Why keep sending toys to LEO, or to Pluto for that matter, when an important part of the cost is the fee for the ride, while the same money could be spent to develop cheaper launch systems and get better toys there later, at a fraction of the cost. Are the fake color images the Hubble sends back so important ? My guess is that cheaper lifts for telecom or weather satellites would be much more useful. I don't see why discovering that Titan is a confusing world and resembles Earth but it's nor really the same is important, while you cannot send there gear that would send back more that foggy pictures and very a approximate atmosphere composition ? Why keep the Mars rowers rolling on Mars, when the same money and the same people could develop and test robotic rovers on the hills nearby or on the Moon? NASA and USA needed to prove that they can do this ? Well, they proved it enough. It's not my tax money, but I would enjoy reading news about more capable robotic rovers, even if they dig holes in Antarctica or even in JPL's backyard and not on Mars. Sending robots that are able to move only a few meters a day wont' help anybody prepare for what is on Mars... while spending the same money on developing better and cheaper lifters would sure help get a damn nuclear reactor, tunnel digging gear and an oxygen factory on the moon.
Why not instead just open the Moon for commercial exploitation: regulate it (under the authority of the UN or of the Catholic Church, I don't care), and offer incentives to those companies that find something useful there or find a more useful use for it than driving the tides. Why not announce that from 2010 NASA will buy rides from those that were able to launch heavy objects to LEO or GEO a couple of times on their own expenses and stop launching it's own vehicles? Why not organize a contest for the repair of Hubble stating that anyone who is able to get there first and fix it without destroying it will get the money NASA plans to spend on servicing it with it's own means, and a maintenance contract for the remainder of Hubble's life ? Why not allow a private company build a breeder reactor on the Moon and build there the rocket that would get to Pluto in 6 months instead of 10 years?
My guess is that a lot of the money that now end being spent for developing playstations would be moved into developing technologies for providing whatever services the armies or the governments need in LEO, GEO or on the Moon...
maybe this is redundant... but I have to ask this question:
Why is this news ? Wals, from the fourth century BC or even older are found every damn week, and I cannot imagine how could Alexander the Great inspire a wall design... maybe they mean the "greek wall", but that is quite common all over the South-Eastern Europe, Anatolia, Levant up to Pakistan. Ancient walls raise up the building expenses in that area on a regular basis, since you have to pay some archaeologists to look over it just in case the local government will miss the great treasure burried there by the local founding hero.
Last year there was the big news about the prehistoric dildo, piece any sane archaeologist would have been able to identify with the implement used for resharpening stone blades.
Are the archaelogists that hungry that they must invent news? I thought that's the apanage of the PR people working for IT companies...
sure, the best politically-correct-with-cute-children-in-it literary remake of Heinlein's Starhip Troopers... why not the even-more-politically-correct-with-even-cuter-chil dren-in-it literary remake of the Ender's Game that Orson Scott Card wrote later, "Ender's Shadow"...
I still wait for a "Solaris" that would not rip the heart of Lem's novel with sentimental crap, a "Stalker" made by David Lynch (F*&^*&^ Tarkovsky... his luck was that he had a great camera crew and superb actors... ), and a less Wester-like "The Postman comes after the Apocalypse".
Does it word this way?
You make the request for a RAM upgrade. The IT guys pass the request to the upper echelon for aproval, where is is held for at least two weeks, then it goes back to IT, which has to find supliers... the suppliers have to send pro forma offers (at least three of them, from different companies), which takes another two to three weeks. The pro forma offers go back to management, where they are disscussed, and one of them is chosen (two weeks more). The "chosen one" goes back to IT and they discover that what they chose is not what IT gave them, but a fourth offer from yet another reseller of RAM, and it's incompatible with the hardware that has to be upgraded. One more week is spent trying to get a meeting with the upper echelon and then explaining them why their choise is bad. After another two months the right RAM is chosen from the right supplier. The request goes to Accounting and stays there for another two weeks, is rejected and another supplier is proposed. Two more weeks while Accounting and Management try to find time to meet and debate the issue.
About four month after the initial request was made the money are sent, and the RAM is on it's way...
