I have no problem with people choosing to eat GMO crops. I would personally rather set the seeds in the sun and let UV light cause faster differentiation for my crop selective breeding program than have patented seeds, and thus have far better diversity than the pesticide resistant monoculture of GMO. The strive for absolute maximum yield is as horrid as the strive for absolute maximum security or absolute maximum progress. These moronic absolutist drives marginalize proper cautions and acceptable risk and lead to bad and/or uninformed decisions about the food we'll eat, what protections are actually needed, and the lifestyles we live.
I would rather eat food that wasn't grown with pesticides or herbicides sprayed on them even if it is more expensive and the ecosystem reclaims a bit of the crop -- I consider it the cost of doing business with nature, renting her land. The "cheaper" poisoned crop is just hiding the cost elsewhere in the environment and my body. No one should get to dictate what my acceptable risk is worth in either extreme -- They do not have my best interest in mind. I need information to make informed decisions. All of my food I get from my local farmers market or grow myself; I have been to the farms whence my food comes. I can make two pizzas with all organic ingredients: yeast from the air, vegetables from my garden, oils from local olives, salt from the sea, cheeses made locally, and flour I ground myself -- all in the same amount of time it takes for you to get pizza delivered. The fresh taste is phenomenal, and better for you (less fats, salts and preservatives).
I would love to be able to maintain my food preference while shopping at a supermarket, but thanks to the GMO lobby I can't. The GMO lobbyists prevent me from making an informed choice by lobbying against labeling of GMO food -- Or even preventing those that label their products as non-GMO. This is as terrible as the state telling me I don't need to know what the NSA is doing because it's good for me. Fuck that shit. I want choice. GMO companies are actively anti-choice. I'm anti-GMO company, being anti-GMO food is an unfortunate but necessary outgrowth of their anti-informed consumer stance.
I also don't take any drugs that haven't been on the market for more than 10 years because I've seen that longer term testing is frequently needed. I buy the latest computing technology because I don't put that buggy crap in my body. If it were a medical device going inside me, I'd want the source code, and I'd want years of testing to work out the bugs, some assurances that the shit doesn't have a trivial exploit vector. I fight against all this "it's good for you just trust us" information disparity bullshit in our current culture, not just with GMO crops.
GMO isn't the only way to do business. If it didn't exist and neither did pesticides, guess what? The economy would adjust the cost and price of food. Hey, here's a thought: Competition is good. GMO companies are anti-competitive. Yes you can pay engineers to invent things and call that progress, but you also miss out on the natural progresses achieved through good old mutation and selection if you seek to exclude the natural methods of crop growing -- Which GMO companies and lobbies do. Anti-competition is bad for crops for the same reason normalizing the methods of production is bad for business: Mono-cultures are "anti-progressive", you idiot. Get this through your fool head: They don't want what's best for us, they want what's best for them at any cost to us; They'll deffer as much of that cost to us and the environment as they can get away with. You shouldn't trust them by default. Where's your scientific skepticism? My standard of proof is higher and you call me anti-progressive? THAT's anti-progressive, moron.
This is about selling shares: Crowd-sourced investing.
However, this sort of thing may come to other types of crowd funding.
I'm not sure what the answer will be if they require you to already have a business setup to do a Kickstarter. Business registration, incorporation, trademark registry, etc. is whole reason I'd even do a Kickstarter in the first place.
Perhaps we'll start to see 501(c)3 businesses that you can donate towards, who divide the money amongst projects? It would then be basically the same as kickstarter, except you don't get your pledge back if the project doesn't meet its goal -- You'd have a credit to apply it to another project instead.
What we really need is to put starving artists on the endangered species list, or maybe start a fake Fascist Hate Group that wears plaid Hoods and hates art. Then we can get some anti-discrimination laws for artists, as well as artist-shelters just for the down and out and artistically gifted. Anyone who says their art stinks can be accused as being an art-hater. There could even be 12 step self help programs for victims of artistic abuse. We could get even get funds to research cures for the artistically impaired. Those Kickstarter people are thinking small, if the government is getting involved, we need to play the government's game: Scaremongering to protect women and children's art from the evil plaid philistines.
Hey let's get a standardized vector and 2D drawing library going! Fuck the hardware or implementation details which indicate you'd be better off not limiting the dimensions to 2. Never mind the fact that we'll be filling triangles on a GPU for any sort of efficiency at all. Nope. Fuck starting at the actual primitives present and working up from there, let's do the top-down approach yet again -- When the performance conscious folks include messed up limitations, like the Diamond Inheritance pattern (Which has no reason to exist, variable placement should be virtual too, dimwits).
