Well, sure, and those users are welcome to buy a flatscreen iMac... I think Apple is doing the right thing by keeping CRT's in the lineup. Choice is a good thing. Apple has been particularly guilty of forgetting this occasionally over the years; it's good to see that they're remembering it now.
We aren't the only animals with hands, nor with big brains, but we're the only ones who have both hands and the brains to use our hands to develop much in the way of technology. (As one of the Leakeys pointed out, many other animals make tools; the critical distinction between us and them is that we _use tools to make tools_. After that, there are no limits.) But we're not the only violent animals, nor in fact are the only ones who fight wars -- read up on baboons some time.
Look, I'm not defending killing whales, nor bombing wedding parties. But the idea that the rest of nature is gentle and peaceful and we're the only ones who destroy each other and/or our environment is romantic foolishness.
Um, a lot of whales are predatory, which isn't notably peaceful. (Actually, I think they're all technically carnivores, but I wouldn't call straining plankton from the water "violent," either. But killer whales, sperm whales, and at least a few others are fearsome predators.) I agree that we shouldn't wantonly kill them off, but the main reason they don't have weapons is that they don't have hands. If they did, I suspect we'd have found the ocean a much harder environment to exploit...
Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Like much of the Constitution, this is a masterpiece of balance. The establishment clause prevents the creation of a state church, or official government endorsement or imposition of specific religious views; the prohibition clause prevents laws banning certain religions or religious practices. The long, sad history of religious warfare and oppression in Europe is a solid argument that both clauses are needed.
Check out British lives lost, as a percentage of population, in the World Wars, vs. American lives lost as a percentage of population. And then come back and tell me about the British "high horse." The sacrifices Britain made in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 (note that the Americans weren't even involved until 1917 and 1941, respectively) are really mind-boggling.
(If you want to talk absolute loss of life, of course, the Russians have the UK, the US, and everyone else put together beat.)
And yes, I'm an American. And a veteran. I'm proud of my service (including Desert Storm) and I certainly don't want to minimize the American contribution to winning the World Wars. But to imply that we were the sole factor in "saving Europe" is ahistorical nonsense.
Doctors and scientists, the vast majority of them anyway, do care about people's well-being. The people who don't care are the suits who run big pharma (and everything else health-care related these days) who, unfortunately, tend to give the doctors and scientists their marching orders.
... for computers too. Any decent book on algorithms will give you several elegant, easy-to-implement, blazingly fast methods. The TSP, like all NP problems, is much different. Thinking about the gas-tube device (which is a really cool idea, I must say) there's no way to apply it to the TSP. Electricity just doesn't work that way.
I'm not sure this is a matter of morality so much as it is of manners. Social intelligence is one of the hardest kinds of intelligence to define, and surely one of the hardest to create artificially; if the Cyc people can come up with a machine that not only knows a lot but knows when and when not to talk about what it knows, that will be quite an accomplishment.
Actually, most murder victims of either sex are murdered by someone they know, very often a family member, and that someone is usually male. The circumstances are often different, of course, but this fact holds true.
Note also that rates of murder conviction among women are rising rapidly; this may be an unintended consequence of the success of feminism (equal rights => equal access to and willingness to use the tools of deadly violence) or it may be simply that juries are now more willing to convict women of serious crimes, being less blinded by the belief that A Poor Little Innocent Woman Could Never Do Such A Horrible Thing. IIRC, the rates of murder convictions have been traditionally been about 90% male / 10% female but are now around 80%/20%.
Not entirely a joke. We live our everyday lives in a Newtonian universe; for the vast bulk of the engineering we do, Newton's theories are deadly accurate.
M$, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Apple, HPaq, Adobe, Dell... there are lots of big-ass companies out there, providing hardware and software and combinations thereof, that are capable of meeting government needs. The fact that the government has gone whole-hog to M$ software (and buys its hardware from companies like Dell that are basically marketing divisions of Wintel Inc.) has nothing to do with those companies having "proven themselves able to support the task." It has everything to do with technological illiteracy on the part of the people making the purchasing decisions and the enormous lobbying power of Microsoft's money.