Then IT have to test the new setup... lots of paperwork, documenting the change, documenting the impact on the performance of the system, imagining scenarios, getting ready a new compatible backup system to take over in case the one that is upgraded crashes, building a test machine to test the impact, doing tests and making statistics etc.: at least one more month.
all this for some RAM... yep, it might sound incredible to somebody that expects the IT to "just works", and who thinks that "it should just work, or else... ".
ups... I forgot about the Legal department that gets called to review the warranty contracts etc....
The greatest enemy of the Chinese Communist Government is prosperity... starving people have enough trouble finding food for the next day, they don't rebel.
Do you really believe that the Eastern European Communism was defeated, from prison, by a handful of dissidents? Do you really imagine that the Communist regimes in the Eastern Europe fell because of poverty/economic collapse etc.? They fell because the government could not increase the prosperity at the rate people expected it to increase, and because the profiteers wanted to legalise their ill acquired wealth. The collapse of the economy came after Communism fell and the economy was no longer planned... imagine what would happen to the Microsoft departments if the company would be broken into pieces... except those making and selling Office and Windows, all would go broke in an instant, and when the Office and Windows companies will begin working with other partners, they will also have a hard time maintaining the market they already have. This happened in E.Europe. Before 1989, the ecomonies of those countries were centrally planned and integrated. When central planning stopped, all the enterprises had to find contacts that previously were supplied by the central planning agencies and compete among themselves for contracts in an environment where the output of every unit was required to make the others work. In Romania it took at least 8 years for the economy to hit the bottom where, from the old enterprises, only those that could survive by themselves were left standing, and even then there were lots of survivors.
The only ally the Chinese Communists have is poverty. Let Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. keep their shops in China, pay huge (i.e.: 300USD, or something like that... I don't know what the local rates are) salaries to their Chinese employees, let those employees send gifts to their relatives in the poor areas and brag about their new cars, and you'll have your revolution.
Is Google censoring the Web? Let them do it if they still help the Chinese find technical information, "window shop" and raise their expectations on what a "good life" is, and get rich. Then sit tight and wait for the Communists from the top of the food chain to start getting at each other's throats. I don't think you'll have to wait long before selling your shares in the companies that depend on revenue earned in China would look like a good idea to a lot of people.
In China, the clock is ticking fast... the only question is: would Communism be replaced by an open society, or by the dictatorship of the potentates, or, even worse (or better, depending what shares you bought), by another "Spring and Autumn" period ?
tech will not save the small towns unless teleportation is invented, or you, the tech worker from a small town, will suddenly become content with
limited choices in shops
limited choices when loking for a date
work-home-tv-sleep-work-home-tv etc. schedules since there are no places to go out and have a beer without everybody in the town being aware of how many gulps you took
living 20 minutes from the house of your in-laws
living 20 minuntes from the house of your parents
hearing rumours about your wedding arrangements after you looked more than 2 seconds at a woman if you are not married, or rumours about your divorce if you are
the ex you dumped 20 years ago being the teacher of your children (if you have children)
the bully that terrorised you 20 years ago being the policeman
finding out that the attractive woman you met yesterday is your second cousin you never met and who moved in from a near by small town
funny you mentioned j.k.rowling... did anybody notice how much does the Hog... academy of j.k.rowling resemble the Assassin Guild from the "Pyramids"?
Re:The real question is: who cares?
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 1
it's a horrible looking and very obfuscated language which sits in the middle of the programming arena, i.e. where it servers no purpose
as they say... beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder...
... law:
There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is
the least bit difficult to write bad programs.
and the corrolary:
There is not now, and never will be, a natural language in which it is the least bit difficult to complain about how difficult programming languages are
Re:The REAL reason why America is going to the moo
on
Return to the Moon
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· Score: 1
Whoever can establish a base on the Moon will also be able to catapult big rocks towards their competition... way cheaper and cleaner than building and using atomic bombs. The only expensive part would be getting enough people and gear there to get the things started.
