Or, what would happen if everybody with an IQ under say 80, was sterilized?
Nothing. Because IQ is normalized such that the average person is 100 with a mainly bell-shaped curve on both sides. If you wnet to kill every single person with IQ80 tomorrow, the average remaining person would still have an IQ of 100 and there would still be a bell-shped distribution around it on each side. Because the definition of IQ is such as to guarantee that.
Also let's remember that mortality was disproportionately higher among the lower classes until very very recently. As in, until 2 centuries ago or so.
Uh, what? Mortality is still disproportionately higher in the lower classes. Everywhere on the globe. And that shows not the slightest sign of changing. As a matter of fact I'd be willing to define "classes" along the lines of life expectancy. How else would you do that? Even the lowest hobo can own a DVD player these days. But he can't afford health insurance...
Not a nice thought, but history or humanity weren't nice until the 20'th century. Stuff that we all now get horrified about, when we read about the Third Reich or Stalin, were the stuff human civilization was built upon.
Absolutely nothing whatsoever has changed since the 20th century. The same atrocities are committed right this moment by the same power-hungry tyrants all over the planet for the same reasons.
I do not know where you get the delusion that today is somehow different from the rest of history, but to the people 100 years from now you will just be one of these folks back there in the past and they will not perceive any more of a change in conditions at the turn of the 21st century than we perceive one today at the turn of the 20th.
We're trying to decelerate for lunar orbital insertion but when we try to fire the thrusters, a little box pops up that says "Null pointer dereference at 0x00045fe3342a"
"Wait, I'll check Sourceforge"
...
"Nope, looks like that's a new one. I submitted it through Bugzilla and changed the priority to '9'..."
With all due respect, I've done CMYK separation in GIMP. No, it doesn't come with the default install, but it is too obvious an extension not to float around out there as a free download.
As far as I recall, all I did was google "gimp cmyk" or some such. Downloaded some gizmo that had to be placed into some directory. Had to download some profiles from Adobe or something. And then the rest "just worked". Total investment maybe 30 minutes of time.
Now when was the last time you tried to do something that wasn't built-in with a commercial piece of software and the fix was as easy as that?
As far as I can tell, that's where the value of F/OSS really lies. It's not the "price" (GIMP is only 'free' if your time is worthless) but the enormous flexibility that arises from letting anybody who cares modify (i.e. improve upon) the tool you're using.
Considering the market segments that companies like Microsoft were involved with in the mid 1980's, it should not surprise anyone that they were not among the first to register for.com domains. It would not have made any sense for them to do so.
If you read some of the old stuff, MS was quite expressly strategizing on the "computer on every desk" paradigm, with a network tacked on for communications, maybe, but certainly not as a major driver of anything. As opposed to Oracle, which wanted everybody to have a dumb terminal and the computing power centralized in majorly big iron - with the net as a main enabling technology. And as opposed to Sun, which really recognized the net as a worthy entity in itself ("the network is the computer"). It's about outlook on a technology as much as "target market".
Nobel prize winner Steve Weinberg says in the article that it will be the only good science done on the ISS if it goes up!!!
...which is slightly misleading, of course. Back in the late eighties, early nineties, cosmic-ray scientists in the US formed a collaboration to conceive pretty much this system. It was called Astromag. It had a certain cost, NASA said it was too expensive, it got canned. Fast forward a couple years and Sam Ting, who has no clue of cosmic-ray science and only now discovers that there's interesting things to be done there drums up financial support in industry and various European partners for a harebrained gizmo that he called AMS that would never do a thing and be horribly expensive. NASA agrees to fly it in complete circumvention of any kind of peer-review that had axed Astromag earlier. In the following years, AMS hits snag after snag, snafu after snafu, redesign after redesign -- and after many, many redesigns finally effectively mimicks what Astromag would've been from the word go.
The reason it took "500 scientists 12 years to build" the piece of junk is because these were scientists who had no clue of space particle research. Who were lacking the simplest background in anything to do with with space radiation. There were major press releases, for example, when a first prototype flew on the shottle and purportedly newly discovered a population of trapped electrons -- i.e. the van Allen belts. Which none of these folks had ever heard of, because they're all particle physicists who've spent their lives in tunnels underground.