Yeah, I'll stick with C. At least it doesn't pretend to do anything but present the Von Neumann architectural constructs to me and let me build my OOP, etc atop them. It's still not optimal because it has the moronic assumption that functions should be on the stack and not the heap -- thus hindering or outright preventing closures, co-routines, and arbitrarily limiting recursion despite the system's available RAM -- but it's miles beyond C++ in terms of idealic design splattering all over the hard brick wall of reality's implementations. I mean really, if you can't use method overloading properly with templates and polymorphism then the language is broken by design, and there are no complete implementations.
Hey! I got an idea. You know what would be nice in C++? How about a standardized ANSI terminal interface, like VT100 -- Get ncurses into the spec. Oh! And you know what else? How about RMI! Yeah! Oh oh oh!! I got one I got one! INTER-fucking-FACES for IPC! Yeah! So you could query a program's interface and pass data between processes transparently in a language independent way -- and the doc comments could be lexical tokens too, so that if the.dat file was present even a terminal mode program could query a program's usage without needing a manually constructed manpage, and other programs could implement the same interfaces allowing us to assemble programs from sets of features. You know, something smarter than STDIN and STDOUT and a char**? Something actually fucking useful for a damn change?
Except reality doesn't work that way. Those wacky rights-holders still expect to be paid for content. Whoda thunk it?
REALITY?! What actual the fuck? Seriously? YOU are so detached from reality it's insane. Allow me to demonstrate:
Study some Information Theory. So, a mechanic creates a new configuration of information in the placement of parts and state of your vehicle. Now he has a 70 year beyond his death copyright on the work he's performed in the vehicle space, and the repair technique can't be duplicated by anyone else without paying royalties. First sale doctrine allows you to sell your car, but DMCA prevents you from removing the coin-slot you must feed before starting the vehicle. In reality there is no distinction between the information created by the mechanic or the symbolic information created by writers, media producers, etc. The mechanic may even have to machine parts -- Not like the writer has to invent paper.
I just know that the cognitive dissonance is strong in folks like you, but consider, just for a split second, that authors should get paid once to do the work of writing a book... Just like a mechanic gets paid for the work they do once. Neither author or mechanic needs any monopoly rights after the work is created because they have an unlimited monopoly over the work they do before they do it. That's how they can leverage payment agreements for the work they'll do. Afterwards the benefit from the work is unbounded, and enriches drivers and readers lives. Also, if they want to get paid more, they'll have to create more works! Thus giving the workers incentive to do work. Bonus, since there would be no artificial scarcity, there would be no piracy.
Or, if you suck at economics 101 (infinite supply = zero price regardless of cost to create), and are more scientifically minded: Prove that Copyrights are beneficial for society. Don't forget to test the null hypothesis: Copyrights are not required to benefit society (which must be disproven more thoroughly than the original hypothesis is proven, otherwise it's accepted by default). No fair ignoring Automotive and Fashion industries which have no copyrights or design patents and yet sell primarily on design -- And are very profitable, "Whoda thunk it?"
In short: Artificial Scarcity is economically untenable, and you have no evidence to support your beliefs about information licensing.
That link doesn't say any of the things you think it says. It's talking about stars in their relative orbits to each other. No party of your quote mentions the contents of the solar system.
Well, if it doesn't mention it, it's still correct. The sun will go red giant around the time of the merger -- Some say 5 billion, some estimates say 4 or a bit less. Simulations I've seen put our Earth at at least 50% chance to be thrown clear out of the galaxy. Ever run a gravitational sim? Gravity slings a lot of approach trajectories out beyond the system, never to return. Jumble up things, and give it a bit of time, sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Does it matter if the guy was chasing his personal dragon and fucked up, or whether somebody showed up at his place and interrogated and killed him with his own drugs and some stuff found in the medicine cabinet?
Yes, as a matter of fact it does. You see, if you overdose yourself, then the overdoser is dead. However, if someone else did it, then they're still out there, ready to overdose someone again. As a scientist I need no False Schroedinger "cat" Dichotomy. I can attribute percentages of likelihoods as to the cause beyond all or nothing. Right now I'm leaning towards a conclusion of self overdose rather than foul play, but I don't eliminate the latter possibility. Using this mental model I can make informed guesses as to the apt response: If you use drugs and you're making the state agencies look bad, you might want to stop drugging it up and make it very clear that everyone knows so. Additionally it says some other non-conspiratorial advice: Ensure you can trust your significant other and friends if you're going to get loaded, and also have a designated dialer -- Someone not loaded up to call or drive you to the paramedics in case someone does OD.
