Kids playing around on the internet tend to pick more interesting targets. Large multinational corporations, government organizations, that kind of thing. Try to imagine a kid saying, "Woo! I stuck it to the man! I struck a blow for freedom! I'm living dangerously! I'm such a badass because I just shut down a WATER PUMP IN ILLINOIS! FUCK YOU, ILLINOIS!"
What I can imagine is a military official talking to the commander of a cyberwarfare unit in China, and saying, "So you say you could in theory launch cyberattacks against critical U.S. infrastructure similar to the way the Americans and Israelis attacked Iran with Stuxnet. And that you could do so in such a way that the attack is untraceable? That sounds very interesting... in theory. It seems to me, however, the only way to know if it would actually work is to test it out against a real target."
...and people are willing to lend you money, as long as you have the ability to put a nuke anywhere on the planet with a couple of hours. So you see, this *is* part of a sound fiscal policy!
if women were in power you would see psychological warfare like you've never seen, and it would last a long, long time, and teh game would be played for serious detrimental effects. it would be soft power, economic and cultural, but played out to such a vicious extreme that the other country would be bereft of all confidence, culture, economy, or any other sort of ability to function as a normal society
I'm not going to dispute that women can be truly horrible. Hell hath no fury, as they say. But in recent memory, the worst governments in the world are, or have been, all run by dudes. Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria shooting their own people. Robert Mugabe running his country into the ground in Zimbabwe. Saddam Hussein's sadistic totalitarian state in Iraq. Karzai's corrupt kleptocracy in Afghanistan. The Taliban assholes that Karzai replaced. And so on. Meanwhile, Iceland is run by a lesbian. Their economy is f***ed, true, but that was all done by the men running the finance sector. Germany is run by a woman, Angela Merkel, and they're doing okay. Liberia is run by a woman, and it's not exactly a paradise, but that has something do to with the fact that until recently the country was run by Charles Taylor, a guy. We have women running the show in Argentina, Brazil, and Finland, and none of them have either started wars of aggression or descended into dictatorship. I'm not saying that women are universally more qualified... god forbid that Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin ever get into positions of real power- but their track record isn't that bad.
I use Apple and I think their products are pretty cool. I think that Steve Jobs, for all his flaws, was also a pretty cool guy- he was a visionary, an iconoclast, he spoke with passion about technology, he had that whole hipster-poet look going on with the turtleneck and the glasses. But I'd argue that he didn't change how we saw cool. I think Bill Gates and Microsoft did more on that front, because Gates is more the stereotypical nerd. Gates is not outgoing and he's not fashionable, he's the guy you imagine in the "before" picture of a bodybuilding advertisement... but he showed that the kind of person that used to be widely mocked in high school could build a multibillion dollar empire and usher in a major technological revolution, and people are willing to respect that.
So I think of those "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" ads. Selling the hipster "I'm a Mac" guy as cool isn't really that hard and isn't any sort of major cultural shift. What's remarkable is that our concept of cool has shifted enough to where it can potentially include the nerdy "I'm a PC" guy.
Steve Jobs' followers don't need to be huge in number to make a big difference, if they're the type of people who set trends. Stephen Colbert is always sporting the latest iGadget on the Colbert Report, or making a big deal about how his love affair with an Apple product is ended by the release of a newer, shinier, thinner version of the same gadget. Apple products feature prominently in movies and TV, because in the same way the director wants the character to have fashionable clothes and a sleek car, they want them to have the coolest, trendiest gadgets. If your friend who is always quick to pick up on technology trends has ditched his Kindle and is now sporting an iPad, that may not make you run out to the Apple Store but it will make you consider whether it's something you should buy. So if the people who follow Steve Jobs are the people the rest of us take our social cues from, the Reality Distortion Field can have a huge effect.
Here's a wild, crazy, totally out of left field thought.... why doesn't Microsoft try making products that aren't, like, total shit? I spent the day working on a grant proposal using with Microsoft Word and it was an absolutely excruciating experience- it's an incredibly slow program, even on a brand-new, high end Macbook Pro, it's confusing as hell, it slows down every time it communicates with Endnote to update references, and it crashes repeatedly when I do simple things like move text boxes around on the screen. It got to the point that I was saving every ten or thirty seconds just so I wouldn't lose my work when it crashed. It's just a crap product, to the point that I deeply resent the idea that I have paid any money whatsoever at all for it. I feel like Microsoft should be paying me for my wasted time. Now, maybe a real commitment to making reliable, usable products wouldn't save the company from its slow death spiral into irrelevance, but it sure as hell couldn't hurt things at this point, so why not go all nuts and give it a try?
And here's a second thought. Fire Ballmer. Whatever it takes to make a company great, it's pretty clear Ballmer doesn't have it.
To be fair, they don't do everything wrong. The Xbox is a pretty cool product. I love me that Halo.
