I'm not arguing against government investment. I'm arguing against government control. The government can set up a prize (like the Ansari X Prize, or the DARPA Grand Challenge) and let individuals and corporations determine the best way to get to the moon. The way I see it, having multiple competing designs has a much better chance of succeeding and resulting in useful innovations here on Earth than a centralized program that puts all of our eggs into one politically influenced basket.
Ummm... you do realize that someone, somewhere, is going to have to come up with a long-term plan and put a few people in charge?
Really? I didn't see any centralized steering committee for the Ansari X Prize. All they did was set up a valuable prize and a set of clear parameters for winning it. People supplied their own ingenuity and cooperation - no centralized bureaucracy necessary.
What if we took NASA's budget for five years and put it into a prize for the individual or corporation that can deliver a person to Mars and return him or her safely to the Earth? I think that would have just as much economic benefit as a government effort.
What you describe sounds like space communism, complete with a politburo and five year plans. How about we try a different strategy - let NASA open-source all of the technology that it has developed so far and see what the private industry can make of it. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have already created launch systems independently. They could do much more if they had access to NASA's vast collections of information about what does and doesn't work for spaceflight.
Given that no form of copy protection in use today has lasted more than a couple of years before being broken, I'd say that copy protection won't be much of an obstacle to future generations. Remember, they'll have hardware that's beyond our current capabilities by a few orders of magnitude. Cracking copy protection should not be a technical problem.
Given that the commonly used encryption algorithms are open source (e.g. AES, Blowfish, etc.) there's no reason to suspect that encrypted data will somehow become "obsolete". All the key needs is a tag stating which decryption algorithm to use.
Of course, if the key is lost, the data is unreadable, but isn't that the whole point of encryption in the first place?
Neither of your points invalidate mine. Sure, our current models are crap. That's not a reason to throw up our hands, that's a reason to work to improve those models. A climate service would help do that by serving as a centralized data repository, allowing scientists to validate their models against a number of historical data series, not just the ones that scientists were able to discover on their own.
In addition, I note that you don't deny that sea levels are rising. Given that the majority of human cities are on or near coastlines, isn't it a good idea to at least start planning our defenses? How many more Katrina-like situations are you willing to pay for before realizing that its good to have projections that outline the costs of defending an area against rising sea levels.
The main hypothesis of the global warming theory is one that has been borne out by evidence. Sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting and rainfall patterns are shifting.
So yes, some places will get less snow. Other places will get more snow because the wind patterns in the upper atmosphere will have shifted to bring moisture to those parts. In addition, there will be more variation in climate everywhere. You'll have many more very wet years and very dry years - what will be missing are the moderate years.
Even if you believe that global warming is not human caused, it still is a good idea to have someone looking at long term climate change and figuring out which areas will be unsustainable for agriculture/settlement in the future.
Bush didn't get his power taken away for any reason other than term limits. He was well into his second term by the time the war turned sour.
If Republicans really lost power because of their profligate spending, then Bush would not have been re-elected to a second term.
Re:behavioral problems have virtually disappeared
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 1
Way to go blaming the victim here. The problem of bullying is due to the bullies, not due the kids with "insufficient social skills" not learning how to take their bullying correctly.
Sure, I agree that social skills are important. However, having good social skills are no guarantee that bullies will avoid you. The only guarantee of that is to ensure that the bullies aren't near you.
Voted out of office? Really? Then why was Mr. Bush president from 2004 to 2008? Was the USA a dictatorship for those four years?
The way I see it, the Republicans were voted out of office in the 2006 midterm elections due to their extraordinary mismanaging of the Iraq war. Then, in 2008, the financial crisis hit just before the election, causing the public to turn against the party in power. The profligate spending habits of the Republicans had little do with them getting voted out of power.
So you're saying that the governor of a state has absolutely no pull with the senators from that state? I find that to be a highly dubious assertion, especially when the governor and the senator both belong to the same party.