Now, forgetting a moment about Heinlein, all the US and European companies than invested in China should voluntarily pay a tax to help their countries put people on the Moon... showing China that US and/or Europe are able, have the willpower and also the money to build a Moon base would delay somewhat the nationalization of their Chinese assets in case the leaders in Beijing decide that that would be the only way of staying in charge.
Well, you have to choose between still having a chance to compete for the job (if you accept skilled immigrants), or no chance unless you move to India/China/Romania/etc. It's up to you.
btw, as far as I understand this, one immigrant creates at least another job besides that he is taking in the country he is moving in: s/he will need services, he will eat in that country, buy clothes, even pay taxes. A highly skilled immigrant will create more than one job: s/he won't be willing to spend time for small tasks so will hire somebody else.
If you are willing to let 10,000,000 jobs go to China or elsewhere, forbid imigration. If you want to have 10,000,000 Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Romanians, Russians and Ukrainians come to pay taxes for your goverment, and have a chance to compete with them for a job... let them come.
Around 1900 it was said that only uncivilized countries demanded entry visas... and the finger was pointed towards Russia... now it seems that we are all uncivilized.
I think you have a rather strange idea what do the poor children from developing countries need... I guess you watched way too many "save the children", "unesco", "Give Me a Fat Salary to Save the Poor Children" Inc. commercials. Except for the war zones, the poor children in the developing countries already have food/water/shelter/clothing. The large majority even have reliable electricity/radio/TV/internet coverage.
What the generic "poor children from the developing countries" need right now is access to information. They don't need charity, and the 100$ laptop is not charity. The laptops are going to be bought by their governments, and the parents of the "poor children from the developing countries" already pay hefty taxes to their governments (some argue that these taxes are the main reason those countries are still "developing").
What is special about the 100$ laptop is that it is no longer a prestige comodity used mainly to assert status, but a useful tool: waterproof, dustproof, shock resistant, long battery life, high contrast screen. As of now, I don't know of any laptop that matches these specifications and that can be bought in stores. Computers used to be status markers besides being business machines. Now they are being turned into tools available to everyone. You might still be proud that you have a 4GB computer with 4GB of RAM, but you don't need to feel proud that you have a stailess steel kitchen knife... soon you won't feel the need to boast about your computer.
Maybe you should revise your data on the developing countries... after all, the new jobs US companies are creating are moved outside of US because, well, we are no longer in the '50s, and the rest of the world is no longer in ruin after 6 years of war... on the contrary, the rest of the world is catching up with U.S. of A.
I forgot to add that Wikipedia still has a change to grow beyond what it is now... some day real experts might write articles (maybe some do it right now).... Britannica and the rest of the commercial encyclopaedias ?... no way, since I don't think the publishers can do better with the money they are putting in now.
Why compare Wikipedia and Britannica ? Compare those two with the encyclopaedias printed around 1900... in the former you find terse, unaccurate, most of the time obsolete information and hardly any references, while in the later you find much larger articles, much more relevant illustration and, as far as I can tell for the subjects that interest me, much more relevant references.
Recent encyclopaedias seem to be less and less focused on encyclo paedia, and more focused on provinding high status shelf fillers.
Researching for an encyclopaedia is very expensive, so if done properly Britannica would probably cost 20000$ instead of 2000$, but right now it's not encyclo and it's not paedia, so maybe it should be renamed to PopQuiz Assistant Britannica for HighLifers. Wikipedia is not very different (PopQuiz Assistant Wikipedia for the rest of us), but it tends to have more references (not necessarily more relevant references) and together with [fill in your favorite search engine] and [fill in your file sharing network of choice] makes a better tool than Britannica.
<rant>When the original Encyclopaedia described wind mills (which were high tech at that time), it acctually showed you how to build one. "encyclopaedias" of today ?... blah...
Terry Pratchett does not write fantasy, he writes political philosophy put into dialogues... even the "lightest" of his novels, those revolving around Rincewind, are very political...
I would add "Only You Can Save Mankind" after "Small Gods" and "Men at Arms"...
The Geneva convention does not cover very well what should happed when a person that was captured while wearing weapons in a war zone, if that person does not wear a uniform. Under previous regulations that person was to be summarily executed... if I remember well.