So at some point AMS runs our of money, steam, political will to ram an expensive industrial project down the throats of people who proposed to do the same damn thing for 1/10 the cost a decade earlier. I can't say I'm surprised.
All that said, it is definitely an interesting project. It would most certainly be the only worthwhile science on the ISS. But it could've been up there as one of the first functional modules at some fraction of the cost.
(And trust me I am moderating this comment -- go and chat to Ed Stone (PI on Voyager and former director of JPL who retired to head the Space Radiation Lab at Caltech) one of these days for a lesson on how politics drives science).
Sorry, but the burden of proof is on your positive assertion. Nobody has to prove you wrong. YOU have to prove your claim that a civilian space researcher who goes from JPL to ESA would be subject to the same onerous background checks. Hint: up until now, they were not required for JPL or NASA in general, so your claim is that Europe conducts background checks that are in excess of what the US has been doing up until now. Apparently you know something that the US intelligence community doesn't know -- it's astonishing how many people like you I keep meeting on the internet...
..perhaps this from your post "Every single ESA project is automatically by definition an international project."..Well, besides "huh...so what?" ..from this it follows that (quoting my own post here): It is an absolute certainty that ESA research cannot possibly get mired in "national defense" as much as NASA can get .
Since you seem to have trouble parsing English sentences, let me give you the hint that the first "N" in NASA stands for "national", which ESA is decidedly not. To the contrary. The ESA member countries will make quite sure that no nation derive any unfair military advantage from ESA projects.
[...] but you not being an american [...]
As long as you continue to base your posts on one assumption after the other, you should not be surprised if you keep being corrected by people. Let me re-formulate what you appear to have missed in my last post: just because you think something doesn't make it so. And that's good for the universe. Because your thinking continues to show itself as rather limited.
Which is why a post-doc at a top-tier academic institution, will be making <$32'000/year.
Uh, what? When I was a postdoc at Caltech I was making $49k. That was a number of years back. Aerospace, not biotech, though. And yes, that number doubled when I went to (you guessed it) JPL, and then almost again when I left JPL. Both steps were made possible because of the time spent as a Postdoc.
And, with all due respect, if I can support a family of three on $49k in the frickin' LA area, then so can everybody else everywhere else. It's definitely nothing to sneer at. For a job description that boils down to "research whatever you feel like researching" I cannot claim to have been "undervalued".
But of course everybody and their little brother are going into biotech these days, so it's not particularly surprising that there's no money to be made there. Just as the "computer science" boom of the nineties where everybody expected to get tenure and six-figure salaries by learning a little Modula. Secretaries became "html programmers" and doubled their salaries. And the whole thing collapsed and they became secretaries again.
If I wanted to hire you right now, why would I offer you more money than the bunsen-monkey down the hall would be willling to cook for me for?
Probably the first thing most people would know is when they get told to start learning Mandarin, because their company just got bought.
Don't worry -- spoken mandarin is one of the easiest languages on the planet. It's the written stuff that's difficult. Which is a fine way to keep the unwashed masses out of the business of the leaders. Who would not come from your formerly-American company so there's no need for you to learn the written stuff. See -- it all works out.
The federal government has absolutely no reason to balance the budget or to erase the debt. Why should they? All that debt gives them control over the economy. As long as they're the biggest debtors around, Wall Street will tremble about every quarter-point increas or decrease in the prime rate. Why would anybody give a rat's ass about the federal reserve if the feds (i.e. outstanding accounts against the feds) weren't the largest collective asset in the economy?
If you're a hundred grand in debt, the bank owns you. If you're a hundred million in debt, you own the bank.
Why do you think the republicans want to privatize Social Security? Because it will make the federal government the largest single investor and thus the most powerful economic force in the country. It will give the federal government control over the economy.
I'm not defending these obtrusive new background checks, but having a hard time believing other large nations wouldn't have quite similar policies.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, it does not matter what Americans "have a hard time believing". It is widely understood that all oppressed people always imagine that everybody else is as oppressed as they are.
It is an absolute certainty that ESA research cannot possibly get mired in "national defense" as much as NASA can get because Europe is not a caountry. It is a continent. Every single ESA project is automatically by definition an international project.
And your claim that research into the composition of martian dust or studies of cloud formation in the troposphere or research into galactic nuclei is "dual use" is absurdly uninformed at best. What part of "None of them even work on anything classified or defense related. " is too hard for you to grasp?
