It's no use, you know. You can explain these things over and over again, but at this point you can be almost sure that anyone who needs it explained to them is going to answer your carefully reasoned mathematical and scientific explanation with the irrefutable counter-argument, "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEEEEAR YOOOOU..."
Fair enough. That's why I said "class" instead of "species"; obviously you can predict that in the event of a major extinction event, smaller animals will tend to do better than larger ones, but you can't predict that, say, mammals will do better than reptiles, without looking at the traits of particular animals within each group. My original point, apparently not too well phrased, was that it's silly to say "mammals are more adaptable than other animals" when we're judging from a sample size of two: one time when we were, and one time before that when we pretty clearly weren't.
I find it hard to think what could be done differently enough to justify Google X interest, myself.
The rate of growth in phone technology has been impressive enough lately that there's probably still a lot of room for new ideas. I can't personally think what major new advances are possible, either--but I'm willing to bet that someone can. The smartphone is a long way from being a mature technology.
Well, okay, actually I can think of something that I'd like to see: a device that looks like a phone, which can then be unfolded into a tablet, which can then be unfolded into a laptop, which can then be unfolded into a desktop. But that would require a flexible screen, and it sounds like Google's given up on that for the moment. Should be interesting to see what they come up with, though.
I still think we should blow this sucker up, just to make sure we can if the time comes. To me "exploding into tiny hopefully harmless pieces" has less modes of failure than "attach rocket and try to nudge."
You must be young. Those of us who grew up in the 80s know that when you blow up an asteroid, you don't get tiny harmless pieces; you get small fast-moving pieces that are just as deadly as the original rock and much harder to hit.
I believe Humans and Mammals are the dominant life form primarily due to our ability to withstand cataclysmic events like that.
It's why dinosaurs died out and mammals took over.
Except that toward the end of the Permian, "proto-mammals" that were in most ways a great deal like modern mammals were the dominant form of animal life on land. And then something happened to cause the worst mass extinction event in the planet's history... which cleared the way for the dinosaurs and reduced mammals to a small niche for almost 200 million years. What class of creatures end up winning looks like a roll of the dice as much as anything,
Every time someone makes a prediction that Global Warming will cause temps to rise 10 degrees next year or something absurd, it hurts the credibility of the entire "AGW" scientific community. And then people wonder why noone takes it seriously!
So who exactly are these climatologists predicting a ten-degree rise (on any commonly used scale) in one year? Be specific.
Or do you judge the predictions made by scientists by the misinterpretations spouted by hysterical cranks? Because if you do, that's your problem.
Actually one problem is that they hear GW alarmists claiming that GW will cause the end of the world. Some of them even claim it will turn Earth into Venus! So, naturally they lump GW alarmists in with other EOTW crackpots.
Actually, it's the heat from all the burning strawmen that will turn Earth into a Venusian-style hell planet.
MacArthur had the entire invasion of Japan all planned out and was really p*ssed when Truman decided instead to launch the nuclear attack on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to force a quick surrender.
And then a few years later, got even more pissed when Truman wouldn't let him nuke China. I think we can pretty much agree who was right, both times, and it wasn't the guy wearing the uniform.
As much as I'll agree that I wasn't in Ypres or Verdun myself, either were an order of magnitude better places to be than Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Rwanda during the genocide for that matter, if you measure things in deaths per day.
Hardly. The Western Front and the Holocaust both involved about 10 million deaths over about four years, although the measure of both the number of deaths and the period of time that should be considered is fuzzier in the latter case. What the distribution of deaths is in the great battles vs. the constant skirmishing were for the former, and in the camps vs. the local killings for the latter, I'm not sure. The Rwandan genocide at its peak was about equal to the worst of the other two, but of course it didn't go on as long.
In any case, they're all about as bad as anything can possibly be--and all of them, along with all the smaller-but-just-as-horrible-for-those-who-were-there mass killings in human history, are so much worse than any business dealing can possibly be that any comparison is absurd and insulting. Business problems can be exhausting, they can be stressful, and they may even be dangerous to your physical health, but... no. Just, no.
Fighting a bureaucracy that drags its feet with payments is worse than fighting a trench war
So, how were things at Passchendaele?