"Hey, President Hu, is it really true that the Americans owe us so much money that if you took all the U.S. Treasury bonds we hold and spread them out, you could actually see it from space?"
All I can say is, I read this post and thought, "Weird structures, visible from outer space, built out in the desert... man, this sounds like the first five minutes of a blockbuster Hollywood sci-fi movie..." and unlike most of the stuff coming out of Hollywood these days, I *totally* want to see how this ends. I figure this movie has it all. A mysterious, civilization-threatening menace. Huge battle scenes with entire cities being obliterated. Robots, or aliens, or gods, or Chinese, or maybe Chinese alien robot gods. A scientist desperately working to unravel the mystery and decode the text. At least one smoking hot chick who runs around looking helpless in very tight clothing, implausibly cast as some sort of researcher. And finally, an elite group of U.S. soldiers, written off as a bunch of misfits by the Pentagon, who are now personally called upon by the President in our time of greatest need, to save the nation... and the world.
Another possible explanation is that groundbreaking science using state of the art technology now requires some serious financial support and infrastructure. We're talking about grants from the NSF or NIH, a lab, equipment, graduate students, postdocs... a senior scientist is more likely to have acquired the resources and built up the program to do groundbreaking work than a junior scientist. Take astronomy, for instance. Back in Galileo's day, you could just take a small telescope and point it at the moon and planets and do groundbreaking research. Now, the state of the art in astronomy requires machines like the Keck Observatory or the Hubble Space Telescope.
Re:Affordable replacement for something paid for
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The F-35 Story
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, I wouldn't want to write off the possibility that we, or our allies, find ourselves at war with a large, technologically advanced opponent- perhaps even Russia- in the next 50 years. If anyone thinks that Russia's imperialist days are long past, look at the 2008 war with Georgia over South Ossetia. Is that just a throwback to Cold War expansionism, or a preview of and practice for things to come? That being said, it's probably safe to say that the odds of such a war any time soon are much lower than they have been in decades, whereas the odds that we'll find ourselves trading fire with illiterate farmers armed with Kalashnikovs and IEDs are damn near 100%, so it's clear where our priorities should lie.
The other issue is, even assuming Russia does get their act together militarily, and even assuming they then try to throw their weight around a little, how are we going to fight that war? Odds are, it will be with unmanned drones. The Predators have proven themselves, again and again, against the Taliban in Afghanistan, terrorists in Yemen, and against conventional ground forces in Libya. And ultimately, there's no reason you can't just build larger, faster drones that have longer ranges, higher speeds, stealth capabilities, and carry a wider range of armaments- including air-to-air missiles- than current drones. We're already seeing this start to happen. They're now putting Stinger missiles on the Predator, which will allow it to shoot down other aircraft, and they're developing the General Atomics Avenger as the next-generation successor to the Predator- it has a higher speed, it can carry a larger payload, and it's got low-observability (stealth) technology incorporated into it. And the drones will only continue to get better. Pretty soon they'll be good enough that it will seem pointless to risk the lives of pilots, or a $150 million F-22, when you can send a couple of cheap drones to do the same job and not lose any sleep if they get shot down.
I agree that these guys are idiots, but it does raise a question. Isn't there some pressing need out there that cheap 3D rapid prototyping could help solve? What are the unique capabilities of this technology, and what problems would this technology be uniquely suited to solving? For instance, if you wanted to make components for cheap water filters, 3D rapid prototyping isn't the way to go. You'd get a Chinese company to manufacture the components cheaply in large quantities and then ship them to Africa. But there are advantages that a 3D rapid prototyper has that the Chinese factory doesn't- (1) it is rapid, since as soon as you have the design you can start manufacturing it, (2) it can be done anywhere in the world, so you could manufacture the components where they need to be used, instead of waiting for them to come in from the factory, and (3) it is cost effective to make limited numbers of parts, or even to make unique parts. Basically, rapid prototyping is useful when you only need to make one of something, and you need it right now. Are there any pressing problems we could solve with that kind of technology? Offhand I can't think of anything, but there must be *something* these machines are good for, besides making that one Lego part you need to finish your spaceship.
This project is just so completely naive and asinine, it's hard to even know where to start. From their site:
"With a shell shortage, hermit crabs around the world are being forced to stick their butts into bottles, shotgun shells, and anything else they can find. This is not acceptable. As a community, we can reach out to this vulnerable species..."
First of all, scarcity of a resource- in this case, shelters- is just how things operate in nature. It's not a sign that something is necessarily wrong, because in a healthy ecosystem, there's never enough to go around for everyone. Trees in the rainforest compete with each other for light, jackals on the savannah fight each other for scraps of food, elephant seals fight each other for mates. Using the same logic as these guys, you would conclude that we should put grow-lights in the Amazonian rainforest to help the poor, light-starved seedlings on the forest floor. We should be flying tons of steaks to Africa to feed the jackals so they don't have to fight each other. We should run dating services for the seals.