Now why exactly would giving away virtualization not result in the same harsh treatment?
because Microsoft could take XEN and use it without more restrictions than other companies that want to use XEN for their OSes. Microsoft could even take over the development of XEN, or make a fork, if Microsoft chose to use GPLed software.
We might understand different things by "raw data":)
Let's say I expected to see images of transversal sections of tree trunks, the scale of the image, details on cameras and film used to take those pictures, data concerning the source of those pieces of wood, the species etc., and not numbers... so I could check the growth rings on my own... if I were a climatologist or a biologist:)
If it was about an opinion poll, I would have liked to see not the numbers, but the whole stack of filled forms, to know how the interviewers were recruited and who were they, to read the transcripts from the focus groups, and to listen to the tapes recorded during the focus groups, to know where the exact spot and the exact time where each of those forms were supposed to have been filled etc. This is what I mean by raw data.
No, I am not saying that "science generally is suppressing and/or falsifying data". I am saying that there is a lot more to science than data: scientists are human, and academias are no different than other "tribes", and the competition for resources goes quite the same way: sometimes the capital of authority goes before data and experiment, sometimes honest errors combined with the need to preserve status go in the way of honesty etc.
You asked for an example. There were stories posted on./ about hoaxes played by an exact science guy on social scientists or by journalists on mathematicians (acctually in that last case it seems that nobody is certain if it was a hoax or not)... Those hoaxes worked because the jokers used the right language and the right references, i.e. played within the rules set by the relevant communities. This MIT guy managed to pull his stunt because he played within the rules, and on short term at least, it's more important to play within the rules than to play well. The "hockey stick" people put a lot of numbers on their site, and those numbers probably seem, and probably are, right to those in the field, so they are still in the game.
Sometimes I have the feeling that staying in the game got more important than data, than reviewing other peoples' data or than having other people look critically at your data. Just play it safe and you'll go through the postgrads, get an assistantship, get to publish that stuff that you know very well brings nothing new to science, but only confirms the scientific prejudices of those marking your theses or evaluating your grant requests.
How could a serial faker pull it? What kind of "research group" was that that did not notice until after he published the paper? Was he doing imunology research on his own, in a private lab, behind closed doors, or was he part of a team? Or maybe peer reviewing is not what it is said it is, and the sciences, both exact and social, are subject to secrecy, power strife, and "safe" games with terms and formulas? Would have Inteligent Design been considered if it was not supported by nice professors with cool beards and a tenure in some academic place?
OK, enough ranting:)... I'll go grind my axe some place else:)
ok, take a look at:
ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/sdr/temp/natu re/MANNETAL98/
the famous hockey stick data
What you have here is numbers already interpolated, normalized etc. This is not *raw*. I am not a climatologist, but I guess the arithmetic is the same everywhere, and "cleaning" your data is as easy as in the social sciences...
If you need/want to manipulate your data you don't have to lie... you just have to choose the "right" sampling method or sample size, or to define in the "appropriate" manner what are the "irrelevant" bits...
Science is based on the belief that experimental results can be replicated in repeated experiments. I've always wondered why the global scientific community doesn't do more replication of data as part of peer review
1. because most of the time the raw data is not published and kept secret, only the conclusions are made public...
2. because replicating somebody's else experiments, or checking somebody's else archaeological trenches and stratigraphy, or asking to see the sets of questions asked during a survey is the same as questioning the validity/corectness of that research, and is interpreted as "agression"...
3. because, more and more often, science is not about knowledge, but just a job. Are the profets of "global warming" making their raw data public ? Hell, no... they might lose access to grants such as those that allowed them to perform flawed research in the first place (not taking into account if the thermometers were on the top or the bottom of the meteo baloon etc.), and then publish "patches" upon "patches", corrections etc. Why let somebody else do it when you can do it and be certain of a cushy job until you retire?
last time I used MSWord willingly (true, it was in '99, on Win95 and it was version 6), it crashed after it mangled my file and *saved* it. I could not open that file again using Word or another text processor, and had to edit it in MSEdit to delete the binary crap and unshuffle the text... managed to recover less than half... OOffice still has to beat this...