In what way, other than the literal one that refers to its size?
Can you point me to one single astronomer who, when given the choice between an hour time at Arecibo, an hour at the VLA, or an hour at Atacama would choose Arecibo? One single astronomer?
Pointing at things it has done decades ago is not an answer to the question "what are we getting out of this thing RIGHT NOW that we can't get somewhere else better, cheaper?"
As one of my professors used to say: Anything that can be discovered by measuring Volts, meters, kilograms and Kelvins has been discovered. If you want to find something new, you're going to have to look at microvolts, nanokelvins, picometers. Or otherwise at gigavolts and terakelvins and such things where all our nice meso-scale simplifications break down.
The next generation of discoveries are going to be made with the next generation of equipment. And creating that next generation is a lot more important than keeping some outmoded stuff alive for sheer nostalgia. I love old grandfather clocks, but if my budget is so tight that I have to choose between one of these and an atomic clock, I know which of them is actually doing the actual work RIGHT NOW. In terms of telescopes it's really more like keeping three different generations of grandfather-clock around together with two generations of atomic clocks and then deciding to *scale down* the mechanical clock department by 25% to have the money available to make the NEXT generation of atomic clock.
Why is that wrong? I'd say it is exactly what any self-respecting geek would want to do.
This is so OT that it hurts my teeth to type this, but... backwards-compatibility is one thing, but a complete lack of development on the core ISA is a rather different one. I have no idea what AMD or Intel are doing to SSE these days, but if one of them could backport some of the technologies involved there to the cores, where a simple indirect add still consumes the same number of processor cycles as it did back on the Pentium-II, it would speed up a lot of existing software in a way that is entirely backwards compatible with the exception of programs that rely on the number of cycles for a given instruction for timing reasons. Which is not what should be running on a general purpose CPU anyways.
has got to be about as obvious as can be. So who gets to be the "expert witness" that proclaim that this obvious to them so that the patent can be revoked? Most of the "eperts on internet search technology" are either
- employed by Google (and thus have a conflict-of interest) or
- employed by one of Google's competitors (and thus have just as much of a conflict but a less obvious one).
Reality is that there's a lot of things that are "obvious" in hindsight -- but who gets to say so? Was this obvious to you in 1994? Then why didn't you patent it?
One, a full audit shouldn't taken "hunrdeds or even thousands of man hours". Nor should a full audit really be necessary (if nothing else, by using a known clean backup). Two, if the kids had stolen and altered the gradebook, wouldn't that entail a "full audit" of all gradebooks they could have had acccess to?
Did you actually read TFA? The two apparently hacked the passwords of several fairly-high-level accounts of the Cal State University (a 23 campus, 400,000+ student system) PeopleSoft DB. Three are named and it said "and others". So they had access to... what exactly? Payroll? Grants administration? Patentable technology? Classified defense-funded research? You think you can audit this in a couple hours? Or just wipe it all and go back to some "known clean backup" when the crime was committed three years ago?
It would have been more interesting (for me at least) to see comments on logical processes (or the way our own biases will compel us as thinking of such an argument as being totally bogus in the first place), rather than just merely reasons why children should not smoke. I think that's what the author wanted to gain. It's still early though. Let's hope:) The author selected a bunch of people who are willing to get paid pennies for menial labor to check out hit arguments. This is in itself a fallacy: if you want to test the quality of your arguments you want to submit them to people selected by their high ability to understand your argument and to find the flaws in it and to be familiar with the topic at hand and so forth. That's why we have a scientific peer-review: because I want those who understand what I'm talking about to look at my work, not a bunch of random strangers.
And yes: post your stuff on Slashdot and you'll only find "the most commonly spotted flaws" in your argument, not the most important ones, not the most interesting or revealing ones, not the most devastating ones -- just the ones that are caught most frequently. Those are the ones you'll find with a HIT-like process as well.
(I'm not going to point out the (glaring!!) fallacies committed by the author in his "reasoning" since I'm assuming that we're talking about the process here, not the employed example. The article is about using humans to do something that computers find difficult to do -- not about any one task that might fall into that category.)
He said he uses Windows. He didn's say he uses XP embedded (as your link appears to point to an article strictly about EWF which appears to be a feature of the embedded version of XP SP2).
