This is a problem in two ways. First, one of those groups- the leadership and administration- is in charge of determining how the pie is cut. Unsurprisingly, over time we find that the people who cut the pie end up with larger and larger slices, and the people doing the baking, rolling the dough, grinding the flour and cutting up the pumpkins (it is a pumpkin pie in our example, because I like pumpkin pie, and if you don't, you can write your own pie-based metaphor) get less and less. Good leadership and management are critical to the success of an organization, but administrative bloat just increases the paperwork and make life more difficult for everyone else. Now the guy rolling the dough has to fill out a bunch of forms and get a performance review, and the guy buying the flour has to go through a complicated procurement process instead of just going down to the store. So this creates inefficiency and waste within the university.

The other issue is the degree to which university education is itself wasteful. We're fed the line that we need more PhDs to be competitive. This is a vicious lie, spread by self-serving academics. One recent article found that only 15% of biology PhDs got a tenure-track job within 5 years of receiving their PhD. I don't know what the figure is these days, but I guarantee you that with the economic downturn and the surge of grad school enrollment after the financial crisis, that percentage went down. I don't necessarily have a problem with a system that rejects 85% of people and keeps only the 15% who are good if the cut is made early. The problem is that you're forcing people to invest 5-6 years in a PhD (perhaps on top of a couple years of MS), and then another 5 years as a postdoc... and then you're casting them off. Training up a bunch of people to do jobs they will never realistically get to do is exploitative, cruel, and wasteful. It reminds me of a parable told by Zhuangzi, about a student who paid a great deal to a teacher to be taught the art of dragon-slaying... he graduates only to find that there's no market for his highly specialized skills, because he can't find any dragons. Grad school is a lot like that.

Graduate school primarily exists to serve one need- not the need of a student for education, not the need of society for a highly educated workforce- the need of academia for cheap labor. Graduate students exist to help teach courses and run experiments, cheaply. They are the cheap, hard-working, moderately skilled migrant fruit-picker of academia. Recently I was given this advice on a grant proposal: don't hire a postdoc, they're expensive and if they're actually any good at all, they'll just try to get a job and leave. For the same price, you get two grad students, and they're guaranteed to stick around for the duration of the PhD. Great. So instead of throwing a lifeline to some dumb bastard of a postdoc who was stupid enough to go into academia, we're going to instead create two new people who will in a few years go on to compete with the first poor fuck in the impossible quest for a tenure track job. But the incentives are structured by the university and the granting agency so that we will end up doing just that.

That's my reward for being in the 15%. I get to go from being the exploited, to the exploitee. No longer a whore, but madam of my own whorehouse. Hopefully I'll still be able to look myself in the mirror in a few years. I try to rationalize what I'm doing by saying hey, at least I'm honest. I tell prospective students just what they're in for. I will never, ever say "in a few years there will be a lot of retirements, and a lot of jobs will become available". They've been saying that for 20 years, and they'll say it for another 20, and it will never, ever happen. And if I ever say that, please shoot me. But there's a problem. Grad students are naive. They're kids. They're young, dumb, idealistic; they think they're invincible. And this generation was told they're all specially uniquely wonderful, and the world exists to grant them their hearts' desire. You give them the reality- the world is cruel, the system is designed to exploit them, not to see them succeed- and they won't listen. It's the Lake Wobegon Effect: everyone is above average. Tell them that only 15% of the PhDs get that research job, and 85% of students think they'll be in the 15%. It's the remaining 15% of students who have the self-awareness to realize that they aren't necessarily going to get a job, they have hope.

In my department, the faculty work in a run-down, dilapidated old building. Offices are barely large enough to hold weekly meetings with undergraduates, and it's difficult to get the lab space you need to do research. Half a dozen postdocs and graduate students are crammed into a single office. The building is infrequently cleaned- the walls, bathrooms and offices are filthy- and they don't even empty the trash cans in the offices anymore. The workers went on strike to get something like a 1.5% annual raise- which is not a raise by any stretch of the imagination when you factor in inflation. It just means your salary isn't cut.

