By the way, Google StreetView has been mentioned, but if you wanted to do an entire city, wouldn't it be simpler to use a bunch of high res shots taken from an helicopter circling around the city?
Also, could it be used by the military? To transform the photographic data from recon planes of an area into something that could be used in some simulation program? Imagine playing Call of Duty in the village you'd have a mission into in a few hours.
Isn't where the new iPhones come in? They have GPS and a compass. But you're right that it would probably simplify things to make it more systematic, mostly when you already have all the StreetView data readily available, considered that it's full panoramas with sufficient increments of parallax for anything.
I don't know which is worse, that anyone can be dumb enough to actually make that happen, or that it would garner our praise. In our defence, Slashdot is full of people who think that education should be all about learning to think. That's utter bullshit, learning to think is only one aspect of education, and as a matter of fact it's more a by-product of "learning things". School is for learning basic knowledge and basic skills, like reading, counting, writing, or knowing about ancient Greece or being able to put Belgium or the Potomac River on a map. So, learning multiplication by reciting look-up tables isn't fun? Well tough luck, cause you need that in life, and that's not by making homoerotic monsters in Spore that you'll learn that. Just stop with the experimental education, good education doesn't need innovation, lots of kids 100 years ago received a better education than most of your offsprings ever will.
Disclaimer, I went to private school in France, I know what receiving a decent education is like. How do you think my English became this good, by learning critical thinking? More like by being forced to learn lists of irregular verbs.
Do you realise that most Americans are protestants and that protestant priests don't molest children because they're married and thus live a normal and healthy sexual life?
I feel the same way, you can bet your money on Einstein every time, but we have to test anything we can anyway to verify everything and hope to learn more.
I know it's counter intuitive, and back when I was about your age (that's right, I'm patronising you. Feels good man.) I myself didn't get it, but basic science (the kind that seems like useless theoretical dicking around like that gravitational waves thing) is a sort of long term investment, and a great kind of investment, as you can get several times your investment back.
Think about it, what good was nuclear research in the 19th century? Yet a few decades later they probably kept us safe from an all out war against USSR, they power clean power plants, submarines, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and space probes. The research on quantum physics keeps on giving more and more, mostly as we manufacture things that keep getting smaller, like computer chips. We wouldn't have GPS if it wasn't for Einstein's relativity, and I let you guess what good did research that made transistors was good for. If you look into any technology and progress you'll find that at its root is basic research that wasn't obviously going to give that. Who would have thought that research in chemistry and fluid physics would get us to the moon?
So what do you know, maybe when you'll be older you'll owe your flying car to current research on gravitational waves.
Also, look at it this way. If we only did applied research to find things with direct applications, we wouldn't have gotten far. A good analogy is, if explorers had always only sailed within sight of a coast, we would have never discovered the Americas.
The idea isn't just to merely adopt what others have developed, but to improve upon it.
lol, that's like saying, my girlfriend looks like rapper Lil Wayne, I want my next girlfriend to look Jessica Alba, and then I'll give her a make over.
Sorry if trying to have the same system as Sweden bores you to the tears, but that would be a huge improvement, and you can bet your arse that any of your "improvements" would only look like improvements on paper. Your comment is what's wrong with some people, plans are never ambitious enough, so when they finally are ambitious enough, they become too ambitious/unrealistic to succeed.
Perhaps you don't realise how much crappier than it could be education as a whole in the USA is, mostly when compared to other Europeans countries, or how crucial it would be for the country if everybody in the USA could receive the same kind of education as people in Scandinavia or France. There's nothing to improve upon if you're not even there yet. That's like a hobo making plans of the changes he'd make if he could buy a mansion.
Really? How about you shut the fuck up and spend more time on atheist forums on the Internet, you know, where these types of "New Atheists" spout their hate?
Indeed. There's a prevailing idea that the way it's done in America is superior to the way it's done elsewhere. This means that when it's time for reform, they won't look at what the others do, they'd rather deny the problem or try to come up with an original solution. Not the best way to go. Fortunately, the current president is very pragmatic, quite the opposite of the aforementioned jingoistic movement, as his return to Keynesian economical policies and healthcare reform attest.