The average age of a homeless person in LA is nine. Not twenty-nine, not nineteen, but nine. And that's the average. There's more younger than older then this.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, what would happen if everybody with an IQ under say 80, was sterilized?
Nothing. Because IQ is normalized such that the average person is 100 with a mainly bell-shaped curve on both sides. If you wnet to kill every single person with IQ80 tomorrow, the average remaining person would still have an IQ of 100 and there would still be a bell-shped distribution around it on each side. Because the definition of IQ is such as to guarantee that.
Longevity is an evolutionary dead end.
Physical immortality is easy. Bacteria figured it out. That's why they're still bacteria.
If you keep hardware around for too long, it'll be yesterdays hardware very quickly. And thus be obsoleted by tomorrows hardware.
Planned obsolescence of hardware keeps the means of production busy and allows for constant incremental improvements to the layout of the product.
Uh, what? Mortality is still disproportionately higher in the lower classes. Everywhere on the globe. And that shows not the slightest sign of changing. As a matter of fact I'd be willing to define "classes" along the lines of life expectancy. How else would you do that? Even the lowest hobo can own a DVD player these days. But he can't afford health insurance...
Not a nice thought, but history or humanity weren't nice until the 20'th century. Stuff that we all now get horrified about, when we read about the Third Reich or Stalin, were the stuff human civilization was built upon.Absolutely nothing whatsoever has changed since the 20th century. The same atrocities are committed right this moment by the same power-hungry tyrants all over the planet for the same reasons.
I do not know where you get the delusion that today is somehow different from the rest of history, but to the people 100 years from now you will just be one of these folks back there in the past and they will not perceive any more of a change in conditions at the turn of the 21st century than we perceive one today at the turn of the 20th.
Houston, we got a problem here
"What is it Orion-3?"
We're trying to decelerate for lunar orbital insertion but when we try to fire the thrusters, a little box pops up that says "Null pointer dereference at 0x00045fe3342a"
"Wait, I'll check Sourceforge"
...
"Nope, looks like that's a new one. I submitted it through Bugzilla and changed the priority to '9'..."
With all due respect, I've done CMYK separation in GIMP. No, it doesn't come with the default install, but it is too obvious an extension not to float around out there as a free download.
As far as I recall, all I did was google "gimp cmyk" or some such. Downloaded some gizmo that had to be placed into some directory. Had to download some profiles from Adobe or something. And then the rest "just worked". Total investment maybe 30 minutes of time.
Now when was the last time you tried to do something that wasn't built-in with a commercial piece of software and the fix was as easy as that?
As far as I can tell, that's where the value of F/OSS really lies. It's not the "price" (GIMP is only 'free' if your time is worthless) but the enormous flexibility that arises from letting anybody who cares modify (i.e. improve upon) the tool you're using.
What in the name of blue fuck does this have to do with Microsoft, Twitter?
If you had read past the second word in the sentence, you would have found this very question answered there.
Considering the market segments that companies like Microsoft were involved with in the mid 1980's, it should not surprise anyone that they were not among the first to register for .com domains. It would not have made any sense for them to do so.
If you read some of the old stuff, MS was quite expressly strategizing on the "computer on every desk" paradigm, with a network tacked on for communications, maybe, but certainly not as a major driver of anything. As opposed to Oracle, which wanted everybody to have a dumb terminal and the computing power centralized in majorly big iron - with the net as a main enabling technology. And as opposed to Sun, which really recognized the net as a worthy entity in itself ("the network is the computer"). It's about outlook on a technology as much as "target market".
And since when is Microsoft a "computer manufacturer" (much less a "major" one)?
...which is slightly misleading, of course. Back in the late eighties, early nineties, cosmic-ray scientists in the US formed a collaboration to conceive pretty much this system. It was called Astromag. It had a certain cost, NASA said it was too expensive, it got canned. Fast forward a couple years and Sam Ting, who has no clue of cosmic-ray science and only now discovers that there's interesting things to be done there drums up financial support in industry and various European partners for a harebrained gizmo that he called AMS that would never do a thing and be horribly expensive. NASA agrees to fly it in complete circumvention of any kind of peer-review that had axed Astromag earlier. In the following years, AMS hits snag after snag, snafu after snafu, redesign after redesign -- and after many, many redesigns finally effectively mimicks what Astromag would've been from the word go.