I don't really like it... grew up on Slackware, and still have a Slack somewhere, but for getting your work done, Debian is good.
My eldest Debian install (woody testing, updated by a cron script, hardly touched by me since install and used by noobs all day long for mail and web access) made it until today... it stoped working when the motherboard went down in flames (some noob thought it's cool to open it and brush the dust... with a brush; unfortunately the noob survived).
The truth is that kids aren't becoming scientists not because of money, but because they are looking for a way to have a good life, meaning make a good contribution to the world.
Consider the SF movies made in the US in the '50s and those made now: then the "scientist" was a cool guy, and got the girl; now the scientist is the freak, more often than not he causes all the trouble and gets killed first, and most of the times he is Russian, and mad too. Getting the girl? No way...
"This is an action by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation ("SpaceX") against the Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation for violations of antitrust, unfair competition and racketeering laws."
Maybe we'll see cheap rockets soon... otherwise there will be some ugly "negociations" between US and China on who can say what the next New World Order will be...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get this ...
... while spending the same money on developing better and cheaper lifters would sure help get a damn nuclear reactor, tunnel digging gear and an oxygen factory on the moon.
...
Why keep sending toys to LEO, or to Pluto for that matter, when an important part of the cost is the fee for the ride, while the same money could be spent to develop cheaper launch systems and get better toys there later, at a fraction of the cost. Are the fake color images the Hubble sends back so important ? My guess is that cheaper lifts for telecom or weather satellites would be much more useful. I don't see why discovering that Titan is a confusing world and resembles Earth but it's nor really the same is important, while you cannot send there gear that would send back more that foggy pictures and very a approximate atmosphere composition ? Why keep the Mars rowers rolling on Mars, when the same money and the same people could develop and test robotic rovers on the hills nearby or on the Moon? NASA and USA needed to prove that they can do this ? Well, they proved it enough. It's not my tax money, but I would enjoy reading news about more capable robotic rovers, even if they dig holes in Antarctica or even in JPL's backyard and not on Mars. Sending robots that are able to move only a few meters a day wont' help anybody prepare for what is on Mars
Why not instead just open the Moon for commercial exploitation: regulate it (under the authority of the UN or of the Catholic Church, I don't care), and offer incentives to those companies that find something useful there or find a more useful use for it than driving the tides. Why not announce that from 2010 NASA will buy rides from those that were able to launch heavy objects to LEO or GEO a couple of times on their own expenses and stop launching it's own vehicles? Why not organize a contest for the repair of Hubble stating that anyone who is able to get there first and fix it without destroying it will get the money NASA plans to spend on servicing it with it's own means, and a maintenance contract for the remainder of Hubble's life ? Why not allow a private company build a breeder reactor on the Moon and build there the rocket that would get to Pluto in 6 months instead of 10 years?
My guess is that a lot of the money that now end being spent for developing playstations would be moved into developing technologies for providing whatever services the armies or the governments need in LEO, GEO or on the Moon
maybe this is redundant ... but I have to ask this question:
... maybe they mean the "greek wall", but that is quite common all over the South-Eastern Europe, Anatolia, Levant up to Pakistan. Ancient walls raise up the building expenses in that area on a regular basis, since you have to pay some archaeologists to look over it just in case the local government will miss the great treasure burried there by the local founding hero.
Why is this news ? Wals, from the fourth century BC or even older are found every damn week, and I cannot imagine how could Alexander the Great inspire a wall design
Last year there was the big news about the prehistoric dildo, piece any sane archaeologist would have been able to identify with the implement used for resharpening stone blades.
Are the archaelogists that hungry that they must invent news? I thought that's the apanage of the PR people working for IT companies...
sure, the best politically-correct-with-cute-children-in-it literary remake of Heinlein's Starhip Troopers ... why not the even-more-politically-correct-with-even-cuter-chil dren-in-it literary remake of the Ender's Game that Orson Scott Card wrote later, "Ender's Shadow" ...
