Not true. At SIGGRAPH last year I watched several real-time motion capture systems at work. You can see a 3D rendered, realtime animation of a model using the motion captured data as it is created. So an actor doesn't have to work completely blind, they can actually see how their movements look in the capture data and adjust accordingly.
Obviously you don't get the same polycount and render detail in a realtime animation as you do in rendered film footage, but that's pretty much irrelevant to getting the motion capture down properly.
When I saw the preview for Polar Express, the uncanny valley was the first thing that came to my mind too. For some reason I found it even more disturbing than the Final Fantasy animation. No way I could watch 90 minutes of this without clawing my eyes out.
That's not a very realistic attitude to take and you misunderstand my point. Are you saying that the standards for evidence for each and every claim should be identical, even if some of the claims have been proven and verified thousands of times in the past? I agree that proof is proof - if a hypothesis is falsifiable, and provides for a repeatable experiment, and it's proven to within a reasonable degree of confidence, then it's proven well enough for me.
But that doesn't really answer the question of how do I deal with the large volume of stuff that people claim - given that I don't ahve the time to deal with each and every claim, and attempt to validate them all using the scientific method, I have to decide on some basic standards of evidence as well as standards for whose information I will trust without validation.
If somebody claims that they built an anti-gravity device in my basement I would require a complete demonstration of the device, as well as a description of the theoretical framework behind it in order to accept the claim. If somebody claims that they built their own car from a kit, I will probably accept their claim as true barring evidence to the contrary since it doesn't contradict centuries of human knowledge and science.
I think when quantum mechanics and general relativity came along they were absolutely subjected to this sort of incredulity, and appropriately so. Some of the claims seemed incredible, so the evidence was picked through by many scientists with fine toothed combs, and many years were spent trying to confirm results and devise additional experiments to test their limits. But in the end, they were accepted as true (or rather as accurate models of reality - however you want to phrase this from a philisophical perspective).
Does this mean radical breakthroughs have to overcome inherent inertia? Yes. But it also puts a barrier up to keep the kooks and their crappy ideas out of the scientific mainstream. Generally, even when the source is kooky, if the idea has merit it ends up being accepted. If you can point to counterexamples where this has not occurred, then I'd love to hear them.
But this is an advocation for 8 Million dollars of taxpayer funded money. A lot of good science can be done with 8 Million dollars.
I know nobody reads the articles, but please look at the last sentence in the Yahoo News article. The Air Force implies they are not going to follow the recommendations or spend any more on this guy, the company he works for, or anything related to them. Read the articles, people, please!!! I *CERTAINLY* never said it was worth 8 million dollars of research, unless this guy was presenting repeatable, scientifically verifiable results of interest that some respected scientists validated as being worthy of further research (and he's not presenting anything of the sort here).
If it is not testable, then by definition it is not science. This is why real science is peer reviewed and documented. If your peers cannot duplicate your results or have access to your data, then there very well may be some suspect work going on.
See above. I agree. I am a physicist by training. You are preaching to the choir.
What is disturbing is that this person is confabulating real science with bogus ideas.
Agreed. There is enough real science in there to create an air of legitimacy to a really uninformed reader. That does give me cause for concern. I was sort of trying to think aloud before about how to address that - when it comes down to it, I think what I said before holds, real scientists in academic posts need to review these "research reports" before the military does anything with them.
It does bug me somewhat that they pay 25 grand for a research report that looks like some kooky college exercise. If somebody wants to write an argument for funding this kind of stuff, let them do so on their own budget. The government would be better served putting a few grand into paying some academic scientists to spend a few hours or days reviewing the work and giving their assessment to help inform how valid the recommendations are, and whether they are justified by the summarized research contained therein. I'm sure in this case, the report would have been instantly torn to shreds.
As a point of fact, nobody spent the 7.5 mil, and it's never going to happen. They actually spent 25 thousand dollars on this "reasearch report", which we can all agree is probably mostly wasted. But a few thousand bucks here or there to turn up the latest research on some out-there topics isn't anywhere near as bad as the millions of dollars the CIA spent on resarching some of these areas back in the day.
As for your other point - I basically agree with you. People always say "stop your bitching and do something" - well, I did, I donated thousands of dollars, I voted, and I got several friends to vote for Kerry, and made a case to anybody who would listen. Now I get to throw rocks for the next four years. I was a little afraid that if Kerry won and fucked up, I'd have to admit to being part of that mistake.
Just to be clear - they funded a study into the general areas and applications of teleportation by a private individual/small company. Some of the conclusions seem a bit wacky, however, there is no evidence in this documentation that the recommendations are accepted or that this guy's conclusions are accepted.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with paying somebody to do some background research on potentially "out there" research areas, and figure out what application they might have to the military. However, with rather complicated topics like this, they should be hiring people with appropriate qualifications, and relying on a review of the research by qualified scientists before they do anything else with it. I assume they would do that before pouring millions a year into some of this stuff.
The point where I start becoming wary is the point where he starts saying things like this:
The debate among scientists and scientific philosophers is highly charged at times, and becomes acrimonious to the point where reputable skeptical scientists cease being impartial by refusing to examine the experimental data or theories, and they prefer to bypass rational discourse by engaging in ad hominem attacks and irrational "armchair" arguments.