Second of all, referring to hermit crabs as "this species" is a clear red flag that these people don't even have the slightest clue about marine biology, or conservation, or science in general. Hermit crabs aren't a species, they're a collection of over a thousand species, ranging from the little things you see in the pet store to giant palm-tree-climbing coconut crabs three feet across. Some of them use shells, some live in sponges instead of shells, some (like coconut crabs) only use a shell for part of their life cycle, and a number (including the giant Alaska King Crab) gave up on the whole snail shell thing millions of years ago. The point is, it might make sense to talk about saving certain species of hermit crab that are threatened, but to say that hermit crabs as a whole need saving just shows an ignorance of the science.
Finally, I can't actually find any reference to hermit crabs being endangered or listed on the IUCN redlist. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are endangered species of hermit crabs, but until you've actually taken ten minutes on Google to determine whether there really are endangered species of hermit crab, and whether that actually results from a scarcity of shells, I think you're just wasting everyone's time.
Listen, if people want to make the world a better place, that's great. That's to be respected, and we need more of it, and we do more people who are concerned about taking responsibility for their communities, their world, and their environment. But good intentions aren't enough to make a difference. This kind of thing is just a waste of time and distracts from the people who are out there every day trying to solve problems that actually need solving. The technology is pretty cool, so there must be some way people could use it that would actually solve a real problem.
There was recently a segment on NPR's Fresh Air where they were playing an interview about Apple, and I remember thinking "who's this geek they're interviewing about Apple?" and then I realized it was Jobs himself, back in his NeXT days. He sounded a lot different from the Jobs I've gotten to know from the keynote addresses. That guy, the one with the black turtleneck, is a confident, slick, polished presenter, a technological oracle. The person they were interviewing on NPR was a lot more human. It makes me think that to some degree the "Steve Jobs" who presented Apple products to the world was a bit of a construct, just some guy that Jobs played, sort of like Steven Colbert's "Steven Colbert" character.
Is it a bagel? Is it a hoagie? No! It's a hogel! Come on down to Hogel Hut, where we're serving up the best hogel sandwiches in West Brooklyn. Come on down! Please? I mean it. I put my life savings into the hogel business and if this fails, I'm ruined.
Says who? WTF do you even base the comment on? Yes there scanning the data looking for sociological trends, not looking for the word bomb.
Idiot.
"Hey Steve."
"What?"
"We got a hit. Someone posted a message in an online forum repeatedly using the word 'bomb' and this dude immediately replied."
"Our sociological models suggest there's a strong possibility he's a terrorist sympathizer. Put him on the watch list. I want you to record every phone call, every email, every packet of data, have a Predator drone follow him around, and make sure he's cavity searched every time he goes through airport security."
The financial system does contribute to society by proving risk-willing capital.
"Providing risk-willing capital", i.e. loans, is not necessarily a contribution to society. If I Ioan a small business owner money to expand his business, allowing him to serve more people's needs and hire more workers, then I'm benefitting society. If I loan a responsible, financially stable homeowner the money to buy his family a house at a reasonable price, then I'm benefitting society.
But if I loan people the money to take out mortgages so that they can live beyond their means, how does that help society? If I loan someone the money to speculate by buying a house during the middle of a real estate bubble, how is that a benefit to society? And if I loan billions of dollars to investment banks and hedge funds to gamble on mortgage-backed securities and derivatives, how does that make the world a better place?
Borrowing money is called financial "leverage" because it multiplies what you can do, financially. The problem is that while it increases your ability to do good things with your money- prudent investments in a house, an education, a small business- it also increases your ability to do stupid things with your money, like buy things you can't afford, gamble with a few million bucks on a house, or gamble with a few billion dollars on mortgage-backed securities. Being able to borrow money is a good thing only when that money is wisely spent.
No matter how you slice it, this was a US president ordering (or even worse, the CIA and DoD acting without orders) a US citizen killed far from any battlefield without presenting a shred of evidence to a jury.
What the people invoking the Fifth Amendment seem to be missing is that Anwar al-Awlaki wasn't executed for the crimes he had committed. He was killed because he posed an immediate danger. The issue wasn't that he had blood on his hands, it was that if he wasn't stopped, there was going to be more blood. We're not talking about executing someone for a crime, we're talking about justifiable homicide.
If someone has committed a murder, then the job of the police is to track him down, detain him as a suspect, and try him in court. But if someone is in the process of trying to commit a murder, then the job of the police is to stop him by any means necessary- up to and including killing him, if attempting to capture him would put lives at risk. If a bank robber takes a bunch of people hostage and is threatening to kill them, then the police are completely justified in shooting him. They're not going to go, "oh my god, if only we could do something! But he's an American citizen protected by the Fifth Amendment and is therefore entitled to due process!"
The same applies here. Anwar al-Awlaki played a major role in an organization that was actively working to kill innocent people- both in the United States and abroad. Capturing him couldn't be done without risking lives, so killing him was entirely justified.