I still wait for a "Solaris" that would not rip the heart of Lem's novel with sentimental crap, a "Stalker" made by David Lynch (F*&^*&^ Tarkovsky ... his luck was that he had a great camera crew and superb actors ... ), and a less Wester-like "The Postman comes after the Apocalypse".
Does it word this way? You make the request for a RAM upgrade. The IT guys pass the request to the upper echelon for aproval, where is is held for at least two weeks, then it goes back to IT, which has to find supliers ... the suppliers have to send pro forma offers (at least three of them, from different companies), which takes another two to three weeks. The pro forma offers go back to management, where they are disscussed, and one of them is chosen (two weeks more). The "chosen one" goes back to IT and they discover that what they chose is not what IT gave them, but a fourth offer from yet another reseller of RAM, and it's incompatible with the hardware that has to be upgraded. One more week is spent trying to get a meeting with the upper echelon and then explaining them why their choise is bad. After another two months the right RAM is chosen from the right supplier. The request goes to Accounting and stays there for another two weeks, is rejected and another supplier is proposed. Two more weeks while Accounting and Management try to find time to meet and debate the issue.
About four month after the initial request was made the money are sent, and the RAM is on it's way ...
Then IT have to test the new setup ... lots of paperwork, documenting the change, documenting the impact on the performance of the system, imagining scenarios, getting ready a new compatible backup system to take over in case the one that is upgraded crashes, building a test machine to test the impact, doing tests and making statistics etc.: at least one more month.
all this for some RAM ... yep, it might sound incredible to somebody that expects the IT to "just works", and who thinks that "it should just work, or else ... ".
ups ... I forgot about the Legal department that gets called to review the warranty contracts etc. ...
The greatest enemy of the Chinese Communist Government is prosperity ... starving people have enough trouble finding food for the next day, they don't rebel.
... imagine what would happen to the Microsoft departments if the company would be broken into pieces ... except those making and selling Office and Windows, all would go broke in an instant, and when the Office and Windows companies will begin working with other partners, they will also have a hard time maintaining the market they already have. This happened in E.Europe. Before 1989, the ecomonies of those countries were centrally planned and integrated. When central planning stopped, all the enterprises had to find contacts that previously were supplied by the central planning agencies and compete among themselves for contracts in an environment where the output of every unit was required to make the others work. In Romania it took at least 8 years for the economy to hit the bottom where, from the old enterprises, only those that could survive by themselves were left standing, and even then there were lots of survivors.
... I don't know what the local rates are) salaries to their Chinese employees, let those employees send gifts to their relatives in the poor areas and brag about their new cars, and you'll have your revolution.
... the only question is: would Communism be replaced by an open society, or by the dictatorship of the potentates, or, even worse (or better, depending what shares you bought), by another "Spring and Autumn" period ?
Do you really believe that the Eastern European Communism was defeated, from prison, by a handful of dissidents? Do you really imagine that the Communist regimes in the Eastern Europe fell because of poverty/economic collapse etc.? They fell because the government could not increase the prosperity at the rate people expected it to increase, and because the profiteers wanted to legalise their ill acquired wealth. The collapse of the economy came after Communism fell and the economy was no longer planned
The only ally the Chinese Communists have is poverty. Let Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. keep their shops in China, pay huge (i.e.: 300USD, or something like that
Is Google censoring the Web? Let them do it if they still help the Chinese find technical information, "window shop" and raise their expectations on what a "good life" is, and get rich. Then sit tight and wait for the Communists from the top of the food chain to start getting at each other's throats. I don't think you'll have to wait long before selling your shares in the companies that depend on revenue earned in China would look like a good idea to a lot of people.
In China, the clock is ticking fast
funny you mentioned j.k.rowling ... did anybody notice how much does the Hog... academy of j.k.rowling resemble the Assassin Guild from the "Pyramids"?
... law:
and the corrolary:Whoever can establish a base on the Moon will also be able to catapult big rocks towards their competition ... way cheaper and cleaner than building and using atomic bombs. The only expensive part would be getting enough people and gear there to get the things started.
... showing China that US and/or Europe are able, have the willpower and also the money to build a Moon base would delay somewhat the nationalization of their Chinese assets in case the leaders in Beijing decide that that would be the only way of staying in charge.