I don't know the specifics of the Chinese studies he mentions, but I know that most of the psychokinetic stuff from the 70s has been thoroughly discredited when repeated under controlled conditions. If you can only bend a spoon with your mind when its your spoon and your on national TV, then I don't think you're really bending the spoon with your mind. Incredible claims require incredibly strong evidence to back them up. If this guy can repeat any of the results that the Chinese studies he mentions were able to produce (he says they were repeatable, but fail to say by whom - if they just said they were repeatable, that fails to rule out the most likely explanation of simple scientific fraud), then by all means, fund away.
It is a bit disturbing is that this same fellow is making recommendations on military funding of mainstream scientific propositions, like quantum cryptography and computation, entanglement research, and thereotical string theory stuff. And he thinks they should wait-and-see while D-Brane theory matures, but run full steam ahead with psychokinetic research.
He also seems to recommend that some of the most outrageous and least likely to pay off topics should be pursued the most vigorously, like "biological quantum teleportation", based on a single, unpublished paper in the arxiv.org online repository (i.e. a non-peer reviewed scientific publication with no credibility to speak of). Additionally, he recommends funding FTL communication based on entanglement, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the concept of group vs. phase velocity. Without at least an inkling of which direction to go, funding a million bucks a year of FTL communications research based on the irrelevant mechanism behind entanglement is useless.
So yes, this guy is a quack, but it looks like nobody is taking the recommendations seriously. Was the study a waste of $25,000 (what the Yahoo News article says the company was paid for this work)? Perhaps, but lots of small research projects happen and end up going nowhere, and like they say, it's sometimes worth pursuing a bit of cursory research in even unlikely areas to see if anything interesting gets turned up. In this case, it didn't pay off (and I doubt this guy will be doing any more studies for the Air Force).
For the most part, I don't think the status quo is too bad, at least with respect to web content. The relevant laws are pretty much determined by where you host and serve content from, so if that copyrighted material is out of copyright in Australia, and hosted in Australia, then there's no obligation by the Australians to prevent Americans from downloading it, though those Americans are still bound by American laws once they have it.
Likewise for eBay et. al. - if it's hosted in America, and legal in America, but the French try to buy it from America, then that's their problem. If they want to make it illegal to buy nazi memorabilia from abroad, let them, but don't try to enforce your laws on somebody else's content.
Yes, that creates free-for-all zones on the web in countries that don't really enforce any of their own laws when it comes to online content. If you don't want to accidentally stumble on that stuff, it's not too hard to block content from China, for example, just like they do from us.
The real remaining problems then are things like spam. Yes, you can change the rules as you describe them by amending SMTP, POP, etc. to prevent these problems, and that's going on, but ultimately spam is a social problem, not a purely technical one. Expecting a perfect technical solution seems unreasonable to me, since the solutions all seem to introduce substantial costs into the usage equation, for every degree of protection you get, you seem to lose some of the usefulness and beauty of it too.
Additionally, transnational fraud is at an all-time high. It's easy for 419 scammers from Africa to defraud dumb Americans and Europeans (no, it's not just Americans that get taken in these scams) - and there's no legal recourse when the government in question doesn't enforce its own laws, or the government is in bed with the perpetrators of the fraud. You can't deny that the Internet made this kind of fraud accessible, while before it would have been effectively impossible to pull this off from five thousand miles away.
If what you're saying is "the government of Nigeria needs to enforce its laws", then yes, I agree with you. That would probably solve this problem, at least if every country complied. But without anybody forcing them to, there's no way to effectively do this. Hell, you can blackhole all IP traffic from the non-compliant country, and it won't help, because they'll use freemail servers in other countries that don't block them.
Likewise with cracking/site defacement/electronic breaking and entering. Also illegal in many places, unenforceable in many of those, and unregulated in some countries still, and it's impossible to prevent entirely through technological means. Again, what's the mechanism for forcing rogue countries to enforce their laws or pass laws against this?
I think it can probably be done without an international oversight body per se - if the US and EU got together and told Russia, Nigeria, etc. they better start enforcing laws against this stuff or face sanctions, there would probably be some action. For some reason, the US government seems far more interested in getting other countries to buy into its MPAA/RIAA/Disney copyright protection regime and patent insanity than protecting its citizens from fraud or giving its business and net community at large legal recourse for electronic vandalism. God forbid our government do something for anybody other than a special interest group. And something that it would be hard for people to whine about too, since it really would help everybody out, not just us. Hard to argue that spam, fraud and electronic vandalism are somehow culturally relative values we'd be imposing on the world.
As for the rest of the problems Vint cites - misinformation, harrassment, illegal transactions, I think those are overstated. The information on the Internet is fundamentally only as trustworthy as the person who put it there, harrassment across country borders isn't a huge problem as far as I know, and illegal transactions are... well, only illegal because one of the countries involved says its illegal. In which case they are free to enforce their laws already.:)
Eh? I don't think you read my post. You know why I can tell? Because you are ranting about something totally offtopic - that's exactly why I put the word "secure" in quotation marks.