The British police are already using photographs and videos taken during the 2011 London riots to identify suspects. I don't really have a problem with that in this particular case; it seems to me that you don't have any sort of right to anonymity if you're in a public place, rioting and looting.
But the potential for abuse of this technology is just chilling. It can be used to identify rioters... but to a repressive regime, people assembling in public to protest the regime would be classified as "rioters". What would happen if, say, Iran were to buy this software and then install cameras by the thousands across Tehran and other major cities? Iran already has a national identity card system, so they would just have to digitize those photos and then they could create a database that would allow them to identify political protestors. Any time people assembled, the regime could run the faces against the database, and then show up at your door and arrest you afterwards. The next day, the next week, the next year... it would have a tremendous chilling effect on protests. For that matter, there's no reason they couldn't now go back and search through TV footage and photographs of the 2009-2010 protests and identify people from those images. It makes you wonder- would people have been as willing to turn out and demonstrate in Egypt and Tunisia if there had been cameras and a system to identify protestors? You have some protection when you're in a large group of protestors, but this technology would mean that the government could simply come and get you later, at their leisure, late at night at your house.
60,000-75,000 years is well before when many anthropologists believe we started using language and symbolic thought. Either they're wrong, or these developments were made independently across different isolated populations.
They're probably wrong. The evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens has four major branches: Aborigines, Eurasians, Africans, and Khoisan. The Aborigines and Eurasians are each other's closest relatives, Africans are more distantly related, and the Khoisan (bushmen) are the most ancient branch of our evolutionary tree. All four groups have the mental hardware to do things like use language, create artwork, and make sophisticated stone tools. While it's concievable that they each evolved that capability independently, Occam's razor says it's simpler to assume that it evolved once, than to assume it happened four separate times. And since Aborigines were around 70,000 years ago, this hardware package- what we'd called the "behaviorally modern" human- would have appeared by that time.
Consistent with this idea, you get cave paintings in Australia around 50,000 years ago, as soon as the Aborigines show up there. And you get cave paintings and sophisticated stone tools in Europe around 30,000 years ago, when the Eurasians move out of Africa. In this scenario, the reason sophisticated stone tools and cave art don't show up earlier is that advanced humans were restricted to Africa. If so, then we would expect evidence for similar behavioral complexity- cave paintings, Neolithic-quality stone tools- in Africa prior to 70,000 years. My guess is that it almost certainly exists, but we just haven't looked in the right places (because it's a lot easier to do fieldwork in Europe than in Africa) or we've found it but haven't recognized it for what it is because the artifacts haven't been dated yet.
I spoke to an associate professor that work with cognition some, and she talked about that humans are likely not meant to have very good memory.
Humans process a lot of the stimuli they take in for a long time (don't know if that's the same as low latent inhibition, but maybe), and often, when eidetic memory is present in a person, they are pretty much screwed up somewhere else, she said.
Look at this if you haven't seen it; chimps out-performing humans in memory tests:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC1nJ61l-h4
Humans might not need very good memory since we have language. We evolved in large social groups of dozens to hundreds of individuals (now thousands). It's not necessary for every individual in the group to remember, for instance, when certain trees are producing fruit, or where the best hunting grounds are, or how you make a tool. As long as a few people in the community remember, you can just ask around. You're doing a search on your social network.
How do they draw this conclusion from a single fossil? Couldn't it have been a deformed human? There are still humans born with the occasional pre-humanoid traits, like tails.
Actually, they have two skulls, which look alike. One odd skull could conceivably be an aberration, but when you have two that look alike, that's strong evidence that you're looking at the average for that population, not the outliers.
The skulls fall completely outside the range of variation seen in modern Homo sapiens, and are about halfway between H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is that these skulls are what they seem to be: not fully human. They could be hybrids between Homo sapiens and something more primitive, or a sort of "missing link" between Homo sapiens and the older species. I'm not really sure why the scientist quoted in the article says that these fossils don't mean anything. They're either modern Homo sapiens or they're not; the researchers have put forward evidence they're not, in which case they do have implications for human evolution. For a researcher to just dismiss that out of hand without offering any other explanation for the data, or explaining why the researchers' study is flawed, is in my opinion irresponsible and not the way to do science. I get the impression that these fossils don't fit with his preconceived notions so he's just dismissing them... which is a classic response you get when you find something really, really interesting that upsets people's pet theories.
If these fossils are what they say they are, there will be more evidence to back it up. More skulls showing these features will turn up. Also, they're not actually that old, so it should be possible to look at the bones for DNA- that's the obvious next step.
The point of leaking is to expose malfeasance. The point of redacting the leaked material was to limit collateral damage to those who had not acted poorly. You only leak what you need to leak in order to expose the bad acts and bad actors, but no more than that.
WikiLeaks' act of leaking the original (redacted) leaks and their suit against this new (non-redacted) leak are a consistent stance from the point of doing the most good while avoiding the most damage. But oh, to live in your simple world...