Now, forgetting a moment about Heinlein, all the US and European companies than invested in China should voluntarily pay a tax to help their countries put people on the Moon
Well, you have to choose between still having a chance to compete for the job (if you accept skilled immigrants), or no chance unless you move to India/China/Romania/etc. It's up to you.
... let them come.
... and the finger was pointed towards Russia ... now it seems that we are all uncivilized.
btw, as far as I understand this, one immigrant creates at least another job besides that he is taking in the country he is moving in: s/he will need services, he will eat in that country, buy clothes, even pay taxes. A highly skilled immigrant will create more than one job: s/he won't be willing to spend time for small tasks so will hire somebody else.
If you are willing to let 10,000,000 jobs go to China or elsewhere, forbid imigration. If you want to have 10,000,000 Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Romanians, Russians and Ukrainians come to pay taxes for your goverment, and have a chance to compete with them for a job
Around 1900 it was said that only uncivilized countries demanded entry visas
s/a 4GB computer with/a 4GHz processor and/
I think you have a rather strange idea what do the poor children from developing countries need ... I guess you watched way too many "save the children", "unesco", "Give Me a Fat Salary to Save the Poor Children" Inc. commercials. Except for the war zones, the poor children in the developing countries already have food/water/shelter/clothing. The large majority even have reliable electricity/radio/TV/internet coverage.
... soon you won't feel the need to boast about your computer.
... after all, the new jobs US companies are creating are moved outside of US because, well, we are no longer in the '50s, and the rest of the world is no longer in ruin after 6 years of war ... on the contrary, the rest of the world is catching up with U.S. of A.
What the generic "poor children from the developing countries" need right now is access to information. They don't need charity, and the 100$ laptop is not charity. The laptops are going to be bought by their governments, and the parents of the "poor children from the developing countries" already pay hefty taxes to their governments (some argue that these taxes are the main reason those countries are still "developing").
What is special about the 100$ laptop is that it is no longer a prestige comodity used mainly to assert status, but a useful tool: waterproof, dustproof, shock resistant, long battery life, high contrast screen. As of now, I don't know of any laptop that matches these specifications and that can be bought in stores. Computers used to be status markers besides being business machines. Now they are being turned into tools available to everyone. You might still be proud that you have a 4GB computer with 4GB of RAM, but you don't need to feel proud that you have a stailess steel kitchen knife
Maybe you should revise your data on the developing countries
I forgot to add that Wikipedia still has a change to grow beyond what it is now ... some day real experts might write articles (maybe some do it right now) .... Britannica and the rest of the commercial encyclopaedias ? ... no way, since I don't think the publishers can do better with the money they are putting in now.
Why compare Wikipedia and Britannica ? Compare those two with the encyclopaedias printed around 1900 ... in the former you find terse, unaccurate, most of the time obsolete information and hardly any references, while in the later you find much larger articles, much more relevant illustration and, as far as I can tell for the subjects that interest me, much more relevant references.
Recent encyclopaedias seem to be less and less focused on encyclo paedia, and more focused on provinding high status shelf fillers.
Researching for an encyclopaedia is very expensive, so if done properly Britannica would probably cost 20000$ instead of 2000$, but right now it's not encyclo and it's not paedia, so maybe it should be renamed to PopQuiz Assistant Britannica for HighLifers. Wikipedia is not very different (PopQuiz Assistant Wikipedia for the rest of us), but it tends to have more references (not necessarily more relevant references) and together with [fill in your favorite search engine] and [fill in your file sharing network of choice] makes a better tool than Britannica.
<rant>When the original Encyclopaedia described wind mills (which were high tech at that time), it acctually showed you how to build one. "encyclopaedias" of today ? ... blah ...
Terry Pratchett does not write fantasy, he writes political philosophy put into dialogues ... even the "lightest" of his novels, those revolving around Rincewind, are very political ...
I would add "Only You Can Save Mankind" after "Small Gods" and "Men at Arms" ...
the same Nokia that pushed for software patents in Europe ? If it's the same company, no, thanks ...