Obviously I don't think that making something illegal makes it impossible either. I never advocated any of these laws, I was advocating for cop's rights to make these decisions, just like they make decisions about whether to wear body armor. And it would be nice if you had the option to buy such a gun (again, all assuming the technology is reliable enough, etc.) to prevent your children from accidentally shooting each other or to prevent it from being used against you in a struggle. Obviously, nobody suggests that a determined tinkerer couldn't bypass such a system, and I fail to see how that's relevant, since we were discussing technology that people would choose to use, not something being mandated by the government.
You and I must watch a different 'Cops', I guess. When I tune in, I see the men in blue frequently get involved in physical tussles and rolling around on the ground trying to get a perp pinned down.
And you are claiming that the most common scenario is a perp makes an officer hand over his gun and kills him execution style? If you don't see how somebody would grab the gun from an officers holster or wrestle it from his hands then use it against him, I don't think you're looking very hard.
Given that cops have the most experience in the field, this is something I'd prefer to get their input on. And despite being a Democrat, I am not a strict gun control person - I don't think we all should have registered smart guns. I think the real issue here is that the hard core NRA member types don't want to see this tech ever hit manufacturing because they are afraid it will be forced on them. I don't really want to see it forced on them, I don't think forcing "secure" access on your own personal property, for guns, or computers, is appropriate (see Slashtrolls, I'm being consistent in my views!) - this isn't really a valid argument though, since the tech already exists, it's really a question of whether the tech works well enough and whether you can get over cops concerns about the 100% reliability issues.
Equally importantly.. no, more importantly to me, the looong time Slashdot/Firefox rendering bug appears to have been fixed with the new Slashcode update as of this morning. I am getting zero misrendered pages now, no more CTRL-mousewheel up-down to get proper rendering! After months and months of waiting, somebody has finally gotten off their asses and stopped pointing fingers.
Yes, I realize it's a Firefox bug with a certain kind of nested table structure that Slashdot uses, but still, it can't have been that hard for Slashdot to clean up their HTML a bit and join the rest of the web. Of course, the FF devs should get off their butts and fix it on their end too.
9 years is excessive for any non-violent non-recidivist crime, period. But I don't think jail time (on the order of months, not years) is completely unwarranted for large scale or repeat spam violaters, or those committing fraud on top of spamming.
I agree with you on the massive financial penalties though - bankrupt these people with fines equal to the amount they made from illegal spamming, give them a few months in jail with the caveat that if they do it again, it will be years, and the spamming business will get a lot less attractive very fast. It just needs to be applied more than once, as more than a novelty. Two or three high profile convinctions will make a huge difference for domestic spam operations. And if you punish American companies comparably that support offshore spam operations, the only people left spamming us will be offshore shops selling products from offshore. Certainly the spam problem will be substantially reduced.
You make no sense. If the democratic party and the DNC aren't challenging the results, how is this a partisan action? I think it's absolutely essential to have openness in our electoral process in this country. I want to understand why polls and exit polls seem to conflict (in some cases by substantial margins) with election results in several states.
I am absolutely thrilled that there is an organization devoted to ensuring that the electoral process is clean and that electronic voting systems are being used appropriately and without tampering. I am also glad that Kerry did the manly thing today and condeded when it became clear that the numbers couldn't add up to his victory in Ohio any way you sliced it.
Despite the fact that I accept the election results (though personally I don't like them), I still want to know that the election was carried out in a fair way, and to ensure that the much debated electronic voting systems aren't being tampered with and are being run in a secure manner, and thank God these people are trying to make sure that is the case.
Is it recorded history or the word of God? Can't you people make up your minds?
Nobody denies the large amount of historical material in the Bible, however much of the Old Testament was written and rewritten generations, even hundreds of years after the events described therein occurred, and there is clear textual evidence for the hands of numerous authors involved. However, we don't know any of these people, and there is no independent corroboration of the things they say. Herodotus also wrote of monsters, beasts, and Gods, but I don't take his work literally either. What about Homer's Iliad? Well, clearly the Trojan War happened, I don't doubt that, but that doesn't mean I take his account of it as literal truth.
Plenty of other tales are passed down over far fewer generations, in written and oral form, and they undergo drastic amounts of change and addition of many fantastical elements as well.
By virtue of their lack of understanding of science and nature, the writers of antiquity were very prone to assign deistic features to natural and human events. And storytelling and embellishment were a basic part of pre-modern life, and one of the few forms of entertainment, the lore, wisdom, knowledge and entertainment media of a land. And storytelling and embellishment seem to be a basic part of human psychology, universal to all cultures.
As for the New Testament - the events therein were described far closer to their occurrence - however what ended up as New Testament canon was scrubbed of the apostolic writings that didn't agree with basic church philosophy, or that seemed to contradict Paul's teachings. In any case, the writings of the early Christians were more religious recruitment effort than natural results of generational storytelling.