Lets not forget that Sarah Palin only began opposing the "Bridge to Nowhere" once it became a political hot button. Until that project became prominent as an example of pork, she was all for it.
You're falling into the No True Scotsman logical fallacy. The fact that the Tea Party movement is nonpartisan from your perspective does not obviate the fact that all the major leaders of the movement (from Glenn Beck to Sarah Palin) are Republicans. Not a single prominent Democrat has associated him or herself with the Tea Party movement.
From the outside, the movement looks pretty Republican. Whether you consider yourself Republican, Democrat, or something else entirely is immaterial.
Tea Party members will generally side with individual efforts, regardless of what party it came from, as long as it: Increases personal liberty, reduces government, and/or is fiscally sound.
Does that imply that you'll side against any effort that goes against those principles? If so, where were you during the eight years of George W. Bush, where we spent trillions fighting an unnecessary war (goes against fiscal responsibility), gave up an unprecedented amount of personal liberty for dubious gains in security, and tolerated a massive expansion of government power (measured in terms of personnel, spending, and liberty). Why are you Tea Party folk coming out of the woodwork now?
That's wrong. Science is not that which is proven. Indeed, there is no such thing as a scientific theory that has been proven to certainty. Its that - the ability to be proven wrong - which distinguishes science from faith. Faith implies believing in something despite a lack of evidence or evidence to the contrary. This is true of creationism. This is not true of science. Therefore, creationism is not science.
Mirrors are heavy. You'd be better off launching a whole bunch of missiles. The laser would need to stop every missile to be successful. You would just need to get a single missile through.
That's a misconception on your part. The vast majority of kids at university are there to do whatever it takes to get that piece of paper. The goal isn't to get educated; the goal is higher earning potential by virtue of a better job.
Furthermore, if you were the "cheatee" and there was reason to suspect you willingly provided the cheater with your code to copy, you would both be subject to expulsion. Ouch.
I like the fact that you put in the word "willingly" there. At my university there was a kid who accidentally left his laptop unlocked and had his code stolen. He came very close to being expelled, and had to appeal his case up through two layers of the administration before he could find someone who saw sense.
The really terrible thing was that the other person admitted that he had taken the code without authorization. Even so, the professor insisted that the kid "should not have left his code in a position where it could be stolen."
So you're in your office 24/7? What about students (like me) who don't live on campus, and therefore have trouble making it to office hours?
I understand where you're coming from, but I still thing a "no discussion" policy is unreasonably harsh. I mean, what's the point of going to university if the only person who is allowed to help you is your professor? As a sibling poster mentioned, you may as well teach a distance learning course.
Our profs will give you marks if you can write down what you need to do, in some improper syntax but still achieve the 'right idea'. I'm apparently mistaken that learning syntax is important.
It depends on the context. Sure, if you're supposed to be handing in a working program, having code that doesn't compile is inexcusable. On the other hand, I've had tests where the professor expected you to write (by hand) correct Java without any references to the Java API. I did well on that test because I'd programmed Java before. My classmates, who were not as familiar with the language, almost universally bombed.
Well, its better to be have that sort of a reputation than to be the one guy that everyone wants to group with because they know they can dump all the work on you. I've been in both those roles, and believe me, the former is far better than the latter.
Yeah, I've also encountered teachers that said they would not accept an assignment unless it had the requisite number of names at the top. At that point, its easier to simply ignore the group and leave their names at the top.
It would be a wonderful world, I agree. However, that world would be awesome right up until the people in charge realized that laws are simply words on paper; that lightning bolts from the heavens will not smite them if they violate laws, no matter how supreme. In other words, after a few centuries, your world would look a lot like ours.
On the other hand, if you could arrange that lightning bolt thing...
I don't know what jurisdiction you live in, but where I live, getting caught running a red light means instant ticket if you're caught. It doesn't matter if it was on accident, or if you were skidding in the snow, or what have you.
Slashdot Mirror
By that logic you shouldn't use any sort of modern device at all, since even a microwave oven can have tens of thousands of machine instructions.