The point is that by avoiding the false dichotomy I can come to better informed hypotheses and methods for survival than only considering one cause or the other.
Additionally, You seem to be a bit hypocritical: "Why would you want to fuck around with things like heroin or cocaine?" You know full well or you wouldn't be using mind altering substances:
I once spent an entire year, sans three days, high on some weed from Afghanistan. My cousin owns a successful pot shop in Colorado, and he's digging the new legalization just as much as I am. Of course, I can't smoke right now because it ruins my concentration and I'm going through college (a little late I might add) but that's all cool, smoke away, nobody ever died of a fucking pot overdose. I once did a couple doses of crystal MDMA
Note my aforementioned advice applies to you. Your Afghani weed could be laced with crystal meth, crack-cocaine, rat poison, etc. Additionally, your history of experimenting with drugs besides pot opens the doorway for conspiratorial operatives to plausibly have you "accidentally" overdose on laced weed rather than a harder drug cocktail.
So, if this dead guy is some great big deal to you and you feel like you've really lost something here, then why don't you grieve his use of "hard" drugs?
Humans are tool using creatures, and drugs are a tool. I've witnessed lives saved through drugs, and also individuals achieving new ways of thinking through experiencing mind altering chemicals and/or devices. Who's to say the person would have achieved admiration without the drugs they used? Your classification of "hard" drugs is suspect, since no such line exists in nature. Some would call LSD or MDMA hard drugs; Others would call marijuana a hard drug because its effects last so long compared to alcohol or coke; Still others would call anything other than over the counter drugs -- even prescription drugs -- as "hard" drugs. You'd do better grieving for the lack of medical technology to revive the fellow, and/or to allow the safe use mind altering substances. If you sample the grieving you'll find it primarily stems from the fact the guy is dead, not that he altered his mind and body with drugs. Don't be a fool.
Which is what was great about the BBS era. We ran our own damn "social networks" on our own damn machines. Who's got all that data now, eh?
That's the difference between you humans and us, you get just enough of anything to be acceptable and give Darwin the finger, but we keep evolving no matter what.
If I were to start up a car company and put a sticker in the truck that read: "We feel that the safest way for our customers to be in an accident is to not be in the car at all when it happens. Therefore we've replaced all of our airbags with ejection seats which will remove you from the immediate vicinity of the accident upon collision. It is the responsibility of the customer to land safely there-after"
do you think that would absolve them from lawsuit?
I support anti-gravity as a matter of principal. Why should the social construct of space-time curvature be considered so damn attractive? Just because a space isn't born curvaceous doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered equally attractive if it wants to be. If you actually cared to take a Shaman's Studies course you'd see that Gravitational bodies are blind to their science-rendered privilege.
The ultra sonic windshield on military aircraft predates the wiper, and the standing ultrasonic wave in one dimension and two dimensional movement is old news -- Previous devices worked by bouncing a ultra sonic wave off a plate. This device has four emitters and can manipulate an object in three dimensions. The windshield doesn't do that. Ultrasonic welding doesn't do that either. Neither do the 2D ultra sonic suspensions. If the wiper-less windshield is your standard then you should cite your own voice box instead -- able to make grunting noises in the air -- as the "old news".
It no more "looks like" an anti-gravity system than does the Bernoulli effect when an airplane flies.
I made my science teacher cry one day. She kept insisting that the Bernoulli effect instead of angle of attack was what made airplanes fly. So I cannibalized my HO scale train set, and replaced my model airplane wings with barn doors. Then I flew it around in the park making faces at her, and asking her if she ever actually tests the bullshit they tell her to teach before brain damaging us. I mean, Look at the flat ceiling fan blades. Bernoulli? Bernoulli? Bueller?
