[Frowning Old Woman]
Did you know that under their clothes, children are all naked? And you dare look at them! Why, everywhere we go there are naked children, thinly veiled in clothing. Any time you glance at a child, it is therefore clear that you are committing a grievous offence against nature.[/Frowning Old Woman]
Some people watch too much commercial television, methinks. That's why the politicians get away with so much.
Never mind the military uses, how about using them for construction purposes? They used kids for that during the industrial revolution. Some day I reckon these robots will be cheaper than children, but it'll take a while.
Actually, I would guess that you read the article wrong.
No, actually, the point wasn't that ticket evasion was expensive but the electronic ticketing system was expensive. They may as well just thrown the whole pay-to-travel idea out and still saved money.
I take your point, though, that ticket evasion is by and large a small scale problem. The issue was that a high-tech solution is dumb-stupid-crazy-evidence-of-corruption when it replaces a low-tech and very cheap solution (paper tickets, real people selling them as well as enforcing their use).
Every child in America is offered a completely free education through high school graduation.
No. Every child in America is offered free childcare (except, I am guessing, pre-school). Education is totally different to sitting in a classroom of 30+ kids in front of a teacher who can't read or count, and doing so until one is 18.
The government doesn't have an education system in mind at all. It's just a euphamism.
Go to a country of equivalent wealth but with better education and see the difference (eg: Germany).
The problem is that what passes as education in the US (and other similarly wealthy countries, indeed) is of such poor quality that one is left wondering if this was intentional and not accidental.
An article in an Australian newspaper pointed out that it's costing us more to build a new ticketing system for public transport in Melbourne than it cost to send the Pheonix Lander to mars. I read somewhere that it costs more to put (and maintain) ticket machines + inspectors on the trams than the combined wages and benefits of all the former tram inspectors that were laid off. It was (and probably still is) costing more to maintain the damned ticketing system than the ticketing revenue. It would have been cheaper to make public transport free of cost. What a change that would have to Melbourne's smog cloud!
What's sad is your comment was rated as Informative rather than funny... What's gratifying is that at least one more moderator out there has been rendered 'informed'.
Maybe you can say "well they didn't lobby hard enough to maintain or grow their funding...
but it's pretty obvious that science has not been a USA priority for quite some time now.
I agree with you, but I think the timing of the US's scientific stagnation is also uncanny. It's been several generations since the last influx of extremely bright and educated scientists (and philosophers) from conquered lands. Iraq, I have to say, hasn't netted anything of the sort (with all due respect to Iraqis).
Is there a problem with the handing on of scientific knowledge in the US? Or is this a reflection of American cultural shortcomings? It seems to me that US culture is too shallow to recognize the importance of free & fair education 'for all'. If you don't provide equal opportunity to every child to excel and prove themselves in academia, then the chances of plucking the brightest from the far reaches of the bell curve diminish.
I say this knowing full well I'm going to be modded a troll or flaimbait or something.
Win95 was as good as Windows got. Yep. A graphical shell running on top of DOS that didn't multi-task properly and invariably killed your computer, given enough time. What a POC it was.
This is false and this is why, even if you 'simulate' cells in the brain, you still don't end up with a brain. The subtlety of brain development before birth is far from being adequately understood.
Unless you want to say that there is some mystical element to brains, there is nothing precluding the eventual design and building of 'sentient' computers, surely?
The only thing precluding it is ethics. I dare you to propose to have thousands upon thousands of mothers give you their healthy foetuses at varying stages of development so that you can kill and analyze them.
Now most people would argue that a fly does not think, but it is clearly able to perform some sort of precessing.
Not wanting to labour the point too much, but...
It's no different to a script that moves a clickable picture away from the mouse cursor once it approaches a critical distance such that you can never click on the picture (unless you're faster than the script).
A fly's compound eye is a highly sensitive movement sensor and the fly will move at anything big that moves, but if you don't move the fly doesn't see you (its brain wouldn't cope with that much information).
Flies can learn a limited amount but it's limited and I would argue a computer could well behave as a fly and perform a fly's functions. But is the fly thinking? I don't think the fly is consciously deciding anything except that repeated stimuli that 'scare' it result in temporary sensitization to any other movement.
Bacteria show similar memory behaviour but I wouldn't go so far as to call it 'thought'.
This is one time when the lessons learned from fictional books/movies would come in handy. I'm serious too.
Like the bit in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker almost asked Leia out and, well, they would have had kids together and everything OMG! And lucky that C3P0 was such a patsy and ruined it for them. It was almost incestuous!
Not that I've ever come across that in real life, but definitely brother-sister relationships are a no-no.
I tried it once and didn't like it at the time, but I might try again. I remember someone referring to it as "all it really does is let me watch banner ads". Does it work properly yet?
But this isn't a difference between what they're saying and what they mean. Yes it is. Well, it's a difference between what the words they say mean and what they are doing and what that means to those who whom they are doing those things. Or something. Anyway how do you know what anyone means by anything anyway? I better go. The boss is coming.
And people wonder why I use noscript and flashblock I imagine those using the malware are not hoping that sensible people such as yourself get infected at all, but the PC's belonging to the members of the unwashed e-masses who wouldn't have the foggiest what anyone's talking about. Their computers are much better because the life of your exploit is likely to be long and chances of anyone chasing and finding you are slim.
My first one has gone from -1 to 5 in the span of an hour or so, and my others have gone from funny to troll... it's just amazing to watch when you have very little else to do =)
That's so true. Post your little post and watch it grow.. then die.. then grow again..