I'm not arguing against government investment. I'm arguing against government control. The government can set up a prize (like the Ansari X Prize, or the DARPA Grand Challenge) and let individuals and corporations determine the best way to get to the moon. The way I see it, having multiple competing designs has a much better chance of succeeding and resulting in useful innovations here on Earth than a centralized program that puts all of our eggs into one politically influenced basket.
Ummm... you do realize that someone, somewhere, is going to have to come up with a long-term plan and put a few people in charge?
Really? I didn't see any centralized steering committee for the Ansari X Prize. All they did was set up a valuable prize and a set of clear parameters for winning it. People supplied their own ingenuity and cooperation - no centralized bureaucracy necessary.
What if we took NASA's budget for five years and put it into a prize for the individual or corporation that can deliver a person to Mars and return him or her safely to the Earth? I think that would have just as much economic benefit as a government effort.
Pedophile hackers. You missed one.
What you describe sounds like space communism, complete with a politburo and five year plans. How about we try a different strategy - let NASA open-source all of the technology that it has developed so far and see what the private industry can make of it. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have already created launch systems independently. They could do much more if they had access to NASA's vast collections of information about what does and doesn't work for spaceflight.
Given that no form of copy protection in use today has lasted more than a couple of years before being broken, I'd say that copy protection won't be much of an obstacle to future generations. Remember, they'll have hardware that's beyond our current capabilities by a few orders of magnitude. Cracking copy protection should not be a technical problem.
Given that the commonly used encryption algorithms are open source (e.g. AES, Blowfish, etc.) there's no reason to suspect that encrypted data will somehow become "obsolete". All the key needs is a tag stating which decryption algorithm to use.
Of course, if the key is lost, the data is unreadable, but isn't that the whole point of encryption in the first place?
Neither of your points invalidate mine. Sure, our current models are crap. That's not a reason to throw up our hands, that's a reason to work to improve those models. A climate service would help do that by serving as a centralized data repository, allowing scientists to validate their models against a number of historical data series, not just the ones that scientists were able to discover on their own.
In addition, I note that you don't deny that sea levels are rising. Given that the majority of human cities are on or near coastlines, isn't it a good idea to at least start planning our defenses? How many more Katrina-like situations are you willing to pay for before realizing that its good to have projections that outline the costs of defending an area against rising sea levels.
The main hypothesis of the global warming theory is one that has been borne out by evidence. Sea levels are rising,
glaciers are melting and rainfall patterns are shifting.
So yes, some places will get less snow. Other places will get more snow because the wind patterns in the upper atmosphere will have shifted to bring moisture to those parts. In addition, there will be more variation in climate everywhere. You'll have many more very wet years and very dry years - what will be missing are the moderate years.
Even if you believe that global warming is not human caused, it still is a good idea to have someone looking at long term climate change and figuring out which areas will be unsustainable for agriculture/settlement in the future.
Bush didn't get his power taken away for any reason other than term limits. He was well into his second term by the time the war turned sour.
If Republicans really lost power because of their profligate spending, then Bush would not have been re-elected to a second term.
Way to go blaming the victim here. The problem of bullying is due to the bullies, not due the kids with "insufficient social skills" not learning how to take their bullying correctly.
Sure, I agree that social skills are important. However, having good social skills are no guarantee that bullies will avoid you. The only guarantee of that is to ensure that the bullies aren't near you.
Voted out of office? Really? Then why was Mr. Bush president from 2004 to 2008? Was the USA a dictatorship for those four years?
The way I see it, the Republicans were voted out of office in the 2006 midterm elections due to their extraordinary mismanaging of the Iraq war. Then, in 2008, the financial crisis hit just before the election, causing the public to turn against the party in power. The profligate spending habits of the Republicans had little do with them getting voted out of power.
So you're saying that the governor of a state has absolutely no pull with the senators from that state? I find that to be a highly dubious assertion, especially when the governor and the senator both belong to the same party.
