It's also the press. They like a good debate, or findings that supposedly overturn conventional wisdom; nothing makes a good story like conflict. The result is that you're more likely to hear a story to the effect of "New study proves all previous research dead wrong" than "New study confirms what we knew all along" and they will tend to exaggerate the extent to which a study departs from previous studies.
Which reminds me, there was a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which said that all these conflicting health reports could stress you out and be bad for your health. But then a report in the Lancet came out proving the opposite.
And that's what makes the military great. Because you fight for something bigger than yourself.
And don't the al Qaeda soldiers and suicide bombers fight for something bigger than themselves? So according to this logic, would that make their organizations great as well?
Because you actually do something to help with the defense of your country and the greater freedom of people around the world.
And doesn't the Al Qaeda soldier or the Palestinian with a bunch of plastic explosives strapped to his chest tell himself that he's defending the Islamic world?
You finally become part of something bigger that's not all about me me me.
And isn't joining the Taliban, the insurgency or a terrorist cell joining something bigger that isn't all about me, me, me?
You have to have blind trust that you're doing the right thing and that the orders you got are good to go and that for the vast majority of people is impossible.
And don't the al Qaeda guys, the suicide bombers and the insurgents have blind faith that what they are doing is the right thing, and that their orders are good to go?
All of these supposed virtues can be exploited for foolish purposes and evil ends, and often are. Perhaps the world would do better with a lot less blind, unquestioning obedience.
All scientific programs in the US are hit by serious budget cuts. Eliminate all chances of finding a job for an entire generation of scientists and you cripple science for decades.
After cuts last year, the National Science Foundation saw a modest increase this year, but not enough to keep pace with inflation. Likewise, the 2006 budget for the National Institutes of Health fails to keep pace with inflation. DARPA is being pushed away from pure research, and now NASA's science is being put on hold. Bush can say whatever he wants, but these are not the actions of an administration that gives a damn about science.
I don't think we scientists deserve to get funded for whatever expensive and highly exotic blue-sky project we can dream up, but I do think that the strength of America's scientific research has been an important ingredient of America's economic success over the past 50 years, and cutting this funding is like starving the goose that lays golden eggs to save a few pennies on bird feed. In the long run, this may hurt more than the scientists: this may hurt America's ability to compete, it may hurt the American economy, and it may hurt the ability of our kids to get decent jobs.
That's exactly where the money is going: to develop the CEV. Which happens to be the manned replacement for the Shuttle. There is also the big booster built from Shuttle-system components that will be used for heavy lifting big cargo.
Let's get rid of that while we're at it. Given how much manned programs cost, and given how rapidly the capabilities of the unmanned probes and rovers are increasing, sending humans into space will soon have little more merit than sending monkeys into space. It's not even terribly romantic anymore. The unmanned Mars rovers did far more to inspire than just about anything the manned program has done in twenty years.
Sure, all else being equal, I'm for humans being in space. But if it does come down to cutting the manned missions or the science (and they pretty much are separate at this point I think), let's cut the manned missions.
Didn't I see this in a movie once? (Or twice? Or ten different times?) I'm pretty sure I already know what's going to happen:
One of the sharks will be smarter than the rest. It will figure out how to escape its captivity, then lead the rest of the sharks in an attack on tasty human morsels. One by one the humans and sharks will destroy each other. At the end of the movie, the hero/heroine will defeat the Big Bad shark with something lame like a live wire. The sharky explodes in gibblets and everyone lives happily ever after.
Or do they.... ?
That's the stupidest, most cliché idea for a movie I've ever heard. You should go to Hollywood and make millions as a screenwriter.
For some reason, making money on the web is looked down apon here at Slashdot
I don't think the Slashdot community is against making money; I think they're all for it, IF you provide useful goods or services in the process. It's those people who are trying to make something while offering little or nothing in return that the community dislikes.
nevermind that Slashdot itself is awash in ads, and produces no original content at all
Sure it produces content. It produces the intelligent and insightful commentary of the readers.