I'd love to see an open-source, low-cost-hardware government computing world, and maybe at some point in the not too distant future we will. (Certainly other countries are showing much more initiative than the US in this direction; maybe if the US bureaucracy gets over its NIH syndrome, they can learn something from, e.g., the Germans.) But failing that, there's no reason at all we can't have machines from IBM and Sun and Apple and Dell and HPaq and whoever else happily coexisting in large-scale computing environments, whether governmental or corporate -- no reason we can't, and plenty of reasons, both economic and technical, why we should.
Students need to learn syntax before they learn (much) in the way of structure. It doesn't matter what language they first learn in, though I think something in the C family (i.e., C, C++, Java, etc.) is a good place to start, since a) most real-worl programming is done in one of these languages and b) if you can really, truly learn C, you can learn anything.;)
But hell, teach 'em in Perl or LISP or Pascal if it makes you happy. The point is that programming courses have traditionally started out with "Hello World" or some such thing for a reason: beginning computer scientists need to learn that they can type in, compile, and run a program before they start worrying about higher-level structures. Any attempt to teach theory before practice will fail as surely as the "New Math" -- which basically did try to teach algebra before arithmetic -- did a couple of decades ago.
The RW&B team is overconfident, assuming that its exclusive access to these mods is a permanent condition. What RW&B fails to recognize is that some of the h4x0rz on other teams are just as 1337 as its own, and they'll replicate or surpass the mods in a matter of a couple of years, given appropriate motivation...
Actually, we should have seen the Iranian revolution coming. We propped up the incompetent, corrupt, and increasingly unpopular government of the Shah and dismissed Khomeini as a fringe nutcase while he was gathering immense popular support. The CIA agents in the region spent all their time playing James Bond at fancy Tehran hotels and restaurants instead of gathering intelligence on the street.
If you expect to live, say, 500 years, then you probably won't have children as fast... Any society which has life-extension technology generally available will also be one in which birth control is even more available, and will probably have an educated enough populace to use it.
And if for some reason I'm wrong, well, there are always war, famine, and plague to keep us in line.
Guillermo Gonzalez is also well known as a proponent of "Intelligent Design," the pseudoscientific creationist idea that An Intelligent Designer (read "God") must have made our universe because everything in it is so perfect for human life. (Do a Google search on "Guillermo Gonzalez intelligent design" if you don't believe me.) It's not surprising that ID and Rare Earth-ism go hand in hand; if intelligent life is common in the universe, it makes it less likely that humanity is the product of a Divine Plan -- at least to the degree that the limited minds of ID'ers and other creationists seem to be able to conceive divinity.
As another poster pointed out, the Tasmanian Tiger was in fact hunted to extinction (or possibly near-extinction, but recent sightings in the wild are unconfirmed) by humans -- there's no doubt about that. But that's not really the point. The real point is that whether or not an animal is "fit to survive in this world" is determined by one thing and one thing only, and that is, well, survival. If an animal goes extinct, for whatever reason, it is unfit. If it comes back, in any manner, it is by definition fit again. It's really that simple.
Many varieties of domesticated animals, from housecats to beef cattle, have been bred to be so different from their wild ancestors that the species would have significant trouble surviving without humans around to take care of them. Does this mean they're unfit? Of course not. It means they're perfectly fit for our current, human-dominated world.
You know, as little as a couple of years ago, you'd have been right. But the EU in general is very nervous about America right now. We've got a President they by and large despise (with considerable justification) and giant corporations (like Microsoft) which are effectively their own branches of government. Anything that gives them the chance to cut loose from their dependence on and vulnerability to the US -- militarily, economically, politically, whatever, especially as the lines between those categories blur -- they're going to see as a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sure, and those users are welcome to buy a flatscreen iMac ... I think Apple is doing the right thing by keeping CRT's in the lineup. Choice is a good thing. Apple has been particularly guilty of forgetting this occasionally over the years; it's good to see that they're remembering it now.