Well I disagree. Who do you think kids in France see as a role model, Tony Parker (the French NBA player who's with Eva Longoria) or some random scientist or astronaut? It doesn't change anything their scientific education whether they worship Paris Hilton or Stephen Hawking. It's hardly relevant.
And since when something "not being cool" got in your way? Science fiction is definitely "not cool" but it doesn't prevent any of you from attending Star Wars conventions dressed as Darth Vader or worshipping some Start Trek actor.
I agree to the extent of what I can relate to in what you say, although you have to be careful with your suggested course of action. I think there's a tendency in reform to try to address the problem blindly hoping it works, it's a way to do it, but it's not very safe. The safe and efficient way to do it is to look at how countries with a successful educational system do it, and try to model after them, without straying from what's been tried and met with success.
It's often said that you can't just copy another country to fix your issues. That may be true most of the time, but like I said education is the same problem for anyone, and because of that looking up to a successful as a role model is a good and relatively safe thing to do.
No offence but TFA is right. "New Atheists" are the worse bunch of dicks I've ever come across, and the worst kind of religious fanatics, and I should know because shortly after I became atheist I joined the "let's blame every war on religion, pretend like theists are all incredibly stupid and wish all the theists in the world would suddenly drop dead so we could live among nothing but the superior people that we believe we are" club for a year or two.
The problem I believe is we're right and we so know it. I'm not even being sarcastic or implying some sort of relativity, we are right, and that's the entire problem. It gives us a sense of legitimacy for practically lynching people who fail to realise that, and it makes us act like we're so much better as persons because we are right and others persist in being wrong and foolish. It's like we're looking at 90+% of the world in the eyes and telling them "you're stupid you're stupid you're stupid please drop dead". No wonder atheists are hardly the most popular "religious group" out there, and yet it's not even like the others despise and hate us as much as we do to them.
Yep, when in the above comment I was writing about "shit no one would normally care about" it got me wondering if in a way it wasn't interesting (or at least familiarising) people with such topics they would normally ignore. Americans as a whole not just simply accepting the scientific consensus on climate warming for instance and deciding to take it to the streets into an all out brawl (which I find ridiculous) probably taught them a lot about how climate works. Not like that's the way things should be learnt, mostly when so many get it awfully wrong.
Speaking as a European, actually science is pretty popular in the USA, globally (except for the mad handful who think science is the sworn enemy of their faith). Actually, I quite like to think of the USA as the country of nerds. Case in point, that's where all the Europeans nerds want to go cause since some time around the 1930s that's where all the big science and engineering are. In Europe (UK excluded, too much of an American satellite to be representative) we don't make offerings to the holy ghost of Charles Darwin, and we couldn't care less about science fiction (seriously, we care nowhere near as much as people in the USA do). But we're better at mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, because secondary education didn't fail us. It's not a cultural problem, it's all an educational one.
The problem is not how "popular" or "cool" it is, the problem is with education. To put it simply and bluntly, your educational system sucks, particularly when it comes to science. Reform it. Education is pretty much the same problem for anyone, you're doing it wrong, look at how others are doing it right.
An obvious rift exists between many religious and scientific communities.
Yep, and there shouldn't be one. Science and faith aren't incompatible, some great men of science were also men of faith. But in America more than anywhere else it was turned into an epic science vs faith war where everybody picks a side and the battlefronts are shit that no one would normally care about, like biology and genetics or palaeontology or even palaeoclimatology.
Also, why the hell can't I post this comment? It says "There was an unknown error in the submission.". It seems Slashdot is crumbling to pieces day after day.
So, go ahead and accomplish something? Surely there must be something that you're good at that overlaps with something you'd find desirable to achieve?
Wouldn't it be trivial for Google to kill it? Think about it, recently created groups devoid of any true conversational activity, being accessed by thousands of computers on a regular basis, probably all of them identifying themselves in a similar way (i.e. all giving the same user agent or no user agent, no referral, etc..). That would be fairly trivial for Google to identify the patterns and shut down the botnet groups. Might orphan quite a few botnets, and definitely hunt the botnets out of Google Groups.