Are there just not enough moderators? i know i havent had mod points in at least half a year. For the last week or so ive seen so many stories with hundreds of comments but few modded up. what gives?
I've noticed the same thing. I suspect that the volume of postings has increased while the number of mod points awarded has been kept relatively constant. I've also found that some of my postings which previously would have gotten a +5 funny/insightful now languish at 2... of course, it could be I'm modded up less because I'm dumber and more boring than I used to be.
It's a bit of a balancing act- on the one hand, if there are too many mod points and too many people getting modded up, it defeats the purpose of mod points- you want a few good things to rise to the top, not everything, to make it possible to skim the discussions for intelligent comments. On the other hand, if nothing gets modded then slashdot functions just like a regular newsgroup. A continually evolving system like Slashdot obviously needs continuous tinkering to get the balance right, but it seems that this isn't being done.
While we're bitching about how Slashdot works, the other issue that people bring up continually is the articles themselves, and how a lot are either dupes or completely uninformative. And that could also affect moderation, of course- moderators would rather spend their mod points on an interesting discussion than a boring one. I suspect most of the readers would like to see moderation of the articles themselves, but the editors don't because it would mean more work if we don't let them get away with crap articles. Otherwise they can go "eh, I'm feeling lazy today... I'm just gonna post four articles taken off the latest Google press releases, and then play World of Warcraft the rest of the day."
Sophisticated ideas can be difficult to understand, so you can trick some people into thinking even your dumbest ideas are clever and sophisticated by making them impossible to understand.
Academics are some of the worst offenders when it comes to this, which is one reason why their papers are so dense and difficult to read, even for other academics. I try not to pull this kind of crap... I figure, anybody impressed by your vocabulary, rather than the content of your thoughts, isn't really worth impressing.
True, they don't. But then, a parachute attached to the pieces in chess doesn't make any sense.
Obviously you've never played chess using my rules. I think it's quite an improvement on the original game, but I have trouble finding people to play with. I wonder if this might have something to do with my rules for castling, which involves a car battery, jumper cables, live hornets, and kerosene.
Does anybody still beleive that this election wasn't fixed? I mean, really. Of course it'll never be proven, but it's so freakin' obvious. Incompetence can only explain so many problems - I think we've passed that point a long time ago.
Its an appealing thought. I mean, the alternative is to believe that more than half the country was dumb enough to believe that the same jackasses who failed to stop 9/11 and royally screwed up in Iraq were the best guys to protect us from further terrorist attacks and the best guys to fix Iraq.
There's something very comforting about conspiracy theories in general. I mean, if it's a conspiracy you at least have a chance to fight that; it's just the actions of a few people. But if the problems of the world emerge from the apathy, stupidity, ignorance, greed, and hate of billions of people, including ourselves... well, that's a little more difficult to tackle and a little more depressing to think about.
I'll admidt I really don't understand what the article is talking about, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with Heisenberg's Uncertainty...
This sounds like zen buddhist computer science. Either that or something cooked up after a little too much of the green stuff. Still, makes me wonder. What kind of software do you run... erm, not run... on a computer that isn't running? Non-existent programs, like Duke Nukem Forever?
Hrm. That would open up a whole new industry. That'd be a fun profession, full-time vaporware programmer... hell, I'm gonna start right now. I'm officially announcing VaporWorks, an integrated word processor, spreadsheet, calendar and presentation software suite, not running on your computer in the near future. If anyone needs me, I'll be on the beach in Cancun spending my startup money, not busy working 16 hour days to get it ready.
This is (a) kind of short-sighted and (b) a logical fallacy.
Imagine you're in some gang-infested urban area and someone brings a 5-year old into the O.R. who's been hit by a stray bullet during a driveby shooting. What should you do?
I mean, you can make the argument that the only thing that's going to solve this kind of thing is long term solutions, which might include: better policing, looking at changing gun legislation, addressing the underlying causes of social inequality and poverty, change of U.S. approach towards fighting drug use- everything that contributes to urban violence. Since these are the only things that will solve gang violence in the long term, we shouldn't bother to operate on the poor kid and sew him back up. Basically that's the argument you're making: don't bother to save lives now because that doesn't address the root causes.