The reason it took "500 scientists 12 years to build" the piece of junk is because these were scientists who had no clue of space particle research. Who were lacking the simplest background in anything to do with with space radiation. There were major press releases, for example, when a first prototype flew on the shottle and purportedly newly discovered a population of trapped electrons -- i.e. the van Allen belts. Which none of these folks had ever heard of, because they're all particle physicists who've spent their lives in tunnels underground.
So at some point AMS runs our of money, steam, political will to ram an expensive industrial project down the throats of people who proposed to do the same damn thing for 1/10 the cost a decade earlier. I can't say I'm surprised.
All that said, it is definitely an interesting project. It would most certainly be the only worthwhile science on the ISS. But it could've been up there as one of the first functional modules at some fraction of the cost.
(And trust me I am moderating this comment -- go and chat to Ed Stone (PI on Voyager and former director of JPL who retired to head the Space Radiation Lab at Caltech) one of these days for a lesson on how politics drives science).
Sorry, but the burden of proof is on your positive assertion. Nobody has to prove you wrong. YOU have to prove your claim that a civilian space researcher who goes from JPL to ESA would be subject to the same onerous background checks. Hint: up until now, they were not required for JPL or NASA in general, so your claim is that Europe conducts background checks that are in excess of what the US has been doing up until now. Apparently you know something that the US intelligence community doesn't know -- it's astonishing how many people like you I keep meeting on the internet...
..perhaps this from your post "Every single ESA project is automatically by definition an international project."..Well, besides "huh...so what?" ..from this it follows that (quoting my own post here): It is an absolute certainty that ESA research cannot possibly get mired in "national defense" as much as NASA can get .Since you seem to have trouble parsing English sentences, let me give you the hint that the first "N" in NASA stands for "national", which ESA is decidedly not. To the contrary. The ESA member countries will make quite sure that no nation derive any unfair military advantage from ESA projects.
[...] but you not being an american [...]As long as you continue to base your posts on one assumption after the other, you should not be surprised if you keep being corrected by people. Let me re-formulate what you appear to have missed in my last post: just because you think something doesn't make it so. And that's good for the universe. Because your thinking continues to show itself as rather limited.
Uh, what? When I was a postdoc at Caltech I was making $49k. That was a number of years back. Aerospace, not biotech, though. And yes, that number doubled when I went to (you guessed it) JPL, and then almost again when I left JPL. Both steps were made possible because of the time spent as a Postdoc.
And, with all due respect, if I can support a family of three on $49k in the frickin' LA area, then so can everybody else everywhere else. It's definitely nothing to sneer at. For a job description that boils down to "research whatever you feel like researching" I cannot claim to have been "undervalued".
But of course everybody and their little brother are going into biotech these days, so it's not particularly surprising that there's no money to be made there. Just as the "computer science" boom of the nineties where everybody expected to get tenure and six-figure salaries by learning a little Modula. Secretaries became "html programmers" and doubled their salaries. And the whole thing collapsed and they became secretaries again.
If I wanted to hire you right now, why would I offer you more money than the bunsen-monkey down the hall would be willling to cook for me for?
Don't worry -- spoken mandarin is one of the easiest languages on the planet. It's the written stuff that's difficult. Which is a fine way to keep the unwashed masses out of the business of the leaders. Who would not come from your formerly-American company so there's no need for you to learn the written stuff. See -- it all works out.
The federal government has absolutely no reason to balance the budget or to erase the debt. Why should they? All that debt gives them control over the economy. As long as they're the biggest debtors around, Wall Street will tremble about every quarter-point increas or decrease in the prime rate. Why would anybody give a rat's ass about the federal reserve if the feds (i.e. outstanding accounts against the feds) weren't the largest collective asset in the economy?
If you're a hundred grand in debt, the bank owns you. If you're a hundred million in debt, you own the bank.
Why do you think the republicans want to privatize Social Security? Because it will make the federal government the largest single investor and thus the most powerful economic force in the country. It will give the federal government control over the economy.
Yes.
You're welcome.
Wait - was that intended to be some kind of rhetorical question? I can't always tell on the intarwebs. Clearly HTML needs a "rhetorical"-tag...
Fortunately for the rest of the world, it does not matter what Americans "have a hard time believing". It is widely understood that all oppressed people always imagine that everybody else is as oppressed as they are.
