fact checking. But as it is, the meme just promotes the petty and frankly groundless rebuttals typified by the parent post. Instead of actually bothering to critique specific points in the grandparent, the whole thing is simply tarnished with the [citation needed] brush in a fairly transparent attempt to outright dismiss it.
Considering that the meme originated on Wikipedia, it's not surprising that its purpose has twisted beyond its ostensible meaning. [citation needed] was always just another example of the stonewalling, wiki-lawyering and petty bureaucracy that thrive in that institution. From there, it has moved smoothly into the mainstream as a general purpose discussion terminating cliche. I have never seen actual honest debaters of any kind ask for citations in this way. Its a rhetorical technique, not an honest rebuttal.
There are points in the grandparent which could have done with some justification. Maybe. The one about the 60% feeling entitled to "steal" IP. The Android and iPhone being sunk by piracy was pretty speculative. Android developers (?!) making 1/8 less than iPhone developers. It would be nice to have all these things confirmed, but I'm not going to dismiss the entirety of the post and lower the tone of the debate by jumping up and yelling; "[Citation Needed]!! [Citation Needed]!!! Unless you can prove it to me, it's not true!!!!"
So, take your tricks back to the playground or some other net forum. Adults are talking.
Name me one company, just one, that has provided a significant and continuous source of funding for a major project that it believed in, even when the going got tough.
Just one.
If it's not EXPLICITLY stated in the US Constitution then they don't; and it is TYRANNICAL for any government to force anyone facing extreme danger to be properly informed of that fact! America isn't a COMMUNIST country, at least not yet.