It's the same deal with the developing world. In the long term, we need to have security, political freedom, free presses, market reforms, less corruption, the rule of law. But all of those things take years to accomplish even if you're not dealing with fundamentally different cultures which may not share many of your values and beliefs; creating stable governments is not the type of thing that can be done overnight as Iraq demonstrates (a better example would be Kosovo, because we didn't cock that up completely after we went in and it's *still* a long-term project). In the meantime, people are suffering from diseases, dying and starving now. Telling them that we're creating a liberal government is going to be little comfort.
The answer is that we need to do both: we've got to engage in both a long-term effort to address the root causes of this poverty, and we've got to address its short-term effects and symptoms. Going back to the analogy with the kid, sew him up and then try to deal with the underlying causes of the violence. That being said, we do need to reexamine how charity and aid are distributed. Is our aid money getting where it's needed? Are our short-term efforts to reduce suffering hurting long-term efforts to reduce poverty? I wonder to what extent foreign aid may create dependency and foster the view that Africa needs to look outward for help and solutions, instead of inward.
One final note... anyone who has a solid handle on how to cure poverty in places like Africa has either spent less than ten weeks there... or more than ten years.
On the contrary, these sound like practical ideas from someone who's been there.
When I was in Madagascar, one thing I noticed is that homemade carts were one of the major ways goods were moved. But the Malagasy lack the skills to build decent wheels, so you'd see these cockeyed contraptions made of rebar, or else scavenged sets of ball bearings used as tiny wheels. Better wheels for handcarts, dollies and bicycles would improve the economy by allowing people to transport their goods within and between towns faster, further, and with less effort. I suspect that this kind of simple, practical technology would do much to improve the average person's life. Likewise, better and cheaper tools such as machetes, knives, hammers and shovels would do a lot to help farmers produce more with less input of money and effort. My basic take on the country is that a nationwide crash-course in Shop 101 might do a lot more good than CS 101; then we can worry about the computers.
How to accomplish this is arguable. The easiest and most cost-effective thing to do might be start out at the level of training craftsmen and setting up workshops, rather than large-scale factories. Small towns in Madagascar don't need a full-scale wheel factory, but they could use a couple craftsmen who know how to make wooden wheels the old fashioned way, and some good blacksmiths, or some small shops equipped with lathes and drill presses, with a few guys who know how to use them.
Well a byte will store two digits or one letter. So if we need a 10 digit number that's five bytes, then we'll be generous and leave 35 characters for first and last name. That would give us 40 bytes for each phone # and name... allowing you to store two hundred million phone numbers. Wow, I've gotta run out and get me one of these!
I agree that computer != technology but I don't know that I would call cooking technology. To quote from Douglas Adams, "Another problem with the net is that it's still 'technology', and 'technology', as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is 'stuff that doesn't work yet.'
Well, according to that definition, my cooking would qualify as technology...
Anyone else remember the whole "Network Computer" concept of having a stripped-down machine that accessed applications and documents from a central server? This strikes me as somewhat similar in intent, the idea to have your PC do less and a server on the other end do more. And if the network computer concept is any indication, it's going to be equally doomed to failure.
Please transform the following disputed sentence into a sentence that ends other than with a preposition: "The public domain should be cared about."
Please transform the following disputed sentence into a sentence that ends other than with a preposition: "Tepples should be recognized as an anal-retentive grammar Nazi who really needs to get laid more often."
By focusing on what the United States does, not what it says. When the United States occupies an Islamic nation on pretenses of WMD and Iraq/al-Qaeda connections that were (at best) wildly inaccurate, then allows that country to descend into anarchy and insurgency, kills tens of thousands of civilians in the processes, goes around roughing up people more or less at random and engaging in the same kinds of torture that the former dictator did... well, no shit you're gonna be unpopular. All the slick TV spots in the world ain't gonna change that.