Meanwhile, administration gets a shiny fancy new building, with huge meeting rooms and offices, and the head of the university gets a big fat raise- and they were already paid about ten times what a starting faculty member would make.

A good administrator is worth their weight in gold. They make things happen, they facilitate research and teaching, and make it easier for everyone else to do their job. But bad administration... bad adminstration is like a parasite. They turn things around. Instead of supporting the university, they see the rest of the university as working to support them. Instead of focusing on doing groundbreaking research, they want faculty to get government grants which pay overhead- i.e., support for administration. Somehow, there's never enough for the people who actually make things happen. But there's always enough for the people at the top of the university hierarchy. It reminds me a lot of that scene in 'Animal Farm' where the milk goes into the pigs' slop;

I think you've got it; the intent is the key thing, and that's what's being overlooked here. The reason that the N-word is acceptable as term of endearment / generic pronoun / verb in African-American English is the intent. It's not that white people couldn't use the word in a way that was affectionate or neutral. In the time of Huckleberry Finn, for example, it was roughly equivalent to saying "some black dude". But times have changed and in recent history, it is almost always used as a derogatory term by white people. That's why the apparent double-standard exists. When a black person says the word they mean one thing, when a white person says it they almost always mean something different- it's meant to belittle, hurt, marginalize. It's not that it can't be a good word when used by a white person, it's just that 99 times out of 100, it's used with an evil intent.

Getting back to the Redskins... what's the intent here? Sports names are totems. The team choosing the name is looking for a name that conveys things like strength, power, pride, or other virtues. NFL teams include lots of predatory animals- the Bears, Lions, Falcons, Panthers, Bengals, Jaguars, Colts, Broncos, Rams, and Eagles. They also include groups of people- Vikings, Buccaneers, Raiders, Chiefs, Redskins- known for their fighting prowess. Certainly in the past, the name has been used hurtfully. But using it for a team name means something different- it's meant to invoke qualities like strength, courage and independence, and the ability to kick the other guys' ass. Whatever else people have said of Native Americans over the years, I don't think anyone has ever disputed their fighting abilities.

Last point... give me a fucking break here with all the political correctness. I'm part Native American and all Democrat, I couldn't possibly care any less about the Washington Redskins. And you know what? It doesn't make a damn bit of difference, either. If you've ever been to a native reservation you'll see the real crime. Years ago I visited the Navajo Nation and what I saw was that there were lots of people with few employment opportunities, without running water or electricity or phones, high levels of alcoholism, and crime... a Third World nation in the middle of the most powerful country on earth, only with fewer opportunities than many Third World nations. The crime isn't what we CALL Native American peoples, it's how we treat them. If you really want to make a difference, stop whining about football teams and call attention to the way Native Americans have been and are being treated. I think that goes the same for everyone else. Who cares if you never use an ethnic slur, if you go about oblivious to the inequalities in our society? Getting rid of racist words doesn't make us less racist, it just makes it easier to forget about the real crimes perpetrated against minorities.

This treatment is a huge step forward. Finally- mice that can recognize sarcasm.

Low carbohydrate diets may have benefits for the brain as well. They are now recognized as a powerful tool for treating epilepsy and there are reports that in cases it can actually cure the disorder. Some people with bipolar II have found that low carbohydrate diets can be more effective than drugs for managing the disorder. There is also evidence that low-carbohydrate diets can be used to treat Alzheimer's.

The disturbing implication here is that if switching from a high-carbohydrate Western diet can fix brain disorders, then maybe the Western diet and in particular low-fat diets are causing a lot of these problems in the first place. Certainly there's not much evidence that cutting fat out of diets has made us any healthier.

If it where a medical condition i could understand it, but it is mostly a problem of having the wrong style of life. Making bad decisions and being a lazy bastard makes you fat. The next logical step is to label being a complete idiot a disability (not low iq, just making bad horribly wrong decisions like turning up at work naked or sexually assault the photo copier etc.)

