If you don't age, you can keep working and being productive, and accumulating at least some degree of wealth. You might take periodic "retirements," but retirement would no longer be a permanent act. There are certainly social problems that could result from this, but on an individual level it seems like you can do a whole lot more for your children and grandchildren if you're physically young and healthy than if you're lying in a nursing home--or if you're dead.
If you are going to live a life of sedentary consumption, as most people seem to aspire too, being young is little better than being old.
However people choose to live their lives, they tend to prize them very highly, and want to preserve them. If someone's idea of paradise is an eternity spent on the couch eating Cheetos and playing Xbox... well, what the hell, that's his business. As long as he doesn't cause problems for those of us who want to do more with our lives, I don't see any cause to complain.
There are lots of stories about people who can't die by any means, and who come to regard their immortality as a curse. But if we could turn off the aging clock, that wouldn't protect against death by trauma or disease; if you lived, say, several centuries and decided "okay, I've had enough, I don't want to do this any more," you could always choose to end it, by any of the numerous means people use to end their lives now.
Overwhelmingly the reason given was that people didn't want to be old and infirm any longer than they had to be, even if a pill allowed them to delay the inevitable.
Well, it's a good thing that that's not what we're talking about, isn't it? The whole idea is to delay--or if possible, prevent entirely--the things that make us "old" and infirm to begin with. Nobody wants to spend eternity in a nursing home, duh. Spending an indefinite amount of time young and healthy, or even middle-aged and mostly healthy? Sign me up.
Those of us who do things that might benefit actual humans need to come up with more answers than questions.
I'll be sure to mention at my next lab meeting that the work we're doing on sequence conservation in embryonic development can't possibly "benefit actual humans," then.
When process was mentioned, it was taught as THE scientific method...which is not exactly how research is done!
This. And it's a misconception that persists among a surprisingly large number of very smart people, well into adulthood. How many/. arguments have we seen in which people casually dismiss rigorous, well-founded scientific results because the process by which those results were produced doesn't fall into their high school science class idea of how "the scientific method" works? It's very comforting to think that there is a single, fixed process which scientists in all fields can follow, and if they fill in all the boxes on the checklist then... ta-da! Science happens! It also, of course, bears no relationship to reality.
Formally, they still assign volume and issue numbers; this article appears in "volume 8, issue 8." Which seems a little strange for all-online journals, I agree, but I think they're trying to make it easy for standard-form citations.
They're gearing up to fight for more funding in next year's budget. "Senator, we had to drop a case against a dangerous drug dealer because we couldn't afford enough data storage!" "Okay, I know computer stuff is expensive. Here's a check with an extra couple of zeroes on it. Oh, and there happens to be an excellent data storage company in the great state of East Dakota."
I was with you up until the last paragraph. While there are no doubt some people who fall into the categories you describe, the majority of poor people work every bit as hard, for every bit as long, as any CEO. They just don't get paid nearly as much.
Because every man knows the consequences of unprotected sex: 20 years of child support.
For honorable men who play by the rules, sure. The ones who get a bunch of different women pregnant and don't have any further involvement in their children's lives, financial or otherwise, don't give a shit. And no matter what the law says, in the real world, getting child support money from people who don't want to pay (women occasionally do this too; a friend of mine raised twins his girlfriend left with him shortly after they were born, and she just disappeared) is extraordinarily difficult.
Try being a man in a job interview and having to rely solely on merit and get back to me. Try being a man and getting out of a traffic ticket and get back to me. Try being a man and actually having to take some risk and do some work just to have a relationship, let alone a good one.
Despite presumably being a biologically adult male human being, you've clearly never actually been a man yourself. Why don't you try it and get back to us before you start telling others what it's like.
So what's your standard for manhood, then? Mine involves concepts like "keeping your word," "standing up for what's right," and "taking care of your family," and it's hard to see how a minivan or a vasectomy interferes with any of those things. But maybe you're using some different set of criteria.
SQLite is an embeded database; it's really a different sort of tool altogether.