We aren't the only animals with hands, nor with big brains, but we're the only ones who have both hands and the brains to use our hands to develop much in the way of technology. (As one of the Leakeys pointed out, many other animals make tools; the critical distinction between us and them is that we _use tools to make tools_. After that, there are no limits.) But we're not the only violent animals, nor in fact are the only ones who fight wars -- read up on baboons some time.
Look, I'm not defending killing whales, nor bombing wedding parties. But the idea that the rest of nature is gentle and peaceful and we're the only ones who destroy each other and/or our environment is romantic foolishness.
Um, a lot of whales are predatory, which isn't notably peaceful. (Actually, I think they're all technically carnivores, but I wouldn't call straining plankton from the water "violent," either. But killer whales, sperm whales, and at least a few others are fearsome predators.) I agree that we shouldn't wantonly kill them off, but the main reason they don't have weapons is that they don't have hands. If they did, I suspect we'd have found the ocean a much harder environment to exploit ...
The obvious analogy: after OKC (which resulted in a Federal trial, as you may recall) the government didn't rush to make new laws about rental trucks.
Like much of the Constitution, this is a masterpiece of balance. The establishment clause prevents the creation of a state church, or official government endorsement or imposition of specific religious views; the prohibition clause prevents laws banning certain religions or religious practices. The long, sad history of religious warfare and oppression in Europe is a solid argument that both clauses are needed.
Check out British lives lost, as a percentage of population, in the World Wars, vs. American lives lost as a percentage of population. And then come back and tell me about the British "high horse." The sacrifices Britain made in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 (note that the Americans weren't even involved until 1917 and 1941, respectively) are really mind-boggling.
(If you want to talk absolute loss of life, of course, the Russians have the UK, the US, and everyone else put together beat.)
And yes, I'm an American. And a veteran. I'm proud of my service (including Desert Storm) and I certainly don't want to minimize the American contribution to winning the World Wars. But to imply that we were the sole factor in "saving Europe" is ahistorical nonsense.
Doctors and scientists, the vast majority of them anyway, do care about people's well-being. The people who don't care are the suits who run big pharma (and everything else health-care related these days) who, unfortunately, tend to give the doctors and scientists their marching orders.
... for computers too. Any decent book on algorithms will give you several elegant, easy-to-implement, blazingly fast methods. The TSP, like all NP problems, is much different. Thinking about the gas-tube device (which is a really cool idea, I must say) there's no way to apply it to the TSP. Electricity just doesn't work that way.
I'm not sure this is a matter of morality so much as it is of manners. Social intelligence is one of the hardest kinds of intelligence to define, and surely one of the hardest to create artificially; if the Cyc people can come up with a machine that not only knows a lot but knows when and when not to talk about what it knows, that will be quite an accomplishment.
Actually, most murder victims of either sex are murdered by someone they know, very often a family member, and that someone is usually male. The circumstances are often different, of course, but this fact holds true.
Note also that rates of murder conviction among women are rising rapidly; this may be an unintended consequence of the success of feminism (equal rights => equal access to and willingness to use the tools of deadly violence) or it may be simply that juries are now more willing to convict women of serious crimes, being less blinded by the belief that A Poor Little Innocent Woman Could Never Do Such A Horrible Thing. IIRC, the rates of murder convictions have been traditionally been about 90% male / 10% female but are now around 80%/20%.
Not entirely a joke. We live our everyday lives in a Newtonian universe; for the vast bulk of the engineering we do, Newton's theories are deadly accurate.
Unlike the current President, Jimmy Carter had a record of honorable active military service.
M$, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Apple, HPaq, Adobe, Dell ... there are lots of big-ass companies out there, providing hardware and software and combinations thereof, that are capable of meeting government needs. The fact that the government has gone whole-hog to M$ software (and buys its hardware from companies like Dell that are basically marketing divisions of Wintel Inc.) has nothing to do with those companies having "proven themselves able to support the task." It has everything to do with technological illiteracy on the part of the people making the purchasing decisions and the enormous lobbying power of Microsoft's money.