Lets not forget that Sarah Palin only began opposing the "Bridge to Nowhere" once it became a political hot button. Until that project became prominent as an example of pork, she was all for it.
You're falling into the No True Scotsman logical fallacy. The fact that the Tea Party movement is nonpartisan from your perspective does not obviate the fact that all the major leaders of the movement (from Glenn Beck to Sarah Palin) are Republicans. Not a single prominent Democrat has associated him or herself with the Tea Party movement.
From the outside, the movement looks pretty Republican. Whether you consider yourself Republican, Democrat, or something else entirely is immaterial.
Tea Party members will generally side with individual efforts, regardless of what party it came from, as long as it: Increases personal liberty, reduces government, and/or is fiscally sound.
Does that imply that you'll side against any effort that goes against those principles? If so, where were you during the eight years of George W. Bush, where we spent trillions fighting an unnecessary war (goes against fiscal responsibility), gave up an unprecedented amount of personal liberty for dubious gains in security, and tolerated a massive expansion of government power (measured in terms of personnel, spending, and liberty). Why are you Tea Party folk coming out of the woodwork now?
The one that has never been proven.
That would be BOTH.
That's wrong. Science is not that which is proven. Indeed, there is no such thing as a scientific theory that has been proven to certainty. Its that - the ability to be proven wrong - which distinguishes science from faith. Faith implies believing in something despite a lack of evidence or evidence to the contrary. This is true of creationism. This is not true of science. Therefore, creationism is not science.
Mirrors are heavy. You'd be better off launching a whole bunch of missiles. The laser would need to stop every missile to be successful. You would just need to get a single missile through.
This is university, they are paying to learn.
That's a misconception on your part. The vast majority of kids at university are there to do whatever it takes to get that piece of paper. The goal isn't to get educated; the goal is higher earning potential by virtue of a better job.
Furthermore, if you were the "cheatee" and there was reason to suspect you willingly provided the cheater with your code to copy, you would both be subject to expulsion. Ouch.
I like the fact that you put in the word "willingly" there. At my university there was a kid who accidentally left his laptop unlocked and had his code stolen. He came very close to being expelled, and had to appeal his case up through two layers of the administration before he could find someone who saw sense.
The really terrible thing was that the other person admitted that he had taken the code without authorization. Even so, the professor insisted that the kid "should not have left his code in a position where it could be stolen."
So you're in your office 24/7? What about students (like me) who don't live on campus, and therefore have trouble making it to office hours?
I understand where you're coming from, but I still thing a "no discussion" policy is unreasonably harsh. I mean, what's the point of going to university if the only person who is allowed to help you is your professor? As a sibling poster mentioned, you may as well teach a distance learning course.
Our profs will give you marks if you can write down what you need to do, in some improper syntax but still achieve the 'right idea'. I'm apparently mistaken that learning syntax is important.
It depends on the context. Sure, if you're supposed to be handing in a working program, having code that doesn't compile is inexcusable. On the other hand, I've had tests where the professor expected you to write (by hand) correct Java without any references to the Java API. I did well on that test because I'd programmed Java before. My classmates, who were not as familiar with the language, almost universally bombed.
Well, its better to be have that sort of a reputation than to be the one guy that everyone wants to group with because they know they can dump all the work on you. I've been in both those roles, and believe me, the former is far better than the latter.
Yeah, I've also encountered teachers that said they would not accept an assignment unless it had the requisite number of names at the top. At that point, its easier to simply ignore the group and leave their names at the top.
It would be a wonderful world, I agree. However, that world would be awesome right up until the people in charge realized that laws are simply words on paper; that lightning bolts from the heavens will not smite them if they violate laws, no matter how supreme. In other words, after a few centuries, your world would look a lot like ours.
On the other hand, if you could arrange that lightning bolt thing...
I don't know what jurisdiction you live in, but where I live, getting caught running a red light means instant ticket if you're caught. It doesn't matter if it was on accident, or if you were skidding in the snow, or what have you.