But you don't have to use it embedded. The command line tool is basic but functional, and if you want, say, a web interface to query a SQLite back end, you can do that too. For most of the MySQL use cases, there's really not much difference.
I worked as a MySQL DBA for years, and I was quite vocal in its defense. Eventually I realized that most of the criticisms of it were entirely reasonable (even if the tone in which they were expressed often wasn't) and that OP is right: use SQLite for stuff that's, well, light, and Postgres for anything that's heavier-duty. The only arguments for MySQL these days are its ubiquity and extensive documentation, and the way Oracle's behaving I don't expect either of those will apply much longer.
Biology and its spinoffs, including modern medicine, are just as much a part of scientific and technical leadership as IT; and evolution is the cornerstone of biology. Just because you don't use an understanding of biological evolution in your work doesn't mean that it's not important in a whole lot of other people's work.
In the linked PDF article, see the end of the second column of the third page, right above Figure 2. They're reporting a mean and a confidence interval. These kinds of numbers seem absurdly specific, but really, it's the right way to report the results--I can pretty much guarantee you that if the authors had written "about 2600 years old," the editor at Journal of Archaological Science would have demanded a clarification, and rightly so.
Looks like it's actually slightly younger than TFS says. "2684" doesn't appear anywhere in the article, so I'm not sure where that came from in the Discovery writeup.
Note, by the way, that the legal basis for seizing him is an allegation of rape. The fact that he's publishing unflattering information about the internal workings of Western governments is *not* their stated reason for wanting him.
And Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury.
No one who's paying attention to the case, and isn't blinded by ideology, has any doubt whatsoever what the real motivation is.
It's one thing when it happens in the context of a revolution or civil war. It's quite another when it happens between two established, stable countries which normally have peaceful relations.
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If you don't age, you can keep working and being productive, and accumulating at least some degree of wealth. You might take periodic "retirements," but retirement would no longer be a permanent act. There are certainly social problems that could result from this, but on an individual level it seems like you can do a whole lot more for your children and grandchildren if you're physically young and healthy than if you're lying in a nursing home--or if you're dead.
If you are going to live a life of sedentary consumption, as most people seem to aspire too, being young is little better than being old.
However people choose to live their lives, they tend to prize them very highly, and want to preserve them. If someone's idea of paradise is an eternity spent on the couch eating Cheetos and playing Xbox ... well, what the hell, that's his business. As long as he doesn't cause problems for those of us who want to do more with our lives, I don't see any cause to complain.
There are lots of stories about people who can't die by any means, and who come to regard their immortality as a curse. But if we could turn off the aging clock, that wouldn't protect against death by trauma or disease; if you lived, say, several centuries and decided "okay, I've had enough, I don't want to do this any more," you could always choose to end it, by any of the numerous means people use to end their lives now.
Overwhelmingly the reason given was that people didn't want to be old and infirm any longer than they had to be, even if a pill allowed them to delay the inevitable.
Well, it's a good thing that that's not what we're talking about, isn't it? The whole idea is to delay--or if possible, prevent entirely--the things that make us "old" and infirm to begin with. Nobody wants to spend eternity in a nursing home, duh. Spending an indefinite amount of time young and healthy, or even middle-aged and mostly healthy? Sign me up.
Those of us who do things that might benefit actual humans need to come up with more answers than questions.
I'll be sure to mention at my next lab meeting that the work we're doing on sequence conservation in embryonic development can't possibly "benefit actual humans," then.
When process was mentioned, it was taught as THE scientific method...which is not exactly how research is done!
This. And it's a misconception that persists among a surprisingly large number of very smart people, well into adulthood. How many /. arguments have we seen in which people casually dismiss rigorous, well-founded scientific results because the process by which those results were produced doesn't fall into their high school science class idea of how "the scientific method" works? It's very comforting to think that there is a single, fixed process which scientists in all fields can follow, and if they fill in all the boxes on the checklist then ... ta-da! Science happens! It also, of course, bears no relationship to reality.