In any case, I don't know why I'm bothering to have this discussion with somebody that judges the quality of an idea primarily by how long ago it was first held by some people. And there is no such thing as an "Evolutionist", evolution isn't a belief system, it's just one scientific theory among many that attempts to model reality in a reasonable way. I believe many scientific theories, but I don't have to believe _in_ any of them. A Creationist is labeled as such because they deny a fairly significant scientific theory based on faith alone. Which is fine, I have no problem if you choose to do that, but I must insist that you acknowledge that none of it is based on any falsifiable set of scientific propositions, and that it is your faith in God and the literal truth of the Bible that leads you to uphold this position.
If you read it, the first page indicates that they passed this information on to law enforcement over a year ago. Seems like law enforcement has really done a whole lot since then.
You must be confused. That site you sent me to starts with the premesis of proving literal truth in every word of a book written by people (mostly my own ancestors) several thousand years ago.
And you consider this to be well argued? It cites a bunch of resources, all of which are either on its own website (their own 'Creation' magazine). The "argument" involves taking one basic fact about the fossilization process as disproof of the entire scientific study of fossils, all techniques and data used to make conclusions about the age of fossils and so on. And that was just the first link in their FAQ I happened to click on.
This is not a scientifically sound site, I'm sorry to tell you.
So you are suggesting that meaningfully all scientists working in the biological sciences are just ignoring this "great deal" of evidence for creationism? Nobody denies that evolution, like any other scientific theory, is a model that has been adapted to better fit new data that has arisen over the years, and that historical biological data is by its nature incomplete. But why don't you enumerate some specific arguments, and explain how they aren't addressed by the Talk.Origins FAQ and the rest of that site.
I have yet to see your compelling evidence and I look forward to hearing more about it.
Okay, you avoided all my points and came back with an ad hominem attack on Slashdot as a whole. I admit that there are some vocal people on this forum more interested in flaming than discussing, but that has nothing to do with the relevant points I made.
Wrong. At least assuming you mean scientists and other intelligent individuals. The reasons that the average person believes what they believe are not relevant to this discussion.
I don't think any scientist will tell you that the theory of evolution is complete or proven in every aspect - as with most facets of biology, it's complex, and the data we have is essentially a partial, but extensive, set of samples. The problem with Creationists is that they fail to separate articles of faith ('God is the ultimate creator of the world' - a statement that is not incompatible with falsifiable observations) and science ('the world is 5000 years old' - there is no evidence to support this and many other such claims).
Obviously, it's a complicated fray, and some of the Intelligent Design people make less outlandish claims, and instead try to attack the theory of evolution by finding exceptions or outliers. Unfortunately, they often selectively ignore important research and evidence, and have mostly been debunked (yes, I've read some of this stuff by these people out of curiousity to see how they presented their arguments, and I wasn't very impressed).
Most of the arguments, at a basic level, are elucidated quite well on the talk.origins FAQ. Strangely, the site doesn't read like religious mantra to me.
Congrats, you get the Slashdot "dick of the day" award for being a big dick. I just got modbombed and now you are rubbing it in. Please fuck off and die a painful death with your 'great sense of humor'.
My sense of humor works just fine, but this story doesn't even remotely qualify as funny. It's incredibly annoying to repeatedly hear about these ridiculously stupid statistical coincidences, and this is the SECOND post on the same one on Slashdot alone.
Thanks, Chuck, for getting me modbombed into oblivion. See, I put sarcasm tags on it, so I don't really mean what I'm saying, in case you didn't realize that. Trying to make me look like an ass is not nice. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't mean to get me modbombed, but you did it nonetheless. And if you haven't realized yet, I didn't mean to imply that most Slashdotters take this seriously. However, the mass media and other statistically crippled people DO frequently take this stuff seriously enough to repeatedly bombard us with it, as if it were interesting. Putting a damned funny foot by it doesn't change the fact that it's not statistically interesting, and not amusing.
And it doesn't help when the editors KEEP droning on with it. It may have been moderately amusing the first time it was posted. The second time, it was just stupid (and I am a gung ho Kerry supporter).
But this one (and its predecessor) take the cake. How many times have I read about one of these flaky statistical prediction mechanisms? When it's a bull market year, this league will win the Super Bowl, or that league will win the World Series. When this team gets in the playoffs, that party's candidate will win.
People always trot out these stupid correlations which are roughly true in the past, and then as often as not their predicted conclusions are wrong, because the correlation is entirely spurious. If you look hard enough you'll find something like this that matches past results. The question is how long does this particular metric's 'predictive' power hold up for, and I think you'd find that in general, these statistical correlations/coincidences that people like to trot out have a very poor record of actually successfully predicting anything.
Are you seriously suggesting a serious surgical procedure be performed, albeit a reversible one, to solve the problem of dealing with human feces during hibernation?
Yes, it's not so hard for a surgeon to reverse a colostomy, but it's still major abdominal surgery to get it in the first place, then major abdominal surgery to reverse it afterwards. And potential complications after each. I realize space exploration has its risks that these astronauts would be assuming, but I think the doctors and scientists involved would all have serious ethical issues about performing two unnecessary operations of that magnitude.
I understand catheters for urine, although to be honest, a Foley catheter needs to be periodically replaced to prevent infection, and even so, long term use is not advisable - imagine a serious UTI/kidney infection out in the middle of space. Not a good thing.