We all know that modelling human behaviour in software is anything but a trivial task, and that the results have to be taken with quite a grain of salt, but that's a step in the right direction, because for the last few decades economists have considered the market players to be perfectly reasonable, rational and competent, assuming little to no chaos in what actually goes on. If this crisis did anything good, it's given a much needed reality check to economists, particularly west of the Atlantic. I read a great piece on the topic by the way.
There's also something I love about these economists who come up with Nobel prize-worthy equations but fail to see the elephant in the room that is making all these weird assumptions about how markets work. I think of them as smart fools, they're extremely intelligent, but never take a step back to see where they're going. They do very futile and dumb things, but in an extremely sophisticated and brilliant manner. And because they know they're extremely smart and experts in their field, they reject any notion that despite that intellect and expertise they might be fools. Anyone with any common sense and education could see the caveats of what they do, but everybody knows that these guys are smarter than us and experts, so they must be right, even if it's blatantly foolish. This applies to string theorists as well by the way, to a lesser extent.
Yes, but it's not about the precious unique snowflake that (you may believe) you are, it's about most workers, most of which are indeed replaceable. You know, the larger picture.
If my boss said that he was going to pay me half of what I make now and ask me to work 16 hours a day I would quit.
Yeah, but if another equally qualified worker steps up and accepts then you're screwed. That's why unions exist, and that's why laws exist, so that things that shouldn't be done aren't done, union or no union. The "free market" thing doesn't always work the desirable way. If it did, capital wouldn't make so much more money than work.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, Google StreetView has been mentioned, but if you wanted to do an entire city, wouldn't it be simpler to use a bunch of high res shots taken from an helicopter circling around the city?
Also, could it be used by the military? To transform the photographic data from recon planes of an area into something that could be used in some simulation program? Imagine playing Call of Duty in the village you'd have a mission into in a few hours.
I would like to know how they decide which color would be more appropriate for a point.
Meh, would you go very wrong if you just settled for the median or mean value?
Isn't where the new iPhones come in? They have GPS and a compass. But you're right that it would probably simplify things to make it more systematic, mostly when you already have all the StreetView data readily available, considered that it's full panoramas with sufficient increments of parallax for anything.
I don't know which is worse, that anyone can be dumb enough to actually make that happen, or that it would garner our praise. In our defence, Slashdot is full of people who think that education should be all about learning to think. That's utter bullshit, learning to think is only one aspect of education, and as a matter of fact it's more a by-product of "learning things". School is for learning basic knowledge and basic skills, like reading, counting, writing, or knowing about ancient Greece or being able to put Belgium or the Potomac River on a map. So, learning multiplication by reciting look-up tables isn't fun? Well tough luck, cause you need that in life, and that's not by making homoerotic monsters in Spore that you'll learn that. Just stop with the experimental education, good education doesn't need innovation, lots of kids 100 years ago received a better education than most of your offsprings ever will.
Disclaimer, I went to private school in France, I know what receiving a decent education is like. How do you think my English became this good, by learning critical thinking? More like by being forced to learn lists of irregular verbs.
Do you realise that most Americans are protestants and that protestant priests don't molest children because they're married and thus live a normal and healthy sexual life?
I feel the same way, you can bet your money on Einstein every time, but we have to test anything we can anyway to verify everything and hope to learn more.
I know it's counter intuitive, and back when I was about your age (that's right, I'm patronising you. Feels good man.) I myself didn't get it, but basic science (the kind that seems like useless theoretical dicking around like that gravitational waves thing) is a sort of long term investment, and a great kind of investment, as you can get several times your investment back.