The Geneva convention does not cover very well what should happed when a person that was captured while wearing weapons in a war zone, if that person does not wear a uniform. Under previous regulations that person was to be summarily executed ... if I remember well.
We might understand different things by "raw data" :)
Let's say I expected to see images of transversal sections of tree trunks, the scale of the image, details on cameras and film used to take those pictures, data concerning the source of those pieces of wood, the species etc., and not numbers ... so I could check the growth rings on my own ... if I were a climatologist or a biologist :)
If it was about an opinion poll, I would have liked to see not the numbers, but the whole stack of filled forms, to know how the interviewers were recruited and who were they, to read the transcripts from the focus groups, and to listen to the tapes recorded during the focus groups, to know where the exact spot and the exact time where each of those forms were supposed to have been filled etc. This is what I mean by raw data.
No, I am not saying that "science generally is suppressing and/or falsifying data". I am saying that there is a lot more to science than data: scientists are human, and academias are no different than other "tribes", and the competition for resources goes quite the same way: sometimes the capital of authority goes before data and experiment, sometimes honest errors combined with the need to preserve status go in the way of honesty etc.
You asked for an example. There were stories posted on ./ about hoaxes played by an exact science guy on social scientists or by journalists on mathematicians (acctually in that last case it seems that nobody is certain if it was a hoax or not) ... Those hoaxes worked because the jokers used the right language and the right references, i.e. played within the rules set by the relevant communities. This MIT guy managed to pull his stunt because he played within the rules, and on short term at least, it's more important to play within the rules than to play well. The "hockey stick" people put a lot of numbers on their site, and those numbers probably seem, and probably are, right to those in the field, so they are still in the game.
Sometimes I have the feeling that staying in the game got more important than data, than reviewing other peoples' data or than having other people look critically at your data. Just play it safe and you'll go through the postgrads, get an assistantship, get to publish that stuff that you know very well brings nothing new to science, but only confirms the scientific prejudices of those marking your theses or evaluating your grant requests.
How could a serial faker pull it? What kind of "research group" was that that did not notice until after he published the paper? Was he doing imunology research on his own, in a private lab, behind closed doors, or was he part of a team? Or maybe peer reviewing is not what it is said it is, and the sciences, both exact and social, are subject to secrecy, power strife, and "safe" games with terms and formulas? Would have Inteligent Design been considered if it was not supported by nice professors with cool beards and a tenure in some academic place?
OK, enough ranting :) ... I'll go grind my axe some place else :)
ok, take a look at: ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/sdr/temp/natu re/MANNETAL98/
the famous hockey stick data
What you have here is numbers already interpolated, normalized etc. This is not *raw*. I am not a climatologist, but I guess the arithmetic is the same everywhere, and "cleaning" your data is as easy as in the social sciences ...
If you need/want to manipulate your data you don't have to lie ... you just have to choose the "right" sampling method or sample size, or to define in the "appropriate" manner what are the "irrelevant" bits ...
last time I used MSWord willingly (true, it was in '99, on Win95 and it was version 6), it crashed after it mangled my file and *saved* it. I could not open that file again using Word or another text processor, and had to edit it in MSEdit to delete the binary crap and unshuffle the text ... managed to recover less than half ... OOffice still has to beat this ...
Debian.
I don't really like it ... grew up on Slackware, and still have a Slack somewhere, but for getting your work done, Debian is good.
My eldest Debian install (woody testing, updated by a cron script, hardly touched by me since install and used by noobs all day long for mail and web access) made it until today ... it stoped working when the motherboard went down in flames (some noob thought it's cool to open it and brush the dust ... with a brush; unfortunately the noob survived).
Consider the SF movies made in the US in the '50s and those made now: then the "scientist" was a cool guy, and got the girl; now the scientist is the freak, more often than not he causes all the trouble and gets killed first, and most of the times he is Russian, and mad too. Getting the girl? No way ...
"This is an action by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation ("SpaceX") against the Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation for violations of antitrust, unfair competition and racketeering laws."
Maybe we'll see cheap rockets soon ... otherwise there will be some ugly "negociations" between US and China on who can say what the next New World Order will be ...