Likewise here - my grandfather was a Marine and was on Iwo Jima when the 4th and 5th Marines invaded. I take their sacrifices extremely seriously too, but I think that image has become such a part of the cultural millieu for victory it's hard to hold it as inviolate.
If the image were being used in a way that mocked the sacrifices of the Marines in WWII, then I would understand finding it offensive.
In any case, there were more than enough other things wrong with that old logo to justify trashing it and I'm glad they did. The new logo is an improvement, even if it is a bit bland.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. At SIGGRAPH last year I watched several real-time motion capture systems at work. You can see a 3D rendered, realtime animation of a model using the motion captured data as it is created. So an actor doesn't have to work completely blind, they can actually see how their movements look in the capture data and adjust accordingly.
Obviously you don't get the same polycount and render detail in a realtime animation as you do in rendered film footage, but that's pretty much irrelevant to getting the motion capture down properly.
When I saw the preview for Polar Express, the uncanny valley was the first thing that came to my mind too. For some reason I found it even more disturbing than the Final Fantasy animation. No way I could watch 90 minutes of this without clawing my eyes out.
That's not a very realistic attitude to take and you misunderstand my point. Are you saying that the standards for evidence for each and every claim should be identical, even if some of the claims have been proven and verified thousands of times in the past? I agree that proof is proof - if a hypothesis is falsifiable, and provides for a repeatable experiment, and it's proven to within a reasonable degree of confidence, then it's proven well enough for me.
But that doesn't really answer the question of how do I deal with the large volume of stuff that people claim - given that I don't ahve the time to deal with each and every claim, and attempt to validate them all using the scientific method, I have to decide on some basic standards of evidence as well as standards for whose information I will trust without validation.
If somebody claims that they built an anti-gravity device in my basement I would require a complete demonstration of the device, as well as a description of the theoretical framework behind it in order to accept the claim. If somebody claims that they built their own car from a kit, I will probably accept their claim as true barring evidence to the contrary since it doesn't contradict centuries of human knowledge and science.
I think when quantum mechanics and general relativity came along they were absolutely subjected to this sort of incredulity, and appropriately so. Some of the claims seemed incredible, so the evidence was picked through by many scientists with fine toothed combs, and many years were spent trying to confirm results and devise additional experiments to test their limits. But in the end, they were accepted as true (or rather as accurate models of reality - however you want to phrase this from a philisophical perspective).
Does this mean radical breakthroughs have to overcome inherent inertia? Yes. But it also puts a barrier up to keep the kooks and their crappy ideas out of the scientific mainstream. Generally, even when the source is kooky, if the idea has merit it ends up being accepted. If you can point to counterexamples where this has not occurred, then I'd love to hear them.
But this is an advocation for 8 Million dollars of taxpayer funded money. A lot of good science can be done with 8 Million dollars.
I know nobody reads the articles, but please look at the last sentence in the Yahoo News article. The Air Force implies they are not going to follow the recommendations or spend any more on this guy, the company he works for, or anything related to them. Read the articles, people, please!!! I *CERTAINLY* never said it was worth 8 million dollars of research, unless this guy was presenting repeatable, scientifically verifiable results of interest that some respected scientists validated as being worthy of further research (and he's not presenting anything of the sort here).
If it is not testable, then by definition it is not science. This is why real science is peer reviewed and documented. If your peers cannot duplicate your results or have access to your data, then there very well may be some suspect work going on.
See above. I agree. I am a physicist by training. You are preaching to the choir.
What is disturbing is that this person is confabulating real science with bogus ideas.
Agreed. There is enough real science in there to create an air of legitimacy to a really uninformed reader. That does give me cause for concern. I was sort of trying to think aloud before about how to address that - when it comes down to it, I think what I said before holds, real scientists in academic posts need to review these "research reports" before the military does anything with them.
It does bug me somewhat that they pay 25 grand for a research report that looks like some kooky college exercise. If somebody wants to write an argument for funding this kind of stuff, let them do so on their own budget. The government would be better served putting a few grand into paying some academic scientists to spend a few hours or days reviewing the work and giving their assessment to help inform how valid the recommendations are, and whether they are justified by the summarized research contained therein. I'm sure in this case, the report would have been instantly torn to shreds.
As a point of fact, nobody spent the 7.5 mil, and it's never going to happen. They actually spent 25 thousand dollars on this "reasearch report", which we can all agree is probably mostly wasted. But a few thousand bucks here or there to turn up the latest research on some out-there topics isn't anywhere near as bad as the millions of dollars the CIA spent on resarching some of these areas back in the day.
As for your other point - I basically agree with you. People always say "stop your bitching and do something" - well, I did, I donated thousands of dollars, I voted, and I got several friends to vote for Kerry, and made a case to anybody who would listen. Now I get to throw rocks for the next four years. I was a little afraid that if Kerry won and fucked up, I'd have to admit to being part of that mistake.
Just to be clear - they funded a study into the general areas and applications of teleportation by a private individual/small company. Some of the conclusions seem a bit wacky, however, there is no evidence in this documentation that the recommendations are accepted or that this guy's conclusions are accepted.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with paying somebody to do some background research on potentially "out there" research areas, and figure out what application they might have to the military. However, with rather complicated topics like this, they should be hiring people with appropriate qualifications, and relying on a review of the research by qualified scientists before they do anything else with it. I assume they would do that before pouring millions a year into some of this stuff.