Think about it, what good was nuclear research in the 19th century? Yet a few decades later they probably kept us safe from an all out war against USSR, they power clean power plants, submarines, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and space probes. The research on quantum physics keeps on giving more and more, mostly as we manufacture things that keep getting smaller, like computer chips. We wouldn't have GPS if it wasn't for Einstein's relativity, and I let you guess what good did research that made transistors was good for. If you look into any technology and progress you'll find that at its root is basic research that wasn't obviously going to give that. Who would have thought that research in chemistry and fluid physics would get us to the moon?
So what do you know, maybe when you'll be older you'll owe your flying car to current research on gravitational waves.
Also, look at it this way. If we only did applied research to find things with direct applications, we wouldn't have gotten far. A good analogy is, if explorers had always only sailed within sight of a coast, we would have never discovered the Americas.
Well, at least they did during the 20th century. Who made your atomic bombs and rockets?
The idea isn't just to merely adopt what others have developed, but to improve upon it.
lol, that's like saying, my girlfriend looks like rapper Lil Wayne, I want my next girlfriend to look Jessica Alba, and then I'll give her a make over.
Sorry if trying to have the same system as Sweden bores you to the tears, but that would be a huge improvement, and you can bet your arse that any of your "improvements" would only look like improvements on paper. Your comment is what's wrong with some people, plans are never ambitious enough, so when they finally are ambitious enough, they become too ambitious/unrealistic to succeed.
Perhaps you don't realise how much crappier than it could be education as a whole in the USA is, mostly when compared to other Europeans countries, or how crucial it would be for the country if everybody in the USA could receive the same kind of education as people in Scandinavia or France. There's nothing to improve upon if you're not even there yet. That's like a hobo making plans of the changes he'd make if he could buy a mansion.
Really? How about you shut the fuck up and spend more time on atheist forums on the Internet, you know, where these types of "New Atheists" spout their hate?
I'm afraid you're entirely right. However this doesn't change a thing to the fact that the American educational system badly needs reform.
Indeed. There's a prevailing idea that the way it's done in America is superior to the way it's done elsewhere. This means that when it's time for reform, they won't look at what the others do, they'd rather deny the problem or try to come up with an original solution. Not the best way to go. Fortunately, the current president is very pragmatic, quite the opposite of the aforementioned jingoistic movement, as his return to Keynesian economical policies and healthcare reform attest.
Well I disagree. Who do you think kids in France see as a role model, Tony Parker (the French NBA player who's with Eva Longoria) or some random scientist or astronaut? It doesn't change anything their scientific education whether they worship Paris Hilton or Stephen Hawking. It's hardly relevant.
And since when something "not being cool" got in your way? Science fiction is definitely "not cool" but it doesn't prevent any of you from attending Star Wars conventions dressed as Darth Vader or worshipping some Start Trek actor.
I agree to the extent of what I can relate to in what you say, although you have to be careful with your suggested course of action. I think there's a tendency in reform to try to address the problem blindly hoping it works, it's a way to do it, but it's not very safe. The safe and efficient way to do it is to look at how countries with a successful educational system do it, and try to model after them, without straying from what's been tried and met with success.
It's often said that you can't just copy another country to fix your issues. That may be true most of the time, but like I said education is the same problem for anyone, and because of that looking up to a successful as a role model is a good and relatively safe thing to do.
No offence but TFA is right. "New Atheists" are the worse bunch of dicks I've ever come across, and the worst kind of religious fanatics, and I should know because shortly after I became atheist I joined the "let's blame every war on religion, pretend like theists are all incredibly stupid and wish all the theists in the world would suddenly drop dead so we could live among nothing but the superior people that we believe we are" club for a year or two.
The problem I believe is we're right and we so know it. I'm not even being sarcastic or implying some sort of relativity, we are right, and that's the entire problem. It gives us a sense of legitimacy for practically lynching people who fail to realise that, and it makes us act like we're so much better as persons because we are right and others persist in being wrong and foolish. It's like we're looking at 90+% of the world in the eyes and telling them "you're stupid you're stupid you're stupid please drop dead". No wonder atheists are hardly the most popular "religious group" out there, and yet it's not even like the others despise and hate us as much as we do to them.