I'd love to see an open-source, low-cost-hardware government computing world, and maybe at some point in the not too distant future we will. (Certainly other countries are showing much more initiative than the US in this direction; maybe if the US bureaucracy gets over its NIH syndrome, they can learn something from, e.g., the Germans.) But failing that, there's no reason at all we can't have machines from IBM and Sun and Apple and Dell and HPaq and whoever else happily coexisting in large-scale computing environments, whether governmental or corporate -- no reason we can't, and plenty of reasons, both economic and technical, why we should.
... before you can tackle algebra.
;)
Students need to learn syntax before they learn (much) in the way of structure. It doesn't matter what language they first learn in, though I think something in the C family (i.e., C, C++, Java, etc.) is a good place to start, since a) most real-worl programming is done in one of these languages and b) if you can really, truly learn C, you can learn anything.
But hell, teach 'em in Perl or LISP or Pascal if it makes you happy. The point is that programming courses have traditionally started out with "Hello World" or some such thing for a reason: beginning computer scientists need to learn that they can type in, compile, and run a program before they start worrying about higher-level structures. Any attempt to teach theory before practice will fail as surely as the "New Math" -- which basically did try to teach algebra before arithmetic -- did a couple of decades ago.
The RW&B team is overconfident, assuming that its exclusive access to these mods is a permanent condition. What RW&B fails to recognize is that some of the h4x0rz on other teams are just as 1337 as its own, and they'll replicate or surpass the mods in a matter of a couple of years, given appropriate motivation ...
Actually, we should have seen the Iranian revolution coming. We propped up the incompetent, corrupt, and increasingly unpopular government of the Shah and dismissed Khomeini as a fringe nutcase while he was gathering immense popular support. The CIA agents in the region spent all their time playing James Bond at fancy Tehran hotels and restaurants instead of gathering intelligence on the street.
Other than that, what you said.
If you expect to live, say, 500 years, then you probably won't have children as fast ... Any society which has life-extension technology generally available will also be one in which birth control is even more available, and will probably have an educated enough populace to use it.
And if for some reason I'm wrong, well, there are always war, famine, and plague to keep us in line.
Guillermo Gonzalez is also well known as a proponent of "Intelligent Design," the pseudoscientific creationist idea that An Intelligent Designer (read "God") must have made our universe because everything in it is so perfect for human life. (Do a Google search on "Guillermo Gonzalez intelligent design" if you don't believe me.) It's not surprising that ID and Rare Earth-ism go hand in hand; if intelligent life is common in the universe, it makes it less likely that humanity is the product of a Divine Plan -- at least to the degree that the limited minds of ID'ers and other creationists seem to be able to conceive divinity.
:) You're welcome. And thank you.
[sigh]
As another poster pointed out, the Tasmanian Tiger was in fact hunted to extinction (or possibly near-extinction, but recent sightings in the wild are unconfirmed) by humans -- there's no doubt about that. But that's not really the point. The real point is that whether or not an animal is "fit to survive in this world" is determined by one thing and one thing only, and that is, well, survival. If an animal goes extinct, for whatever reason, it is unfit. If it comes back, in any manner, it is by definition fit again. It's really that simple.
Many varieties of domesticated animals, from housecats to beef cattle, have been bred to be so different from their wild ancestors that the species would have significant trouble surviving without humans around to take care of them. Does this mean they're unfit? Of course not. It means they're perfectly fit for our current, human-dominated world.
Um, "the doctrine that each person has the same rights" is in itself a moral stand.
You know, as little as a couple of years ago, you'd have been right. But the EU in general is very nervous about America right now. We've got a President they by and large despise (with considerable justification) and giant corporations (like Microsoft) which are effectively their own branches of government. Anything that gives them the chance to cut loose from their dependence on and vulnerability to the US -- militarily, economically, politically, whatever, especially as the lines between those categories blur -- they're going to see as a good thing.
Of course, the far side is also the one that gets the most meteor hits ...
Unless the explosion actually happened 149 years ago ... Remember, we're seeing the star as it was 150 years ago, not as it is today. [1/2 g]
[sigh]
http://www.snopes2.com/quotes/internet.htm
http://www.mids.org/mn/904/vcerf.html
Will you please shut up now?