Not disagreeing with your point, just noting that this is a really... over-the-top... analogy, just about as dumb as calling the recalcritant company "a bunch of Nazis" would be, for much the same reason. The Western Front in WW1 is a pretty good candidate for the worst place in the entire history of the world.
SpaceX is perfectly happy to do business with the US government, and it's not like they're ignoring federal regulations to do their work. A more accurate statement would be that the US government has told private companies "go ahead, we'll stay out of the way."
You're interrupting a good ideological rant with facts. Stop that.
If you're beaten physically there are laws to deal with that and there are plenty of lawyers out there.
Which is not particularly helpful if all the lawyers charge prices an individual worker can't possibly afford, the cops are indistinguishable from corporate security, and the judge is the boss's best buddy at the country club. This was pretty much the norm in the pre-union days, and is becoming the norm again as unions have less and less power.
Frankly, if someone does that to me I'm not going to simply take it - if someone beat your wife at work would you simply shrug?
Without unions, your options are: shrug, call the cops (see above), or charge into the workplace and get shot dead by the cops / security goons. This is not some dystopian cyberpunk fantasy. This is what actually happened, routinely, all the time before workers started organizing.
There are more workers than potential bullies
Um, yeah, and when a bunch of workers get together to protect their interests, it's called a "union."
and there are laws. Until the law comes, it's up to you.
If it's up to you alone, you're not going to get very far. If it's up to you and your co-workers, then yeah. And again, we have a word for the latter scenario. The hostility that word seems to bring out in a lot of people is frankly a puzzle to me.
Unions served to get some essential rights for workers
Horses and buggies served to provide essential transportation. The question is not whether unions were once beneficial, but rather whether they are beneficial today.
Horses and buggies were replaced by something that did the same job better. What, exactly, is there which bears the same relationship to unions that automobiles do to horses and buggies?
Oh, you know, they're out in SPACE, and pretty much everywhere in SPACE is the same. Moons, planets, stars, galaxies... it's all SPACE. Once you're one place in SPACE, getting to any other place in SPACE should be easy, right?
Compare to HISTORY and ASIA.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 1
The fascinating thing is how the public now thinks that FB is "The Web/Internet".
Kind of like the way a lot of people used to think "the web" and "the internet" were the same thing... But no one on Slashdot would make a silly mistake like that, of course.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 3, Funny
And the blink tag is gone!
I consider the widespread loss of support for <blink> a serious bug that reduces the functionality of the entire web. This may, I understand, be a minority opinion.
I would argue that most of the scientists you hear arguing for atheism have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, because they assume that if it exists in any way, it can be reached scientifically, and that anything that cannot be reached scientifically, cannot exist (that combined with their reluctance to trust the authority of anyone or anything they can't understand tends to lead them to atheism).
I would argue that you have absolutely no interest in how actual scientists and/or atheists view religion, and prefer beating up on elaborately constructed straw men.
No, that's a stupid word. 'Boffins' is much better.
Heh. "Boffin" usually refers not just to scientists, but to engineers as well, and sometimes to, well, nerds in general. And unlike "nerd," it's not a pejorative when someone outside that world uses it. So you know, why not?
If we're suggesting words to stop using, I would like to nominate "boffin". A "boffin" is the term that a British journalist, apparently unable to distinguish an astronomer from a geologist, uses to describe someone who uses their brain in their job (as opposed to a British journalist).
He says, on a site billed as "News for Nerds." Like it or not, astronomers and geologists (and scientists of all kinds) have a lot more in common professionally with each other than they do with journalists, or politicians, or anyone outside the field; having a word that covers that particular group of people seems reasonable enough.
You do realize that the word "miffed" in TFS refers to politicians, right? And they're not particularly known for being "practical and dare [sic] scientific."
Slashdot Mirror
It's no use, you know. You can explain these things over and over again, but at this point you can be almost sure that anyone who needs it explained to them is going to answer your carefully reasoned mathematical and scientific explanation with the irrefutable counter-argument, "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEEEEAR YOOOOU ..."