Yep, when in the above comment I was writing about "shit no one would normally care about" it got me wondering if in a way it wasn't interesting (or at least familiarising) people with such topics they would normally ignore. Americans as a whole not just simply accepting the scientific consensus on climate warming for instance and deciding to take it to the streets into an all out brawl (which I find ridiculous) probably taught them a lot about how climate works. Not like that's the way things should be learnt, mostly when so many get it awfully wrong.
I'm of the "if it looks like a duck" school of thought
Sounds more like your school of thought goes like "if it's not an octopus and not a fish and it has two legs, it must be a duck".
Speaking as a European, actually science is pretty popular in the USA, globally (except for the mad handful who think science is the sworn enemy of their faith). Actually, I quite like to think of the USA as the country of nerds. Case in point, that's where all the Europeans nerds want to go cause since some time around the 1930s that's where all the big science and engineering are. In Europe (UK excluded, too much of an American satellite to be representative) we don't make offerings to the holy ghost of Charles Darwin, and we couldn't care less about science fiction (seriously, we care nowhere near as much as people in the USA do). But we're better at mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, because secondary education didn't fail us. It's not a cultural problem, it's all an educational one.
The problem is not how "popular" or "cool" it is, the problem is with education. To put it simply and bluntly, your educational system sucks, particularly when it comes to science. Reform it. Education is pretty much the same problem for anyone, you're doing it wrong, look at how others are doing it right.
An obvious rift exists between many religious and scientific communities.
Yep, and there shouldn't be one. Science and faith aren't incompatible, some great men of science were also men of faith. But in America more than anywhere else it was turned into an epic science vs faith war where everybody picks a side and the battlefronts are shit that no one would normally care about, like biology and genetics or palaeontology or even palaeoclimatology.
Also, why the hell can't I post this comment? It says "There was an unknown error in the submission.". It seems Slashdot is crumbling to pieces day after day.
Hehe, that's another way to see it ;-) suits me.
So, go ahead and accomplish something? Surely there must be something that you're good at that overlaps with something you'd find desirable to achieve?
Wouldn't it be trivial for Google to kill it? Think about it, recently created groups devoid of any true conversational activity, being accessed by thousands of computers on a regular basis, probably all of them identifying themselves in a similar way (i.e. all giving the same user agent or no user agent, no referral, etc..). That would be fairly trivial for Google to identify the patterns and shut down the botnet groups. Might orphan quite a few botnets, and definitely hunt the botnets out of Google Groups.
We all know that modelling human behaviour in software is anything but a trivial task, and that the results have to be taken with quite a grain of salt, but that's a step in the right direction, because for the last few decades economists have considered the market players to be perfectly reasonable, rational and competent, assuming little to no chaos in what actually goes on. If this crisis did anything good, it's given a much needed reality check to economists, particularly west of the Atlantic. I read a great piece on the topic by the way.
There's also something I love about these economists who come up with Nobel prize-worthy equations but fail to see the elephant in the room that is making all these weird assumptions about how markets work. I think of them as smart fools, they're extremely intelligent, but never take a step back to see where they're going. They do very futile and dumb things, but in an extremely sophisticated and brilliant manner. And because they know they're extremely smart and experts in their field, they reject any notion that despite that intellect and expertise they might be fools. Anyone with any common sense and education could see the caveats of what they do, but everybody knows that these guys are smarter than us and experts, so they must be right, even if it's blatantly foolish. This applies to string theorists as well by the way, to a lesser extent.
If your business isn't making enough money to stay alive, exploiting workers harder isn't the solution.
If you're that easily replacible, then sure.
Yes, but it's not about the precious unique snowflake that (you may believe) you are, it's about most workers, most of which are indeed replaceable. You know, the larger picture.
If my boss said that he was going to pay me half of what I make now and ask me to work 16 hours a day I would quit.
Yeah, but if another equally qualified worker steps up and accepts then you're screwed. That's why unions exist, and that's why laws exist, so that things that shouldn't be done aren't done, union or no union. The "free market" thing doesn't always work the desirable way. If it did, capital wouldn't make so much more money than work.