From the New York Times, August 30: "WASHINGTON — In a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials, the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks has published on the Web nearly 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables in recent days, more than six times the total disclosed publicly since the posting of the leaked State Department documents began last November. A sampling of the documents showed that the newly published cables included the names of some people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats and whose identities were marked in the cables with the warning “strictly protect.” State Department officials and human rights activists have been concerned that such diplomatic sources, including activists, journalists and academics in authoritarian countries, could face reprisals, including dismissal from their jobs, prosecution or violence."
In other words, Wikileaks no longer gives a s*** about protecting peoples' identity as long as they can get some media attention, and probably never have. As soon as Wikileaks stopped being front-page news, they increased the volume of the leaks and stopped editing them. Headlines, after all, are far more important than people's heads. But oh, to live in your simple world...
This reflects the fact that Tim Cook IS the right man for the Job, and in fact, already HAS a proven track record at Apple, since he has run the company twice (or is it three times?) during Jobs' other hiatuses (hiatii?).
What it probably reflects is that the news of Jobs departure was already factored into the stock price. Investors already knew how central Jobs has been to Apple, investors knew that Jobs had previously taken a medical leave for pancreatic cancer, and investors knew that Jobs had gotten a liver transplant which appeared to be an effort to treat a recurrence of that cancer. This wasn't insider information or anything, this was widely reported in places like Slate.com. Given that, it seemed like the question was not whether Jobs would leave but when, and everyone's been waiting for this to happen. Now it has, and the uncertainty is removed.
Slashdot Mirror
Pakistani users will have 1600 new euphemisms by the end of the week.
How are we going to replace "flogging the dolphin" though?
Abusing the porpoise?
Whipping Flipper?
Chasing the white whale?
Shaking hands with Shamu?
Strangling the Baird's Beaked Whale?
Grinding the narwhal?
OK, I've done my part. But we still need to come up with another 1594 new euphemisms for masturbation by Friday.
What I can imagine is a military official talking to the commander of a cyberwarfare unit in China, and saying, "So you say you could in theory launch cyberattacks against critical U.S. infrastructure similar to the way the Americans and Israelis attacked Iran with Stuxnet. And that you could do so in such a way that the attack is untraceable? That sounds very interesting... in theory. It seems to me, however, the only way to know if it would actually work is to test it out against a real target."
...and people are willing to lend you money, as long as you have the ability to put a nuke anywhere on the planet with a couple of hours. So you see, this *is* part of a sound fiscal policy!
I'm not going to dispute that women can be truly horrible. Hell hath no fury, as they say. But in recent memory, the worst governments in the world are, or have been, all run by dudes. Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria shooting their own people. Robert Mugabe running his country into the ground in Zimbabwe. Saddam Hussein's sadistic totalitarian state in Iraq. Karzai's corrupt kleptocracy in Afghanistan. The Taliban assholes that Karzai replaced. And so on. Meanwhile, Iceland is run by a lesbian. Their economy is f***ed, true, but that was all done by the men running the finance sector. Germany is run by a woman, Angela Merkel, and they're doing okay. Liberia is run by a woman, and it's not exactly a paradise, but that has something do to with the fact that until recently the country was run by Charles Taylor, a guy. We have women running the show in Argentina, Brazil, and Finland, and none of them have either started wars of aggression or descended into dictatorship. I'm not saying that women are universally more qualified... god forbid that Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin ever get into positions of real power- but their track record isn't that bad.
So I think of those "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" ads. Selling the hipster "I'm a Mac" guy as cool isn't really that hard and isn't any sort of major cultural shift. What's remarkable is that our concept of cool has shifted enough to where it can potentially include the nerdy "I'm a PC" guy.
Steve Jobs' followers don't need to be huge in number to make a big difference, if they're the type of people who set trends. Stephen Colbert is always sporting the latest iGadget on the Colbert Report, or making a big deal about how his love affair with an Apple product is ended by the release of a newer, shinier, thinner version of the same gadget. Apple products feature prominently in movies and TV, because in the same way the director wants the character to have fashionable clothes and a sleek car, they want them to have the coolest, trendiest gadgets. If your friend who is always quick to pick up on technology trends has ditched his Kindle and is now sporting an iPad, that may not make you run out to the Apple Store but it will make you consider whether it's something you should buy. So if the people who follow Steve Jobs are the people the rest of us take our social cues from, the Reality Distortion Field can have a huge effect.
And here's a second thought. Fire Ballmer. Whatever it takes to make a company great, it's pretty clear Ballmer doesn't have it.
To be fair, they don't do everything wrong. The Xbox is a pretty cool product. I love me that Halo.
"I dunno. Let's find out!"