The point where I start becoming wary is the point where he starts saying things like this:
The debate among scientists and scientific philosophers is highly charged at times, and becomes acrimonious to the point where reputable skeptical scientists cease being impartial by refusing to examine the experimental data or theories, and they prefer to bypass rational discourse by engaging in ad hominem attacks and irrational "armchair" arguments.
I don't know the specifics of the Chinese studies he mentions, but I know that most of the psychokinetic stuff from the 70s has been thoroughly discredited when repeated under controlled conditions. If you can only bend a spoon with your mind when its your spoon and your on national TV, then I don't think you're really bending the spoon with your mind. Incredible claims require incredibly strong evidence to back them up. If this guy can repeat any of the results that the Chinese studies he mentions were able to produce (he says they were repeatable, but fail to say by whom - if they just said they were repeatable, that fails to rule out the most likely explanation of simple scientific fraud), then by all means, fund away.
It is a bit disturbing is that this same fellow is making recommendations on military funding of mainstream scientific propositions, like quantum cryptography and computation, entanglement research, and thereotical string theory stuff. And he thinks they should wait-and-see while D-Brane theory matures, but run full steam ahead with psychokinetic research.
He also seems to recommend that some of the most outrageous and least likely to pay off topics should be pursued the most vigorously, like "biological quantum teleportation", based on a single, unpublished paper in the arxiv.org online repository (i.e. a non-peer reviewed scientific publication with no credibility to speak of). Additionally, he recommends funding FTL communication based on entanglement, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the concept of group vs. phase velocity. Without at least an inkling of which direction to go, funding a million bucks a year of FTL communications research based on the irrelevant mechanism behind entanglement is useless.
So yes, this guy is a quack, but it looks like nobody is taking the recommendations seriously. Was the study a waste of $25,000 (what the Yahoo News article says the company was paid for this work)? Perhaps, but lots of small research projects happen and end up going nowhere, and like they say, it's sometimes worth pursuing a bit of cursory research in even unlikely areas to see if anything interesting gets turned up. In this case, it didn't pay off (and I doubt this guy will be doing any more studies for the Air Force).
For the most part, I don't think the status quo is too bad, at least with respect to web content. The relevant laws are pretty much determined by where you host and serve content from, so if that copyrighted material is out of copyright in Australia, and hosted in Australia, then there's no obligation by the Australians to prevent Americans from downloading it, though those Americans are still bound by American laws once they have it.
... well, only illegal because one of the countries involved says its illegal. In which case they are free to enforce their laws already. :)
Likewise for eBay et. al. - if it's hosted in America, and legal in America, but the French try to buy it from America, then that's their problem. If they want to make it illegal to buy nazi memorabilia from abroad, let them, but don't try to enforce your laws on somebody else's content.
Yes, that creates free-for-all zones on the web in countries that don't really enforce any of their own laws when it comes to online content. If you don't want to accidentally stumble on that stuff, it's not too hard to block content from China, for example, just like they do from us.
The real remaining problems then are things like spam. Yes, you can change the rules as you describe them by amending SMTP, POP, etc. to prevent these problems, and that's going on, but ultimately spam is a social problem, not a purely technical one. Expecting a perfect technical solution seems unreasonable to me, since the solutions all seem to introduce substantial costs into the usage equation, for every degree of protection you get, you seem to lose some of the usefulness and beauty of it too.
Additionally, transnational fraud is at an all-time high. It's easy for 419 scammers from Africa to defraud dumb Americans and Europeans (no, it's not just Americans that get taken in these scams) - and there's no legal recourse when the government in question doesn't enforce its own laws, or the government is in bed with the perpetrators of the fraud. You can't deny that the Internet made this kind of fraud accessible, while before it would have been effectively impossible to pull this off from five thousand miles away.
If what you're saying is "the government of Nigeria needs to enforce its laws", then yes, I agree with you. That would probably solve this problem, at least if every country complied. But without anybody forcing them to, there's no way to effectively do this. Hell, you can blackhole all IP traffic from the non-compliant country, and it won't help, because they'll use freemail servers in other countries that don't block them.
Likewise with cracking/site defacement/electronic breaking and entering. Also illegal in many places, unenforceable in many of those, and unregulated in some countries still, and it's impossible to prevent entirely through technological means. Again, what's the mechanism for forcing rogue countries to enforce their laws or pass laws against this?
I think it can probably be done without an international oversight body per se - if the US and EU got together and told Russia, Nigeria, etc. they better start enforcing laws against this stuff or face sanctions, there would probably be some action. For some reason, the US government seems far more interested in getting other countries to buy into its MPAA/RIAA/Disney copyright protection regime and patent insanity than protecting its citizens from fraud or giving its business and net community at large legal recourse for electronic vandalism. God forbid our government do something for anybody other than a special interest group. And something that it would be hard for people to whine about too, since it really would help everybody out, not just us. Hard to argue that spam, fraud and electronic vandalism are somehow culturally relative values we'd be imposing on the world.