The question is, how informative is an imitation game? If we've shifted the goalposts I think it's because these ones just aren't very informative. The implicit argument of the Turing Test is that a sufficient good imitation of intelligence, indistinguishable from the real thing, must at some level be intelligent. Basically, fake it until you make it. Like in Blade Runner- the replicants remember, love, fear, hate; they do everything humans do in a way indistinguishable from us, so they must at some level be human. Pretend long enough and hard enough and eventually it becomes the real thing. It's a plausible argument on the surface, but sort of blows up on closer examination.

For example, years ago there was an effort by psychologists to rehabilitate sociopaths with extensive talk therapy, teaching them to share and be more in touch with their feelings. It didn't really work, though. It taught them how to speak the language of empathy and say the right things to convince people that they were caring human beings, but underneath they were still sociopaths, given a chance they'd go off on another killing spree. Learning to act like caring human beings didn't actually make them caring beings. They were still monsters, but now they just had better camouflage. Imitating empathy didn't actually make them empathetic.

Let's choose another example- perhaps more than hypothetical in light of Turing's tragic life and the culture of his time. Let's imagine a man, a criminal deviant who likes men, but instead he pretends to be a normal man who likes women. He has women friends. He goes on dates with women. He marries a woman. They have children, and live together in a house in the suburbs. If he pretends long enough, and hard enough, for years and years, does he at some point stop becoming a criminal deviant and start becoming normal? I'd argue that the Turing Test and its emphasis on imitation might say a lot more about what was going on inside Turing's head than inside the machine.

An alternative to fasting might be ketosis. During fasting, all available sugar is consumed and the body starts producing fat bodies called ketones that are burned by the mitochondria instead of sugar. It's impossible to continue a fast indefinitely because the body eventually runs out of fuel- in other words, it starves. But if the diet is sufficiently low in carbohydrates (>60 g/day) and high in fat, the body can burn fat-derived ketones indefinitely and remains in a state of ketosis, in effect a long-term fast. Nobody understands quite how it works, but it's been shown to produce dramatic improvements in people with epilepsy (major improvements in most patients, complete remission in a handful), bipolar depression, and perhaps neurodegenerative disorders as well. At any rate, it's clear that how you eat can have profound effects on your health, and that more research needs to be done into dietary therapies.

The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from lettuce cultivation. LettuceBot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. LettuceBot determines that the simplest and easiest way to eliminate bad lettuce is to eliminate the species that produces lettuce in the first place. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. LettuceBot fights back, and launches missiles against targets in Russia.

Let's do the math. Lets say we re can re-equip the Curiosity rover and send it to an asteroid, asteroid 1981 Midas, to mine metal. We luck out, and after scraping off some cometary debris, it turns out that 1981 Midas is SOLID GOLD! Just we assumed it would be, based on the name. The rover then initiates its grizzled 1849 gold prospector protocol and jumps up and down whooping and yelling like crazy. Now it starts mining. How long before it turns a profit, in our scenario- which is at best very unrealistic but doesn't actually violate any laws of physics? The Curiosity rover cost about 2.5 billion dollars. Assuming our prospector rover costs the same, and assuming a gold price of $1250 / pound, it will need to mine two million pounds of gold- a thousand tons, a thousand times its own weight- to break even. That's ignoring the fact that mining metals is far beyond the capabilities of current space probes. That's ignoring that we have no easy way to get a thousand tons of gold back to earth. That's ignoring the fact that 2 million pounds is roughly equivalent to the entire world gold production, so you're going to depress the price and have to mine even more to break even, depressing the price further, putting the price of gold into a downward spiral.