All I can say is, I read this post and thought, "Weird structures, visible from outer space, built out in the desert... man, this sounds like the first five minutes of a blockbuster Hollywood sci-fi movie..." and unlike most of the stuff coming out of Hollywood these days, I *totally* want to see how this ends. I figure this movie has it all. A mysterious, civilization-threatening menace. Huge battle scenes with entire cities being obliterated. Robots, or aliens, or gods, or Chinese, or maybe Chinese alien robot gods. A scientist desperately working to unravel the mystery and decode the text. At least one smoking hot chick who runs around looking helpless in very tight clothing, implausibly cast as some sort of researcher. And finally, an elite group of U.S. soldiers, written off as a bunch of misfits by the Pentagon, who are now personally called upon by the President in our time of greatest need, to save the nation... and the world.
Another possible explanation is that groundbreaking science using state of the art technology now requires some serious financial support and infrastructure. We're talking about grants from the NSF or NIH, a lab, equipment, graduate students, postdocs... a senior scientist is more likely to have acquired the resources and built up the program to do groundbreaking work than a junior scientist. Take astronomy, for instance. Back in Galileo's day, you could just take a small telescope and point it at the moon and planets and do groundbreaking research. Now, the state of the art in astronomy requires machines like the Keck Observatory or the Hubble Space Telescope.
The other issue is, even assuming Russia does get their act together militarily, and even assuming they then try to throw their weight around a little, how are we going to fight that war? Odds are, it will be with unmanned drones. The Predators have proven themselves, again and again, against the Taliban in Afghanistan, terrorists in Yemen, and against conventional ground forces in Libya. And ultimately, there's no reason you can't just build larger, faster drones that have longer ranges, higher speeds, stealth capabilities, and carry a wider range of armaments- including air-to-air missiles- than current drones. We're already seeing this start to happen. They're now putting Stinger missiles on the Predator, which will allow it to shoot down other aircraft, and they're developing the General Atomics Avenger as the next-generation successor to the Predator- it has a higher speed, it can carry a larger payload, and it's got low-observability (stealth) technology incorporated into it. And the drones will only continue to get better. Pretty soon they'll be good enough that it will seem pointless to risk the lives of pilots, or a $150 million F-22, when you can send a couple of cheap drones to do the same job and not lose any sleep if they get shot down.
I agree that these guys are idiots, but it does raise a question. Isn't there some pressing need out there that cheap 3D rapid prototyping could help solve? What are the unique capabilities of this technology, and what problems would this technology be uniquely suited to solving? For instance, if you wanted to make components for cheap water filters, 3D rapid prototyping isn't the way to go. You'd get a Chinese company to manufacture the components cheaply in large quantities and then ship them to Africa. But there are advantages that a 3D rapid prototyper has that the Chinese factory doesn't- (1) it is rapid, since as soon as you have the design you can start manufacturing it, (2) it can be done anywhere in the world, so you could manufacture the components where they need to be used, instead of waiting for them to come in from the factory, and (3) it is cost effective to make limited numbers of parts, or even to make unique parts. Basically, rapid prototyping is useful when you only need to make one of something, and you need it right now. Are there any pressing problems we could solve with that kind of technology? Offhand I can't think of anything, but there must be *something* these machines are good for, besides making that one Lego part you need to finish your spaceship.
"With a shell shortage, hermit crabs around the world are being forced to stick their butts into bottles, shotgun shells, and anything else they can find. This is not acceptable. As a community, we can reach out to this vulnerable species..."
First of all, scarcity of a resource- in this case, shelters- is just how things operate in nature. It's not a sign that something is necessarily wrong, because in a healthy ecosystem, there's never enough to go around for everyone. Trees in the rainforest compete with each other for light, jackals on the savannah fight each other for scraps of food, elephant seals fight each other for mates. Using the same logic as these guys, you would conclude that we should put grow-lights in the Amazonian rainforest to help the poor, light-starved seedlings on the forest floor. We should be flying tons of steaks to Africa to feed the jackals so they don't have to fight each other. We should run dating services for the seals.
Second of all, referring to hermit crabs as "this species" is a clear red flag that these people don't even have the slightest clue about marine biology, or conservation, or science in general. Hermit crabs aren't a species, they're a collection of over a thousand species, ranging from the little things you see in the pet store to giant palm-tree-climbing coconut crabs three feet across. Some of them use shells, some live in sponges instead of shells, some (like coconut crabs) only use a shell for part of their life cycle, and a number (including the giant Alaska King Crab) gave up on the whole snail shell thing millions of years ago. The point is, it might make sense to talk about saving certain species of hermit crab that are threatened, but to say that hermit crabs as a whole need saving just shows an ignorance of the science.
Finally, I can't actually find any reference to hermit crabs being endangered or listed on the IUCN redlist. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are endangered species of hermit crabs, but until you've actually taken ten minutes on Google to determine whether there really are endangered species of hermit crab, and whether that actually results from a scarcity of shells, I think you're just wasting everyone's time.