It is an absolute certainty that ESA research cannot possibly get mired in "national defense" as much as NASA can get because Europe is not a caountry. It is a continent. Every single ESA project is automatically by definition an international project.
And your claim that research into the composition of martian dust or studies of cloud formation in the troposphere or research into galactic nuclei is "dual use" is absurdly uninformed at best. What part of "None of them even work on anything classified or defense related. " is too hard for you to grasp?
What part of "None of them even work on anything classified or defense related." was too hard for you to grasp?
Its A MASSIVE asset to the Radio Astronomy field,
In what way, other than the literal one that refers to its size?
Can you point me to one single astronomer who, when given the choice between an hour time at Arecibo, an hour at the VLA, or an hour at Atacama would choose Arecibo? One single astronomer?
Pointing at things it has done decades ago is not an answer to the question "what are we getting out of this thing RIGHT NOW that we can't get somewhere else better, cheaper?"
As one of my professors used to say: Anything that can be discovered by measuring Volts, meters, kilograms and Kelvins has been discovered. If you want to find something new, you're going to have to look at microvolts, nanokelvins, picometers. Or otherwise at gigavolts and terakelvins and such things where all our nice meso-scale simplifications break down.
The next generation of discoveries are going to be made with the next generation of equipment. And creating that next generation is a lot more important than keeping some outmoded stuff alive for sheer nostalgia. I love old grandfather clocks, but if my budget is so tight that I have to choose between one of these and an atomic clock, I know which of them is actually doing the actual work RIGHT NOW. In terms of telescopes it's really more like keeping three different generations of grandfather-clock around together with two generations of atomic clocks and then deciding to *scale down* the mechanical clock department by 25% to have the money available to make the NEXT generation of atomic clock.
Why is that wrong? I'd say it is exactly what any self-respecting geek would want to do.
This is so OT that it hurts my teeth to type this, but... backwards-compatibility is one thing, but a complete lack of development on the core ISA is a rather different one. I have no idea what AMD or Intel are doing to SSE these days, but if one of them could backport some of the technologies involved there to the cores, where a simple indirect add still consumes the same number of processor cycles as it did back on the Pentium-II, it would speed up a lot of existing software in a way that is entirely backwards compatible with the exception of programs that rely on the number of cycles for a given instruction for timing reasons. Which is not what should be running on a general purpose CPU anyways.
So who gets to be the "expert witness" that proclaim that this obvious to them so that the patent can be revoked? Most of the "eperts on internet search technology" are either
- employed by Google (and thus have a conflict-of interest) or
- employed by one of Google's competitors (and thus have just as much of a conflict but a less obvious one).
Reality is that there's a lot of things that are "obvious" in hindsight -- but who gets to say so? Was this obvious to you in 1994? Then why didn't you patent it?
Did you actually read TFA? The two apparently hacked the passwords of several fairly-high-level accounts of the Cal State University (a 23 campus, 400,000+ student system) PeopleSoft DB. Three are named and it said "and others". So they had access to ... what exactly? Payroll? Grants administration? Patentable technology? Classified defense-funded research? You think you can audit this in a couple hours? Or just wipe it all and go back to some "known clean backup" when the crime was committed three years ago?
And yes: post your stuff on Slashdot and you'll only find "the most commonly spotted flaws" in your argument, not the most important ones, not the most interesting or revealing ones, not the most devastating ones -- just the ones that are caught most frequently. Those are the ones you'll find with a HIT-like process as well.
(I'm not going to point out the (glaring!!) fallacies committed by the author in his "reasoning" since I'm assuming that we're talking about the process here, not the employed example. The article is about using humans to do something that computers find difficult to do -- not about any one task that might fall into that category.)
Google is working on a 3-D social networking environment incorporating Google Earth and Google Maps
wow, this will be just like ... going outside and ... meeting real people....
He said he uses Windows. He didn's say he uses XP embedded (as your link appears to point to an article strictly about EWF which appears to be a feature of the embedded version of XP SP2).
The average age of a homeless person in LA is nine. Not twenty-nine, not nineteen, but nine. And that's the average. There's more younger than older then this.
How many houses did you build at that age?
You mean the brain is active even while I'm asleep?
I wouldn't have imagined that even in my wildest dreams...