Fair enough. That's why I said "class" instead of "species"; obviously you can predict that in the event of a major extinction event, smaller animals will tend to do better than larger ones, but you can't predict that, say, mammals will do better than reptiles, without looking at the traits of particular animals within each group. My original point, apparently not too well phrased, was that it's silly to say "mammals are more adaptable than other animals" when we're judging from a sample size of two: one time when we were, and one time before that when we pretty clearly weren't.
Wow. Three replies and all of them took me seriously. Is 43 too young to turn into a grumpy old man?
You do realize you're on Slashdot, right? Not really the right place to sling those kinds of insults around.
Oh, I just looked at your username, "erp_consultant." I think you're in the wrong place. ESPN.com is just down the hall ...
You were doing so well until you dropped into bitter misogynist mode there at the end.
I find it hard to think what could be done differently enough to justify Google X interest, myself.
The rate of growth in phone technology has been impressive enough lately that there's probably still a lot of room for new ideas. I can't personally think what major new advances are possible, either--but I'm willing to bet that someone can. The smartphone is a long way from being a mature technology.
Well, okay, actually I can think of something that I'd like to see: a device that looks like a phone, which can then be unfolded into a tablet, which can then be unfolded into a laptop, which can then be unfolded into a desktop. But that would require a flexible screen, and it sounds like Google's given up on that for the moment. Should be interesting to see what they come up with, though.
I still think we should blow this sucker up, just to make sure we can if the time comes. To me "exploding into tiny hopefully harmless pieces" has less modes of failure than "attach rocket and try to nudge."
You must be young. Those of us who grew up in the 80s know that when you blow up an asteroid, you don't get tiny harmless pieces; you get small fast-moving pieces that are just as deadly as the original rock and much harder to hit.
I believe Humans and Mammals are the dominant life form primarily due to our ability to withstand cataclysmic events like that.
It's why dinosaurs died out and mammals took over.
Except that toward the end of the Permian, "proto-mammals" that were in most ways a great deal like modern mammals were the dominant form of animal life on land. And then something happened to cause the worst mass extinction event in the planet's history ... which cleared the way for the dinosaurs and reduced mammals to a small niche for almost 200 million years. What class of creatures end up winning looks like a roll of the dice as much as anything,
Every time someone makes a prediction that Global Warming will cause temps to rise 10 degrees next year or something absurd, it hurts the credibility of the entire "AGW" scientific community. And then people wonder why noone takes it seriously!
So who exactly are these climatologists predicting a ten-degree rise (on any commonly used scale) in one year? Be specific.
Or do you judge the predictions made by scientists by the misinterpretations spouted by hysterical cranks? Because if you do, that's your problem.
Actually one problem is that they hear GW alarmists claiming that GW will cause the end of the world. Some of them even claim it will turn Earth into Venus! So, naturally they lump GW alarmists in with other EOTW crackpots.
Actually, it's the heat from all the burning strawmen that will turn Earth into a Venusian-style hell planet.
MacArthur had the entire invasion of Japan all planned out and was really p*ssed when Truman decided instead to launch the nuclear attack on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to force a quick surrender.
And then a few years later, got even more pissed when Truman wouldn't let him nuke China. I think we can pretty much agree who was right, both times, and it wasn't the guy wearing the uniform.
Its beyond reprehensible as they're turning some of the brightest minds we produce into lazy good-for-nothings that are LITERALLY taught to skate by.
So they take the smartest students and teach them to ride skateboards past the school? Damn, I wish we'd had a program like that when I was a kid.
As much as I'll agree that I wasn't in Ypres or Verdun myself, either were an order of magnitude better places to be than Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Rwanda during the genocide for that matter, if you measure things in deaths per day.
Hardly. The Western Front and the Holocaust both involved about 10 million deaths over about four years, although the measure of both the number of deaths and the period of time that should be considered is fuzzier in the latter case. What the distribution of deaths is in the great battles vs. the constant skirmishing were for the former, and in the camps vs. the local killings for the latter, I'm not sure. The Rwandan genocide at its peak was about equal to the worst of the other two, but of course it didn't go on as long.
In any case, they're all about as bad as anything can possibly be--and all of them, along with all the smaller-but-just-as-horrible-for-those-who-were-there mass killings in human history, are so much worse than any business dealing can possibly be that any comparison is absurd and insulting. Business problems can be exhausting, they can be stressful, and they may even be dangerous to your physical health, but ... no. Just, no.