On the other hand, when you're a force that's saving lives and making things better- as the U.S. military was in Indonesia- our popularity goes up. The problem isn't the perception of our foreign policy, the problem IS our foreign policy. The neocons need to get out of their little alternate universe of spin and start dealing in the real world, like the old-school Republicans of Bush H. W. Bush's administration.
How about just using bicycles? Many cities- Berlin and lots of places in China come to mind- are really bicycle friendly; I would really love it if more North American cities were geared for bicycle commuting. It's got many of the advantages of the Segway, it's cheaper, you get exercise, it's not a lot slower than a car when you factor in all the traffic in dense urban settings, and the biggest advantage over a car is that you don't have to deal with the nightmare of parking.
Cold fusion is not really a good analogy. Water purification and power generation are certainly possible, the question is applying the technology in a cost-effective fashion and then figuring out a way to implement it.
I'm usually skeptical of a lot of efforts to solve poverty through technology- but this is definitely headed in the right direction. In my opinion, the most pressing needs in the developing world are the most basic ones: clean water, food, medical care, roads, electricity, basic literacy. Laptops or whatever are way down on the list because their potential payoff is relatively small compared to their cost. Things like clean water and cheap electricity could have big payoffs with relatively little investment; if you're suffering from less disease your productivity will go up, if you have light in the evening your kids can do their homework and the parents can do more work.
Whether or not he's got the solution, he's at least got the right problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Which reminds me, there was a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which said that all these conflicting health reports could stress you out and be bad for your health. But then a report in the Lancet came out proving the opposite.
And don't the al Qaeda soldiers and suicide bombers fight for something bigger than themselves? So according to this logic, would that make their organizations great as well?
Because you actually do something to help with the defense of your country and the greater freedom of people around the world.
And doesn't the Al Qaeda soldier or the Palestinian with a bunch of plastic explosives strapped to his chest tell himself that he's defending the Islamic world?
You finally become part of something bigger that's not all about me me me.
And isn't joining the Taliban, the insurgency or a terrorist cell joining something bigger that isn't all about me, me, me?
You have to have blind trust that you're doing the right thing and that the orders you got are good to go and that for the vast majority of people is impossible.
And don't the al Qaeda guys, the suicide bombers and the insurgents have blind faith that what they are doing is the right thing, and that their orders are good to go?
All of these supposed virtues can be exploited for foolish purposes and evil ends, and often are. Perhaps the world would do better with a lot less blind, unquestioning obedience.
Breaking news: advertisement misleading, report at 11.
Only one answer then. We'll establish a foundation on the edge of the Galaxy to preserve these documents for the next thousand years...
After cuts last year, the National Science Foundation saw a modest increase this year, but not enough to keep pace with inflation. Likewise, the 2006 budget for the National Institutes of Health fails to keep pace with inflation. DARPA is being pushed away from pure research, and now NASA's science is being put on hold. Bush can say whatever he wants, but these are not the actions of an administration that gives a damn about science.
I don't think we scientists deserve to get funded for whatever expensive and highly exotic blue-sky project we can dream up, but I do think that the strength of America's scientific research has been an important ingredient of America's economic success over the past 50 years, and cutting this funding is like starving the goose that lays golden eggs to save a few pennies on bird feed. In the long run, this may hurt more than the scientists: this may hurt America's ability to compete, it may hurt the American economy, and it may hurt the ability of our kids to get decent jobs.
Let's get rid of that while we're at it. Given how much manned programs cost, and given how rapidly the capabilities of the unmanned probes and rovers are increasing, sending humans into space will soon have little more merit than sending monkeys into space. It's not even terribly romantic anymore. The unmanned Mars rovers did far more to inspire than just about anything the manned program has done in twenty years.
Sure, all else being equal, I'm for humans being in space. But if it does come down to cutting the manned missions or the science (and they pretty much are separate at this point I think), let's cut the manned missions.
That's the stupidest, most cliché idea for a movie I've ever heard. You should go to Hollywood and make millions as a screenwriter.
The NSA issued a press release stating that its whole domestic spying operation was just part of a homework assignment.