As for the rest of the problems Vint cites - misinformation, harrassment, illegal transactions, I think those are overstated. The information on the Internet is fundamentally only as trustworthy as the person who put it there, harrassment across country borders isn't a huge problem as far as I know, and illegal transactions are
Obviously I don't think that making something illegal makes it impossible either. I never advocated any of these laws, I was advocating for cop's rights to make these decisions, just like they make decisions about whether to wear body armor. And it would be nice if you had the option to buy such a gun (again, all assuming the technology is reliable enough, etc.) to prevent your children from accidentally shooting each other or to prevent it from being used against you in a struggle. Obviously, nobody suggests that a determined tinkerer couldn't bypass such a system, and I fail to see how that's relevant, since we were discussing technology that people would choose to use, not something being mandated by the government.
You and I must watch a different 'Cops', I guess. When I tune in, I see the men in blue frequently get involved in physical tussles and rolling around on the ground trying to get a perp pinned down.
And you are claiming that the most common scenario is a perp makes an officer hand over his gun and kills him execution style? If you don't see how somebody would grab the gun from an officers holster or wrestle it from his hands then use it against him, I don't think you're looking very hard.
Given that cops have the most experience in the field, this is something I'd prefer to get their input on. And despite being a Democrat, I am not a strict gun control person - I don't think we all should have registered smart guns. I think the real issue here is that the hard core NRA member types don't want to see this tech ever hit manufacturing because they are afraid it will be forced on them. I don't really want to see it forced on them, I don't think forcing "secure" access on your own personal property, for guns, or computers, is appropriate (see Slashtrolls, I'm being consistent in my views!) - this isn't really a valid argument though, since the tech already exists, it's really a question of whether the tech works well enough and whether you can get over cops concerns about the 100% reliability issues.
Equally importantly.. no, more importantly to me, the looong time Slashdot/Firefox rendering bug appears to have been fixed with the new Slashcode update as of this morning. I am getting zero misrendered pages now, no more CTRL-mousewheel up-down to get proper rendering! After months and months of waiting, somebody has finally gotten off their asses and stopped pointing fingers.
Yes, I realize it's a Firefox bug with a certain kind of nested table structure that Slashdot uses, but still, it can't have been that hard for Slashdot to clean up their HTML a bit and join the rest of the web. Of course, the FF devs should get off their butts and fix it on their end too.
9 years is excessive for any non-violent non-recidivist crime, period. But I don't think jail time (on the order of months, not years) is completely unwarranted for large scale or repeat spam violaters, or those committing fraud on top of spamming.
I agree with you on the massive financial penalties though - bankrupt these people with fines equal to the amount they made from illegal spamming, give them a few months in jail with the caveat that if they do it again, it will be years, and the spamming business will get a lot less attractive very fast. It just needs to be applied more than once, as more than a novelty. Two or three high profile convinctions will make a huge difference for domestic spam operations. And if you punish American companies comparably that support offshore spam operations, the only people left spamming us will be offshore shops selling products from offshore. Certainly the spam problem will be substantially reduced.
I am absolutely thrilled that there is an organization devoted to ensuring that the electoral process is clean and that electronic voting systems are being used appropriately and without tampering. I am also glad that Kerry did the manly thing today and condeded when it became clear that the numbers couldn't add up to his victory in Ohio any way you sliced it.
Despite the fact that I accept the election results (though personally I don't like them), I still want to know that the election was carried out in a fair way, and to ensure that the much debated electronic voting systems aren't being tampered with and are being run in a secure manner, and thank God these people are trying to make sure that is the case.
Is it recorded history or the word of God? Can't you people make up your minds?
Nobody denies the large amount of historical material in the Bible, however much of the Old Testament was written and rewritten generations, even hundreds of years after the events described therein occurred, and there is clear textual evidence for the hands of numerous authors involved. However, we don't know any of these people, and there is no independent corroboration of the things they say. Herodotus also wrote of monsters, beasts, and Gods, but I don't take his work literally either. What about Homer's Iliad? Well, clearly the Trojan War happened, I don't doubt that, but that doesn't mean I take his account of it as literal truth.
Plenty of other tales are passed down over far fewer generations, in written and oral form, and they undergo drastic amounts of change and addition of many fantastical elements as well.
By virtue of their lack of understanding of science and nature, the writers of antiquity were very prone to assign deistic features to natural and human events. And storytelling and embellishment were a basic part of pre-modern life, and one of the few forms of entertainment, the lore, wisdom, knowledge and entertainment media of a land. And storytelling and embellishment seem to be a basic part of human psychology, universal to all cultures.
As for the New Testament - the events therein were described far closer to their occurrence - however what ended up as New Testament canon was scrubbed of the apostolic writings that didn't agree with basic church philosophy, or that seemed to contradict Paul's teachings. In any case, the writings of the early Christians were more religious recruitment effort than natural results of generational storytelling.
In any case, I don't know why I'm bothering to have this discussion with somebody that judges the quality of an idea primarily by how long ago it was first held by some people. And there is no such thing as an "Evolutionist", evolution isn't a belief system, it's just one scientific theory among many that attempts to model reality in a reasonable way. I believe many scientific theories, but I don't have to believe _in_ any of them. A Creationist is labeled as such because they deny a fairly significant scientific theory based on faith alone. Which is fine, I have no problem if you choose to do that, but I must insist that you acknowledge that none of it is based on any falsifiable set of scientific propositions, and that it is your faith in God and the literal truth of the Bible that leads you to uphold this position.