Fighting a bureaucracy that drags its feet with payments is worse than fighting a trench war
So, how were things at Passchendaele?
Not disagreeing with your point, just noting that this is a really ... over-the-top ... analogy, just about as dumb as calling the recalcritant company "a bunch of Nazis" would be, for much the same reason. The Western Front in WW1 is a pretty good candidate for the worst place in the entire history of the world.
SpaceX is perfectly happy to do business with the US government, and it's not like they're ignoring federal regulations to do their work. A more accurate statement would be that the US government has told private companies "go ahead, we'll stay out of the way."
You're interrupting a good ideological rant with facts. Stop that.
If you're beaten physically there are laws to deal with that and there are plenty of lawyers out there.
Which is not particularly helpful if all the lawyers charge prices an individual worker can't possibly afford, the cops are indistinguishable from corporate security, and the judge is the boss's best buddy at the country club. This was pretty much the norm in the pre-union days, and is becoming the norm again as unions have less and less power.
Frankly, if someone does that to me I'm not going to simply take it - if someone beat your wife at work would you simply shrug?
Without unions, your options are: shrug, call the cops (see above), or charge into the workplace and get shot dead by the cops / security goons. This is not some dystopian cyberpunk fantasy. This is what actually happened, routinely, all the time before workers started organizing.
There are more workers than potential bullies
Um, yeah, and when a bunch of workers get together to protect their interests, it's called a "union."
and there are laws. Until the law comes, it's up to you.
If it's up to you alone, you're not going to get very far. If it's up to you and your co-workers, then yeah. And again, we have a word for the latter scenario. The hostility that word seems to bring out in a lot of people is frankly a puzzle to me.
Let me ask you: do you really think that companies would get away with beating their workers if unions were to disappear?
Yes. And if you don't think that, then you need to read some history.
Unions served to get some essential rights for workers
Horses and buggies served to provide essential transportation. The question is not whether unions were once beneficial, but rather whether they are beneficial today.
Horses and buggies were replaced by something that did the same job better. What, exactly, is there which bears the same relationship to unions that automobiles do to horses and buggies?
Oh, you know, they're out in SPACE, and pretty much everywhere in SPACE is the same. Moons, planets, stars, galaxies ... it's all SPACE. Once you're one place in SPACE, getting to any other place in SPACE should be easy, right?
Compare to HISTORY and ASIA.
The fascinating thing is how the public now thinks that FB is "The Web/Internet".
Kind of like the way a lot of people used to think "the web" and "the internet" were the same thing ... But no one on Slashdot would make a silly mistake like that, of course.
And the blink tag is gone!
I consider the widespread loss of support for <blink> a serious bug that reduces the functionality of the entire web. This may, I understand, be a minority opinion.
I would argue that most of the scientists you hear arguing for atheism have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, because they assume that if it exists in any way, it can be reached scientifically, and that anything that cannot be reached scientifically, cannot exist (that combined with their reluctance to trust the authority of anyone or anything they can't understand tends to lead them to atheism).
I would argue that you have absolutely no interest in how actual scientists and/or atheists view religion, and prefer beating up on elaborately constructed straw men.
'scientists'?
No, that's a stupid word. 'Boffins' is much better.
Heh. "Boffin" usually refers not just to scientists, but to engineers as well, and sometimes to, well, nerds in general. And unlike "nerd," it's not a pejorative when someone outside that world uses it. So you know, why not?
If we're suggesting words to stop using, I would like to nominate "boffin". A "boffin" is the term that a British journalist, apparently unable to distinguish an astronomer from a geologist, uses to describe someone who uses their brain in their job (as opposed to a British journalist).
He says, on a site billed as "News for Nerds." Like it or not, astronomers and geologists (and scientists of all kinds) have a lot more in common professionally with each other than they do with journalists, or politicians, or anyone outside the field; having a word that covers that particular group of people seems reasonable enough.
You do realize that the word "miffed" in TFS refers to politicians, right? And they're not particularly known for being "practical and dare [sic] scientific."