Listen, if people want to make the world a better place, that's great. That's to be respected, and we need more of it, and we do more people who are concerned about taking responsibility for their communities, their world, and their environment. But good intentions aren't enough to make a difference. This kind of thing is just a waste of time and distracts from the people who are out there every day trying to solve problems that actually need solving. The technology is pretty cool, so there must be some way people could use it that would actually solve a real problem.
There was recently a segment on NPR's Fresh Air where they were playing an interview about Apple, and I remember thinking "who's this geek they're interviewing about Apple?" and then I realized it was Jobs himself, back in his NeXT days. He sounded a lot different from the Jobs I've gotten to know from the keynote addresses. That guy, the one with the black turtleneck, is a confident, slick, polished presenter, a technological oracle. The person they were interviewing on NPR was a lot more human. It makes me think that to some degree the "Steve Jobs" who presented Apple products to the world was a bit of a construct, just some guy that Jobs played, sort of like Steven Colbert's "Steven Colbert" character.
I'll bet he just stole the source code from Rick James' startup.
What the heck is a "hogel"?.
Is it a bagel? Is it a hoagie? No! It's a hogel! Come on down to Hogel Hut, where we're serving up the best hogel sandwiches in West Brooklyn. Come on down! Please? I mean it. I put my life savings into the hogel business and if this fails, I'm ruined.
Says who? WTF do you even base the comment on? Yes there scanning the data looking for sociological trends, not looking for the word bomb.
Idiot.
"Hey Steve."
"What?"
"We got a hit. Someone posted a message in an online forum repeatedly using the word 'bomb' and this dude immediately replied."
"Our sociological models suggest there's a strong possibility he's a terrorist sympathizer. Put him on the watch list. I want you to record every phone call, every email, every packet of data, have a Predator drone follow him around, and make sure he's cavity searched every time he goes through airport security."
"Will do."
The financial system does contribute to society by proving risk-willing capital.
"Providing risk-willing capital", i.e. loans, is not necessarily a contribution to society. If I Ioan a small business owner money to expand his business, allowing him to serve more people's needs and hire more workers, then I'm benefitting society. If I loan a responsible, financially stable homeowner the money to buy his family a house at a reasonable price, then I'm benefitting society.
But if I loan people the money to take out mortgages so that they can live beyond their means, how does that help society? If I loan someone the money to speculate by buying a house during the middle of a real estate bubble, how is that a benefit to society? And if I loan billions of dollars to investment banks and hedge funds to gamble on mortgage-backed securities and derivatives, how does that make the world a better place?
Borrowing money is called financial "leverage" because it multiplies what you can do, financially. The problem is that while it increases your ability to do good things with your money- prudent investments in a house, an education, a small business- it also increases your ability to do stupid things with your money, like buy things you can't afford, gamble with a few million bucks on a house, or gamble with a few billion dollars on mortgage-backed securities. Being able to borrow money is a good thing only when that money is wisely spent.
No matter how you slice it, this was a US president ordering (or even worse, the CIA and DoD acting without orders) a US citizen killed far from any battlefield without presenting a shred of evidence to a jury.
What the people invoking the Fifth Amendment seem to be missing is that Anwar al-Awlaki wasn't executed for the crimes he had committed. He was killed because he posed an immediate danger. The issue wasn't that he had blood on his hands, it was that if he wasn't stopped, there was going to be more blood. We're not talking about executing someone for a crime, we're talking about justifiable homicide.
If someone has committed a murder, then the job of the police is to track him down, detain him as a suspect, and try him in court. But if someone is in the process of trying to commit a murder, then the job of the police is to stop him by any means necessary- up to and including killing him, if attempting to capture him would put lives at risk. If a bank robber takes a bunch of people hostage and is threatening to kill them, then the police are completely justified in shooting him. They're not going to go, "oh my god, if only we could do something! But he's an American citizen protected by the Fifth Amendment and is therefore entitled to due process!"
The same applies here. Anwar al-Awlaki played a major role in an organization that was actively working to kill innocent people- both in the United States and abroad. Capturing him couldn't be done without risking lives, so killing him was entirely justified.
But the potential for abuse of this technology is just chilling. It can be used to identify rioters... but to a repressive regime, people assembling in public to protest the regime would be classified as "rioters". What would happen if, say, Iran were to buy this software and then install cameras by the thousands across Tehran and other major cities? Iran already has a national identity card system, so they would just have to digitize those photos and then they could create a database that would allow them to identify political protestors. Any time people assembled, the regime could run the faces against the database, and then show up at your door and arrest you afterwards. The next day, the next week, the next year... it would have a tremendous chilling effect on protests. For that matter, there's no reason they couldn't now go back and search through TV footage and photographs of the 2009-2010 protests and identify people from those images. It makes you wonder- would people have been as willing to turn out and demonstrate in Egypt and Tunisia if there had been cameras and a system to identify protestors? You have some protection when you're in a large group of protestors, but this technology would mean that the government could simply come and get you later, at their leisure, late at night at your house.