If you read it, the first page indicates that they passed this information on to law enforcement over a year ago. Seems like law enforcement has really done a whole lot since then.
You must be confused. That site you sent me to starts with the premesis of proving literal truth in every word of a book written by people (mostly my own ancestors) several thousand years ago.
And you consider this to be well argued? It cites a bunch of resources, all of which are either on its own website (their own 'Creation' magazine). The "argument" involves taking one basic fact about the fossilization process as disproof of the entire scientific study of fossils, all techniques and data used to make conclusions about the age of fossils and so on. And that was just the first link in their FAQ I happened to click on.
This is not a scientifically sound site, I'm sorry to tell you.
I have yet to see your compelling evidence and I look forward to hearing more about it.
Okay, you avoided all my points and came back with an ad hominem attack on Slashdot as a whole. I admit that there are some vocal people on this forum more interested in flaming than discussing, but that has nothing to do with the relevant points I made.
Wrong. At least assuming you mean scientists and other intelligent individuals. The reasons that the average person believes what they believe are not relevant to this discussion.
As for scientists, their view on evolution is usually founded in the scientific method and falsifiability.
I don't think any scientist will tell you that the theory of evolution is complete or proven in every aspect - as with most facets of biology, it's complex, and the data we have is essentially a partial, but extensive, set of samples. The problem with Creationists is that they fail to separate articles of faith ('God is the ultimate creator of the world' - a statement that is not incompatible with falsifiable observations) and science ('the world is 5000 years old' - there is no evidence to support this and many other such claims).
Obviously, it's a complicated fray, and some of the Intelligent Design people make less outlandish claims, and instead try to attack the theory of evolution by finding exceptions or outliers. Unfortunately, they often selectively ignore important research and evidence, and have mostly been debunked (yes, I've read some of this stuff by these people out of curiousity to see how they presented their arguments, and I wasn't very impressed).
Most of the arguments, at a basic level, are elucidated quite well on the talk.origins FAQ. Strangely, the site doesn't read like religious mantra to me.
Congrats, you get the Slashdot "dick of the day" award for being a big dick. I just got modbombed and now you are rubbing it in. Please fuck off and die a painful death with your 'great sense of humor'.
My sense of humor works just fine, but this story doesn't even remotely qualify as funny. It's incredibly annoying to repeatedly hear about these ridiculously stupid statistical coincidences, and this is the SECOND post on the same one on Slashdot alone.
Thanks, Chuck, for getting me modbombed into oblivion. See, I put sarcasm tags on it, so I don't really mean what I'm saying, in case you didn't realize that. Trying to make me look like an ass is not nice. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't mean to get me modbombed, but you did it nonetheless. And if you haven't realized yet, I didn't mean to imply that most Slashdotters take this seriously. However, the mass media and other statistically crippled people DO frequently take this stuff seriously enough to repeatedly bombard us with it, as if it were interesting. Putting a damned funny foot by it doesn't change the fact that it's not statistically interesting, and not amusing.
And it doesn't help when the editors KEEP droning on with it. It may have been moderately amusing the first time it was posted. The second time, it was just stupid (and I am a gung ho Kerry supporter).
It was moderately amusing the first time it was posted. The second time around it is just stupid, not funny.
But this one (and its predecessor) take the cake. How many times have I read about one of these flaky statistical prediction mechanisms? When it's a bull market year, this league will win the Super Bowl, or that league will win the World Series. When this team gets in the playoffs, that party's candidate will win.
People always trot out these stupid correlations which are roughly true in the past, and then as often as not their predicted conclusions are wrong, because the correlation is entirely spurious. If you look hard enough you'll find something like this that matches past results. The question is how long does this particular metric's 'predictive' power hold up for, and I think you'd find that in general, these statistical correlations/coincidences that people like to trot out have a very poor record of actually successfully predicting anything.
Yes, it's not so hard for a surgeon to reverse a colostomy, but it's still major abdominal surgery to get it in the first place, then major abdominal surgery to reverse it afterwards. And potential complications after each. I realize space exploration has its risks that these astronauts would be assuming, but I think the doctors and scientists involved would all have serious ethical issues about performing two unnecessary operations of that magnitude.
I understand catheters for urine, although to be honest, a Foley catheter needs to be periodically replaced to prevent infection, and even so, long term use is not advisable - imagine a serious UTI/kidney infection out in the middle of space. Not a good thing.
Likewise here - my grandfather was a Marine and was on Iwo Jima when the 4th and 5th Marines invaded. I take their sacrifices extremely seriously too, but I think that image has become such a part of the cultural millieu for victory it's hard to hold it as inviolate.
If the image were being used in a way that mocked the sacrifices of the Marines in WWII, then I would understand finding it offensive.
In any case, there were more than enough other things wrong with that old logo to justify trashing it and I'm glad they did. The new logo is an improvement, even if it is a bit bland.