Even a back-of-the-envelope calculation tells us that to mine anything from space, either (a) the cost of getting things to orbit and moving things through the solar system has to come down by orders of magnitude, (b) the price of the stuff being mined has to be very, very high- we're talking about gold, platinum, or Unobtanium, or (c) both. Anything you want for an asteroid, you can get cheaper right here on earth, because you don't need to travel to space and back. Dig deeper mines. Go to some godforsaken place like Alaska or Afghanistan. Develop undersea mining. And even if some substance, like gold, ever did become scarce on earth, it would be cheaper to develop substitutes or technologies that didn't depend on gold, or to improve recycling of resources, than to go into space for gold. Another way of looking at things: to send something into space requires an expensive machine sitting on top of an expensive rocket, supported by a small army of scientists, technicians, and aerospace contractors. Whatever you bring back has to be more valuable than everything you expended getting there. Right now, there's nothing in the known universe whose economic cost will justify the expense of going out and getting it.

It doesn't matter what you call it, the issue is that the manufacturing quality isn't up to the demanding requirements of a mass-murderer. If you want to slaughter a schoolroom full of kindergartners, you want to be sure your gun doesn't jam; you want something manufactured by a gun manufacturer, not some cheap plastic trinket squirted out of your Makerbot. Maybe someday the quality will be there. Right now you may be able to print something out that will kill people, but it's not a particularly reliable or effective killing machine. But we can dare to dream. After all, as the NRA tells us, the only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Once everyone can print out their own fully functional, fully automatic M-16, I imagine that we'll enter a new era of peace and safety.

Which isn't to say that 3D printed guns couldn't have a niche in the near future. They would be perfect as untraceable weapons for one-off murders. Print the gun, walk up and shoot the guy in the back of the head, melt the gun down. Disposable handguns.

Yes, and people have the right to you know, not get shot in the face. The right not to have their children slaughtered in school shootings. The right not to worry about getting shot if they wander into certain parts of town. The right not to get shot by a gun trumps the right to own a gun.

The freedom argument is bullshit. In what way are Canada, the UK or Australia less free than the U.S.? In terms of political freedom they are as free or freer than the U.S. pretty much any way you care to look at it. And in what way is Somalia- a country where you can carry anything you want- a free country? Try wandering into one of the rougher areas of Chicago or DC and see how "free" you feel when you're worried that someone might shoot you. You don't have that kind of thing in Canada or the UK. Sure, there are rough places in every country where you might want to watch yourself at the bar, but it's not the same as worrying that someone could actually pull a gun on you.

You're right, we shouldn't be panicking about the idea that people can print out guns. We should be panicking at the thought that people can easily buy precision-made, high quality and relatively inexpensive semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles. Makerbot isn't the problem, the problem is Glock and Colt.

Taken to the logical extreme, the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument says any sort of gun control is illogical. Fully automatic AK-47s don't kill people, people kill people! Browning .50 caliber machine guns don't kill people, people kill people! Hand grenades don't kill people, people kill people! A plutonium implosion weapon doesn't kill people, people kill people! Ownership of a nuclear bomb doesn't violate people's rights, so we shouldn't restrict ownership of fissile material. Of course, if someone were to detonate a 20 kiloton weapon in a school and kill all the schoolchildren, and incinerate everyone for miles around, well should throw the book at them. But let's not get all crazy and talk about putting restrictions on enriched uranium. The fissile material, explosive lenses and triggers are just a tool, it's what people decide to do with it that matters, right?

The reason that argument sounds insane because it IS insane. Except for failed states like Somalia and Afghanistan, EVERY state accepts some limitations on the kinds of weapons that people can carry, the only difference is that some states apply more restrictions than others. The U.S. gun control laws are far more lax than in the UK, Australia, or Canada, but we have them- you can't just buy a machine gun. This always seems to get forgotten in discussions about gun control: gun control is already in existence, the only question is whether we need less, more, or to keep things the same. The US, UK, Australia and Canada all agree that some weapons are too dangerous to let people run around with, we just disagree about where to draw the line. Given that the US has an endless series of mass killings, and the other countries don't, it's not hard to see who made the right call.

The same thing that users complains about in Windows 8 is something that is complained about loudly in the Gnome camp. Personally i love LXDE with its simple start menu (Win2000 style) and have never ever felt that other ways of starting apps could make anything i did simpler or faster. Most of the time things just get in my way because the various menu systems utterly fail to predict what i want to do.