I don't think the Slashdot community is against making money; I think they're all for it, IF you provide useful goods or services in the process. It's those people who are trying to make something while offering little or nothing in return that the community dislikes.
nevermind that Slashdot itself is awash in ads, and produces no original content at all
Sure it produces content. It produces the intelligent and insightful commentary of the readers.
Hrm. On second thought, I concede your point.
I've noticed the same thing. I suspect that the volume of postings has increased while the number of mod points awarded has been kept relatively constant. I've also found that some of my postings which previously would have gotten a +5 funny/insightful now languish at 2... of course, it could be I'm modded up less because I'm dumber and more boring than I used to be.
It's a bit of a balancing act- on the one hand, if there are too many mod points and too many people getting modded up, it defeats the purpose of mod points- you want a few good things to rise to the top, not everything, to make it possible to skim the discussions for intelligent comments. On the other hand, if nothing gets modded then slashdot functions just like a regular newsgroup. A continually evolving system like Slashdot obviously needs continuous tinkering to get the balance right, but it seems that this isn't being done.
While we're bitching about how Slashdot works, the other issue that people bring up continually is the articles themselves, and how a lot are either dupes or completely uninformative. And that could also affect moderation, of course- moderators would rather spend their mod points on an interesting discussion than a boring one. I suspect most of the readers would like to see moderation of the articles themselves, but the editors don't because it would mean more work if we don't let them get away with crap articles. Otherwise they can go "eh, I'm feeling lazy today... I'm just gonna post four articles taken off the latest Google press releases, and then play World of Warcraft the rest of the day."
You can pick up lots of those hockey-puck mice on eBay for about three bucks.
Academics are some of the worst offenders when it comes to this, which is one reason why their papers are so dense and difficult to read, even for other academics. I try not to pull this kind of crap... I figure, anybody impressed by your vocabulary, rather than the content of your thoughts, isn't really worth impressing.
Obviously you've never played chess using my rules. I think it's quite an improvement on the original game, but I have trouble finding people to play with. I wonder if this might have something to do with my rules for castling, which involves a car battery, jumper cables, live hornets, and kerosene.
Its an appealing thought. I mean, the alternative is to believe that more than half the country was dumb enough to believe that the same jackasses who failed to stop 9/11 and royally screwed up in Iraq were the best guys to protect us from further terrorist attacks and the best guys to fix Iraq.
There's something very comforting about conspiracy theories in general. I mean, if it's a conspiracy you at least have a chance to fight that; it's just the actions of a few people. But if the problems of the world emerge from the apathy, stupidity, ignorance, greed, and hate of billions of people, including ourselves... well, that's a little more difficult to tackle and a little more depressing to think about.
It must all be the CIA's fault.
This sounds like zen buddhist computer science. Either that or something cooked up after a little too much of the green stuff. Still, makes me wonder. What kind of software do you run... erm, not run... on a computer that isn't running? Non-existent programs, like Duke Nukem Forever?
Hrm. That would open up a whole new industry. That'd be a fun profession, full-time vaporware programmer... hell, I'm gonna start right now. I'm officially announcing VaporWorks, an integrated word processor, spreadsheet, calendar and presentation software suite, not running on your computer in the near future. If anyone needs me, I'll be on the beach in Cancun spending my startup money, not busy working 16 hour days to get it ready.
Imagine you're in some gang-infested urban area and someone brings a 5-year old into the O.R. who's been hit by a stray bullet during a driveby shooting. What should you do?
I mean, you can make the argument that the only thing that's going to solve this kind of thing is long term solutions, which might include: better policing, looking at changing gun legislation, addressing the underlying causes of social inequality and poverty, change of U.S. approach towards fighting drug use- everything that contributes to urban violence. Since these are the only things that will solve gang violence in the long term, we shouldn't bother to operate on the poor kid and sew him back up. Basically that's the argument you're making: don't bother to save lives now because that doesn't address the root causes.