They're probably wrong. The evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens has four major branches: Aborigines, Eurasians, Africans, and Khoisan. The Aborigines and Eurasians are each other's closest relatives, Africans are more distantly related, and the Khoisan (bushmen) are the most ancient branch of our evolutionary tree. All four groups have the mental hardware to do things like use language, create artwork, and make sophisticated stone tools. While it's concievable that they each evolved that capability independently, Occam's razor says it's simpler to assume that it evolved once, than to assume it happened four separate times. And since Aborigines were around 70,000 years ago, this hardware package- what we'd called the "behaviorally modern" human- would have appeared by that time.
Consistent with this idea, you get cave paintings in Australia around 50,000 years ago, as soon as the Aborigines show up there. And you get cave paintings and sophisticated stone tools in Europe around 30,000 years ago, when the Eurasians move out of Africa. In this scenario, the reason sophisticated stone tools and cave art don't show up earlier is that advanced humans were restricted to Africa. If so, then we would expect evidence for similar behavioral complexity- cave paintings, Neolithic-quality stone tools- in Africa prior to 70,000 years. My guess is that it almost certainly exists, but we just haven't looked in the right places (because it's a lot easier to do fieldwork in Europe than in Africa) or we've found it but haven't recognized it for what it is because the artifacts haven't been dated yet.
I spoke to an associate professor that work with cognition some, and she talked about that humans are likely not meant to have very good memory. Humans process a lot of the stimuli they take in for a long time (don't know if that's the same as low latent inhibition, but maybe), and often, when eidetic memory is present in a person, they are pretty much screwed up somewhere else, she said. Look at this if you haven't seen it; chimps out-performing humans in memory tests: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC1nJ61l-h4
Humans might not need very good memory since we have language. We evolved in large social groups of dozens to hundreds of individuals (now thousands). It's not necessary for every individual in the group to remember, for instance, when certain trees are producing fruit, or where the best hunting grounds are, or how you make a tool. As long as a few people in the community remember, you can just ask around. You're doing a search on your social network.
Actually, they have two skulls, which look alike. One odd skull could conceivably be an aberration, but when you have two that look alike, that's strong evidence that you're looking at the average for that population, not the outliers.
The skulls fall completely outside the range of variation seen in modern Homo sapiens, and are about halfway between H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is that these skulls are what they seem to be: not fully human. They could be hybrids between Homo sapiens and something more primitive, or a sort of "missing link" between Homo sapiens and the older species. I'm not really sure why the scientist quoted in the article says that these fossils don't mean anything. They're either modern Homo sapiens or they're not; the researchers have put forward evidence they're not, in which case they do have implications for human evolution. For a researcher to just dismiss that out of hand without offering any other explanation for the data, or explaining why the researchers' study is flawed, is in my opinion irresponsible and not the way to do science. I get the impression that these fossils don't fit with his preconceived notions so he's just dismissing them... which is a classic response you get when you find something really, really interesting that upsets people's pet theories.
If these fossils are what they say they are, there will be more evidence to back it up. More skulls showing these features will turn up. Also, they're not actually that old, so it should be possible to look at the bones for DNA- that's the obvious next step.
The point of leaking is to expose malfeasance. The point of redacting the leaked material was to limit collateral damage to those who had not acted poorly. You only leak what you need to leak in order to expose the bad acts and bad actors, but no more than that.
WikiLeaks' act of leaking the original (redacted) leaks and their suit against this new (non-redacted) leak are a consistent stance from the point of doing the most good while avoiding the most damage. But oh, to live in your simple world...
From the New York Times, August 30: "WASHINGTON — In a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials, the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks has published on the Web nearly 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables in recent days, more than six times the total disclosed publicly since the posting of the leaked State Department documents began last November. A sampling of the documents showed that the newly published cables included the names of some people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats and whose identities were marked in the cables with the warning “strictly protect.” State Department officials and human rights activists have been concerned that such diplomatic sources, including activists, journalists and academics in authoritarian countries, could face reprisals, including dismissal from their jobs, prosecution or violence."
In other words, Wikileaks no longer gives a s*** about protecting peoples' identity as long as they can get some media attention, and probably never have. As soon as Wikileaks stopped being front-page news, they increased the volume of the leaks and stopped editing them. Headlines, after all, are far more important than people's heads. But oh, to live in your simple world...
What it probably reflects is that the news of Jobs departure was already factored into the stock price. Investors already knew how central Jobs has been to Apple, investors knew that Jobs had previously taken a medical leave for pancreatic cancer, and investors knew that Jobs had gotten a liver transplant which appeared to be an effort to treat a recurrence of that cancer. This wasn't insider information or anything, this was widely reported in places like Slate.com. Given that, it seemed like the question was not whether Jobs would leave but when, and everyone's been waiting for this to happen. Now it has, and the uncertainty is removed.