I had a post go troll to interesting to insightful then funny. Then I stopped looking because my coffee was ready.
What if at some point it became obvious that certain populations were (objectively) superior to others, in terms of predisposition toward diseases, etc.
The end of WWII supposedly brought an end to eugenics in Germany, but it was, even then, thriving in the English speaking world and continues to do so.
The weakness of our civilization has become a lack of any moral vigor. Pretty much every time there is protest on moral grounds it is trivialized by the media and the whole thing is treated like a sport between nay-sayers and scientists.
It's a weakness because it breeds distrust and fear in the community. if we don't come up with/maintain some kind of moral integrity in our scientific community, we will be overrun by groups who will impose an extreme opposite on us. And yeah, you're right, someone will come up with a logical but crazy conclusion and we'll have another wave of white-coat slaughter happening.
Slashdot Mirror
[Frowning Old Woman] Did you know that under their clothes, children are all naked? And you dare look at them! Why, everywhere we go there are naked children, thinly veiled in clothing. Any time you glance at a child, it is therefore clear that you are committing a grievous offence against nature.[/Frowning Old Woman]
Some people watch too much commercial television, methinks. That's why the politicians get away with so much.
No, actually, the point wasn't that ticket evasion was expensive but the electronic ticketing system was expensive. They may as well just thrown the whole pay-to-travel idea out and still saved money.
I take your point, though, that ticket evasion is by and large a small scale problem. The issue was that a high-tech solution is dumb-stupid-crazy-evidence-of-corruption when it replaces a low-tech and very cheap solution (paper tickets, real people selling them as well as enforcing their use).
No. Every child in America is offered free childcare (except, I am guessing, pre-school). Education is totally different to sitting in a classroom of 30+ kids in front of a teacher who can't read or count, and doing so until one is 18.
The government doesn't have an education system in mind at all. It's just a euphamism.
Go to a country of equivalent wealth but with better education and see the difference (eg: Germany).
The problem is that what passes as education in the US (and other similarly wealthy countries, indeed) is of such poor quality that one is left wondering if this was intentional and not accidental.
I agree with you, but I think the timing of the US's scientific stagnation is also uncanny. It's been several generations since the last influx of extremely bright and educated scientists (and philosophers) from conquered lands. Iraq, I have to say, hasn't netted anything of the sort (with all due respect to Iraqis).
Is there a problem with the handing on of scientific knowledge in the US? Or is this a reflection of American cultural shortcomings? It seems to me that US culture is too shallow to recognize the importance of free & fair education 'for all'. If you don't provide equal opportunity to every child to excel and prove themselves in academia, then the chances of plucking the brightest from the far reaches of the bell curve diminish.
I say this knowing full well I'm going to be modded a troll or flaimbait or something.
Mod parent up +5 flamebait! And someone please tag the article 'haha'!
I think it's due to the degree of cognitive dissonance involved in the idea that the same company that made Windows 2000 made Windows 95.
This is false and this is why, even if you 'simulate' cells in the brain, you still don't end up with a brain. The subtlety of brain development before birth is far from being adequately understood.
Unless you want to say that there is some mystical element to brains, there is nothing precluding the eventual design and building of 'sentient' computers, surely?The only thing precluding it is ethics. I dare you to propose to have thousands upon thousands of mothers give you their healthy foetuses at varying stages of development so that you can kill and analyze them.
Not wanting to labour the point too much, but...
It's no different to a script that moves a clickable picture away from the mouse cursor once it approaches a critical distance such that you can never click on the picture (unless you're faster than the script).
A fly's compound eye is a highly sensitive movement sensor and the fly will move at anything big that moves, but if you don't move the fly doesn't see you (its brain wouldn't cope with that much information).
Flies can learn a limited amount but it's limited and I would argue a computer could well behave as a fly and perform a fly's functions. But is the fly thinking? I don't think the fly is consciously deciding anything except that repeated stimuli that 'scare' it result in temporary sensitization to any other movement.
Bacteria show similar memory behaviour but I wouldn't go so far as to call it 'thought'.
Like the bit in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker almost asked Leia out and, well, they would have had kids together and everything OMG! And lucky that C3P0 was such a patsy and ruined it for them. It was almost incestuous!
Not that I've ever come across that in real life, but definitely brother-sister relationships are a no-no.
(For example)
Don't feel bad about being 'redundant'. In most cases there is a handsome payout as part of the package. Sometimes there's even some salami.
I tried it once and didn't like it at the time, but I might try again. I remember someone referring to it as "all it really does is let me watch banner ads". Does it work properly yet?
That's so true. Post your little post and watch it grow.. then die.. then grow again..
I had a post go troll to interesting to insightful then funny. Then I stopped looking because my coffee was ready.
I haven't seen that, but have you seen Killer Klowns from Outer Space.. or what about The Chicken From Outer Space. Of course there are others but..
P.S. I have nothing against chickens but.. what were we talking about again?
The end of WWII supposedly brought an end to eugenics in Germany, but it was, even then, thriving in the English speaking world and continues to do so.
The weakness of our civilization has become a lack of any moral vigor. Pretty much every time there is protest on moral grounds it is trivialized by the media and the whole thing is treated like a sport between nay-sayers and scientists.
It's a weakness because it breeds distrust and fear in the community. if we don't come up with/maintain some kind of moral integrity in our scientific community, we will be overrun by groups who will impose an extreme opposite on us. And yeah, you're right, someone will come up with a logical but crazy conclusion and we'll have another wave of white-coat slaughter happening.