draq

"Certainly the increased use of computer models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from those who verify them. [...] an independent research institute [...] must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it."

Yes, we should take his opinion with a grain of salt, not because he is a science fiction author, but generally. I like to remind HN of the Royal Society's motto: Nullius in verba.

A more recent story concerning the resignation of a famous climate scientist, Lennart Bengtsson, former director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, from a controversial lobby group due to what Crichton calls "consensus science": http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists...

"Quality software" can also contain fatal errors.

I don't know the title implies. Just because the production of something is expensive, doesn't mean that you have to charge money for its use (of course, it would be very legitimate to do so).

If it was hosted by the Royal Society, wouldn't it be on their website (https://royalsociety.org/events/?type=all&direction=past)?

I think this is another example of the QWERTY effect. Obviously, there are many pieces of word processing software that are superior, but he is so used to his system that, to him, the transaction cost outweighs the opportunity cost.

Your comment manages to be on top despite having little content. So?

EDIT: HN is not a journalistic site. So don't worry about the decline of journalism in this context.

Personally, I think it is very legitimate to appeal to sentiments, because of the three means of persuasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_%28Aristotle%29) pathos foremost agitates people to actions. And sometimes, it is necessary to act (and inform the public). That you disagree with others on this very issue is no reason for insult.

I thought the introductory statement is ironical, but, apparently, it is not. I don't think this article resounds well within the HN community since it is a "mainstream space" that is being criticized. However, despite its polemic nature, it is a worthwhile read, a representative neo-Marxist critique, that you won't often find on HN.

<irony>Infrastructure provided for free by MPS?</irony>

No, but again, sociopathy is currently more an insult than a clearly defined "disorder".

So data and information are irreversibly lost? In the Age of Internet?

Exposure to air. The higher, the windier, the farther the spores get.

Not necessarily, but maybe the employer is subtly implying: "Old people don't need apply."

But if the employer wrote the job description with the intention of causing potential sexual arousal (e.g. if that perk is amongst free beers, chocolate and "frothy milk"), you are definitely objectified.

Your title is extremely misleading. I cannot possibly think why giving the students a third option is indentured servitude. If anything, it liberates the students from the servitude of their student loans.

I think it's alien.

To establish that dominance is not sexual assault, you should communicate. Simply to impose a dominant behaviour in case of doubt is not a GOOD strategy and may be sexual assault.

Ask 100 women if they find it romantic to be kissed without being asked or if they want to be asked first. I'm pretty sure the answer is: being kissed, don't ask.

I am pretty sure the answer is more complicated.

Thing is, if you try to kiss her and she doesn't want it, she'll turn away and that's it.

Well, the problem is sometimes if you are too quick, your greasy lips might end up on her lips, making her smell your foul breath. And even if she turns away, it will not make the first seconds of assault unhappen.

<irony>Of course, because some women want dominance from men, it means that all women loves it. If you unpermittedly invade the personal space of 100 women, and only 10 complain about it, then it's only 10% sexual harassment, right?</irony>

Are you saying there is a market failure for crowd-funding? (<irony>Maybe we need some government intervention?</irony> Or that because Kickstarter is an amazing service that has conquered a niche, it has the moral obligation to incorporate the Bill of Rights into their ToS?

Facebook also asks for permission to import your email contacts from other providers. For GMX, Skype, mail.ru and "other email service", you need to provide a password. It really depends on whether the target site implemented OAuth, OpenID or etc.

Basic income for everyone does indeed seem reasonable to me. If new technology drastically reduces the amount of labour, it seems obviously fair that everyone should be eligible to profit from its benefits. If 2% of the population can provide food for the whole society, maybe another 30% (a number to be drastically reduced by new technology) needed to maintain the social and economical infrastructure, then we will have a majority of people whose economic output is not required. Those people, e.g. children, retirees, handicapped, people with illness, etc. need means to live a decent life. To excessively burden the relatives of those people seems to be an arbitrary and cruel neglect of the society to care for its members.

The argument against basic income is the same as for IP laws. Without money or legal constructs to monetize their products, people have no incentives to work. Maybe we need better incentives for working and creating things.

If I wrote a screenplay, then Palantir is exactly the name I would give the evil Mega Corp (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MegaCorp).

This is a very creative CAPTCHA. However, computers are rather good at playing chess, so a chess problem is probably the least thing you want to use to distinguish between humans and computers (unless your aims is to keep stupid humans out). Other possibilities: guess fruits (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/ip-std030613....), human emotions, animals etc.

The Economist

Those who reads German may be interested in reading the official press release (https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/presse/20121217-facebook-k...), including the decrees to Facebook Inc./USA and Facebook Ltd./Ireland.

Non-professional summary and translation:

I. Facebook is obligated by law to provide the following for the natural persons who want to use www.facebook.com in Schleswig-Holstein:

1. It must be possible to register with a pseudonym.

2. Accounts of registered users whose registration is blocked because of incomplete disclosure or non-disclosure of their real information must be reactivated.

3. Users are to be informed on www.facebook.com about the possibility to register with a pseudonym before the registration.

II. The immediate execution of the provision I. N°2 is decreed.

III. If Facebook does not implement the provisions of I. within two weeks after the delivery of this notice, it will be handed out a penalty of 20,000 EUR.

The change in policy is demanded by the "Independent State Centre for Data Protection, Schleswig-Holstein", a public institution of a constituent state, but not a court of law.

It will probably go through all the court instances, before a conclusion is reached. So let's talk about it next year.

Who has ordered his own replica journal?

That ridiculous extreme must be quite a popular gene, because it still exists: It's called war and mass war rape. Yet, we are not all warmongers and rapists (I hope). So civilisation is already putting its slow but steady evolutionary pressure onto our genes. Let's hope that it's putting our gene pool onto the right track.

I simply don't share joonix' optimism that genetic screening can eradicate "unbeneficial" traits within next centuries without wrongly removing "beneficial" ones, before we have a better and complete understanding of our biological makeup.

More dangerous than ignorance is half-knowledge.

http://www.eurekalert.org

The truth is that humans, like all other animals, have been selective breeding all the time, it's called evolution. We select our mates based on their phenotypes (like aggression, intelligence etc). It was more so in the past than now. People used to abandon infants that are born "defective" (we now have abortions). Parents selected the mates for their children because they are believed to be better judges of "good" phenotypes. It was customary to ensure that the family of the respective mate has no members with mental illness. Yet, after millennia of selective breeding, we still have all the crazies among us. The fact that those "bad" genes still exist must mean that they confer some benefits to the carrier.

The interplay between genes, RNA, proteins and other macromolecules is so complex that I doubt we can pin down a mental illness to a single gene or safely remove a mutation that causes mental illness from the gene pool without reducing other collateral beneficial traits.

The question here, as I understand, is not whether breeding programmes are ethical, but whether misleading the general population with false information is ethical.

Is it ethical to ask for donations or ticket prices to zoos by giving people the impression that their money will (partially) go to conservation efforts, while the money is spent to breed animals that cannot survive in the wild but only for "marketing" purposes?