Formally, they still assign volume and issue numbers; this article appears in "volume 8, issue 8." Which seems a little strange for all-online journals, I agree, but I think they're trying to make it easy for standard-form citations.
I really like the 1980-1981 logo, although it would be better with a liberal application of umlauts.
... is vaguely mind-boggling to me.
I must be getting old.
They're gearing up to fight for more funding in next year's budget. "Senator, we had to drop a case against a dangerous drug dealer because we couldn't afford enough data storage!" "Okay, I know computer stuff is expensive. Here's a check with an extra couple of zeroes on it. Oh, and there happens to be an excellent data storage company in the great state of East Dakota."
I was with you up until the last paragraph. While there are no doubt some people who fall into the categories you describe, the majority of poor people work every bit as hard, for every bit as long, as any CEO. They just don't get paid nearly as much.
First you'd have to learn to think at all.
Because every man knows the consequences of unprotected sex: 20 years of child support.
For honorable men who play by the rules, sure. The ones who get a bunch of different women pregnant and don't have any further involvement in their children's lives, financial or otherwise, don't give a shit. And no matter what the law says, in the real world, getting child support money from people who don't want to pay (women occasionally do this too; a friend of mine raised twins his girlfriend left with him shortly after they were born, and she just disappeared) is extraordinarily difficult.
Try being a man in a job interview and having to rely solely on merit and get back to me. Try being a man and getting out of a traffic ticket and get back to me. Try being a man and actually having to take some risk and do some work just to have a relationship, let alone a good one.
Despite presumably being a biologically adult male human being, you've clearly never actually been a man yourself. Why don't you try it and get back to us before you start telling others what it's like.
So what's your standard for manhood, then? Mine involves concepts like "keeping your word," "standing up for what's right," and "taking care of your family," and it's hard to see how a minivan or a vasectomy interferes with any of those things. But maybe you're using some different set of criteria.
What a deeply appropriate user name you have.
SQLite is an embeded database; it's really a different sort of tool altogether.
But you don't have to use it embedded. The command line tool is basic but functional, and if you want, say, a web interface to query a SQLite back end, you can do that too. For most of the MySQL use cases, there's really not much difference.
I worked as a MySQL DBA for years, and I was quite vocal in its defense. Eventually I realized that most of the criticisms of it were entirely reasonable (even if the tone in which they were expressed often wasn't) and that OP is right: use SQLite for stuff that's, well, light, and Postgres for anything that's heavier-duty. The only arguments for MySQL these days are its ubiquity and extensive documentation, and the way Oracle's behaving I don't expect either of those will apply much longer.
So do you complain when people give their weight in kilograms instead of newtons?
Biology and its spinoffs, including modern medicine, are just as much a part of scientific and technical leadership as IT; and evolution is the cornerstone of biology. Just because you don't use an understanding of biological evolution in your work doesn't mean that it's not important in a whole lot of other people's work.
"Maybe he was so depressed by the lousy hunting that he went into the bog and hanged himself."
In the linked PDF article, see the end of the second column of the third page, right above Figure 2. They're reporting a mean and a confidence interval. These kinds of numbers seem absurdly specific, but really, it's the right way to report the results--I can pretty much guarantee you that if the authors had written "about 2600 years old," the editor at Journal of Archaological Science would have demanded a clarification, and rightly so.
Looks like it's actually slightly younger than TFS says. "2684" doesn't appear anywhere in the article, so I'm not sure where that came from in the Discovery writeup.
Bill Clinton was impeached for getting a blowjob when a bunch of Republicans weren't getting any. Perjury was the excuse, not the reason.
Well, that should get you on some interesting lists.
Note, by the way, that the legal basis for seizing him is an allegation of rape. The fact that he's publishing unflattering information about the internal workings of Western governments is *not* their stated reason for wanting him.
And Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury.
No one who's paying attention to the case, and isn't blinded by ideology, has any doubt whatsoever what the real motivation is.
It's one thing when it happens in the context of a revolution or civil war. It's quite another when it happens between two established, stable countries which normally have peaceful relations.