It's the same deal with the developing world. In the long term, we need to have security, political freedom, free presses, market reforms, less corruption, the rule of law. But all of those things take years to accomplish even if you're not dealing with fundamentally different cultures which may not share many of your values and beliefs; creating stable governments is not the type of thing that can be done overnight as Iraq demonstrates (a better example would be Kosovo, because we didn't cock that up completely after we went in and it's *still* a long-term project). In the meantime, people are suffering from diseases, dying and starving now. Telling them that we're creating a liberal government is going to be little comfort.
The answer is that we need to do both: we've got to engage in both a long-term effort to address the root causes of this poverty, and we've got to address its short-term effects and symptoms. Going back to the analogy with the kid, sew him up and then try to deal with the underlying causes of the violence. That being said, we do need to reexamine how charity and aid are distributed. Is our aid money getting where it's needed? Are our short-term efforts to reduce suffering hurting long-term efforts to reduce poverty? I wonder to what extent foreign aid may create dependency and foster the view that Africa needs to look outward for help and solutions, instead of inward.
One final note... anyone who has a solid handle on how to cure poverty in places like Africa has either spent less than ten weeks there... or more than ten years.
When I was in Madagascar, one thing I noticed is that homemade carts were one of the major ways goods were moved. But the Malagasy lack the skills to build decent wheels, so you'd see these cockeyed contraptions made of rebar, or else scavenged sets of ball bearings used as tiny wheels. Better wheels for handcarts, dollies and bicycles would improve the economy by allowing people to transport their goods within and between towns faster, further, and with less effort. I suspect that this kind of simple, practical technology would do much to improve the average person's life. Likewise, better and cheaper tools such as machetes, knives, hammers and shovels would do a lot to help farmers produce more with less input of money and effort. My basic take on the country is that a nationwide crash-course in Shop 101 might do a lot more good than CS 101; then we can worry about the computers.
How to accomplish this is arguable. The easiest and most cost-effective thing to do might be start out at the level of training craftsmen and setting up workshops, rather than large-scale factories. Small towns in Madagascar don't need a full-scale wheel factory, but they could use a couple craftsmen who know how to make wooden wheels the old fashioned way, and some good blacksmiths, or some small shops equipped with lathes and drill presses, with a few guys who know how to use them.
Sigh. Now if only I had someone to call.
I couldn't agree with you more. But what's this "Grand theft auto" thing you're talking about?
Well, according to that definition, my cooking would qualify as technology...
Anyone else remember the whole "Network Computer" concept of having a stripped-down machine that accessed applications and documents from a central server? This strikes me as somewhat similar in intent, the idea to have your PC do less and a server on the other end do more. And if the network computer concept is any indication, it's going to be equally doomed to failure.
Please transform the following disputed sentence into a sentence that ends other than with a preposition: "Tepples should be recognized as an anal-retentive grammar Nazi who really needs to get laid more often."
On the other hand, when you're a force that's saving lives and making things better- as the U.S. military was in Indonesia- our popularity goes up. The problem isn't the perception of our foreign policy, the problem IS our foreign policy. The neocons need to get out of their little alternate universe of spin and start dealing in the real world, like the old-school Republicans of Bush H. W. Bush's administration.
How about just using bicycles? Many cities- Berlin and lots of places in China come to mind- are really bicycle friendly; I would really love it if more North American cities were geared for bicycle commuting. It's got many of the advantages of the Segway, it's cheaper, you get exercise, it's not a lot slower than a car when you factor in all the traffic in dense urban settings, and the biggest advantage over a car is that you don't have to deal with the nightmare of parking.
I'm usually skeptical of a lot of efforts to solve poverty through technology- but this is definitely headed in the right direction. In my opinion, the most pressing needs in the developing world are the most basic ones: clean water, food, medical care, roads, electricity, basic literacy. Laptops or whatever are way down on the list because their potential payoff is relatively small compared to their cost. Things like clean water and cheap electricity could have big payoffs with relatively little investment; if you're suffering from less disease your productivity will go up, if you have light in the evening your kids can do their homework and the parents can do more work.
Whether or not he's got the solution, he's at least got the right problems.