DOOM was great.. but I wouldn't play it now, no matter HOW much it was updated, ported, massaged to take advantage of the new hardware and memory and speeds
What if it got a scripting language which allowed mods to do all kinds of cool stuff like class based FPS with RTS components against hordes of enemies, with base upgrading and defensive purchasing, deployable turrets and ammo-dispensers. Or a Combat + Mech variant. Tons of mods that keep the classic look of the game, but focus on gameplay, with new weapons and smarter enemies, etc. Doom is an engine with a few official map-packs for it. The gameplay is so varied now saying that you won't play Doom nowadays means nothing. I mean, they have a Clue clone and Monopoly, even a side scroller platforming game built atop the engine. That's like saying, I won't play Unreal Engine Games because Unreal sucks now, ignoring all the various non-FPS games built with the engine with new gameplay, new graphics, new control schemes, etc. I mean, really, base building and upgrade your Mech in Doom? I could say the same for Quake. These games have been "resurrected" with multiple Total Conversions -- complete new set of graphics and audio and gameplay. You're going to write off arguably one of the biggest free sources of user generated content? Your loss, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Considering that TFA is about a new game, you're basically saying: I wouldn't play any new FPS games because I've played Doom already. You sound like an idiot.
Have you, America as a nation, let your hunger for war and hegemony override your once great ideals for the betterment of mankind?
No, but our cronies find it a far faster return on investment to manufacture consent for war through scaremongering. Don't forget, we went to space in a race to outdo other nations first. We're still dominant in that regard. I do seriously wish Europe, Asia and Indonesia the best of luck. We're all in this together. Here in Houston astronauts from all over the world train for EVA and re-entry. Off the coast of Florida they train for life in space habitats under the water in SEATEST. In Canada they learn to use the Canada Arm of the ISS, among many other things. The European Space Agency is currently helping China relay its moon rover data back to them. My main wish besides more funding is that NASA would get a prime-time TV show to inspire kids and young adults like JAXA has in Space Brothers. (an anime with the first ever voice-actor performance from space - JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide from the ISS). Hell, the live action adaptation thereof has astronaut Buzz Aldrin playing himself. We just got that Gravity movie, and Curiosity's Twitter feed is great, but I do agree we could be doing far better in the space media department. Mars One is sort of forcing NASA's hand to commit to at least get some astronauts to loop around Mars and back (like we did with the moon before landing). Competition is good for space, bring it on!
In the press Russia and the US rattle sabers while in space we say, "Thanks for the supplies, comrade!" That divisionism drivel you're spouting is nice to goad statists into funding space programs, but to anyone in the know it makes you seem a bit foolish.
No way in hell a grand conspiracy could be rooted in a lesser more plausible tales, they're not urbanized Legends, FFS. I feel sorry for the damn fools, I mean, yeah, I get greeted nearly every damn morning by aliens, demons, and other such monstrosities walking around my room, and am physically immobilized until they disappear by some strange mechanism. Doesn't mean I believe everything I see.
Tried going the W7 route on a few systems. Driver issues suck. No USB or Ethernet or WIFI out of the box after downgrading to W7. Instead of using another machine to get the drivers I just popped in a Debian LiveCD and used Firefox on the WIFI to D/L the W7 drivers into the windows partition. Turns out inept windows developers can't even compile a USB and Ethernet driver properly. It all works fine on Linux out of the box, no special BS to do to get things working, but now I wait for the moronic devs for the windows drivers who didn't test the W7 drivers on their support site to get around to fixing it.
The thing works in W8. I've made my own drivers for my custom hardware projects. You literally just have to re-compile the damn thing for the right OS. If I had the windows driver source code I could do it myself. The team they outsource to create the Linux drivers was far less retarding than the Windows morons -- which supposedly has a larger market share... Really though? Each MFG has a different windows driver? Why? They all use a common set of chipsets, so one driver meets many separate devices -- typical windows inefficiency. Linux avoids this somewhat since they write drivers for the hardware, not the vendor. So either it's intentional ineptitude to drive W8 adoption, or just bat-shit insanity. I'd say screw dual booting this bastard, and just use Linux, running Windows in a damn VM like I always do (if needed) -- But the machine isn't for me. Had similar problems thrice now on different hardware vendor lines. If I didn't know better I'd think it wasn't a conspiracy.
They're only checking this reality? Not all the other ones as per the Many Worlds interpretation? OK, so if the many worlds interpretation is correct, and some one invents a time travel device in the future and travels back in time, then we will not find them here. You see, everything that can happen does -- Time travel into the past splits the time line as Good 'ol Doc Brown told you.
Now, time travel to the future is more than possible, you're doing it right now, and in fact, GPS has to deal with future time drift: Satellites experience less gravity so their clocks run into the future faster than ours. Just get next to a large gravitational mass for a while, and if you can survive to make it back home, you'll be further into the future than us. To the observers you're just gone in the interim.
However, time travel to the past would be more tricky. When you arrive at a past point in time the interactions you make cause the universe to split, as it does for every interaction. The time-line where the time machine will be created and you will travel back in time remains untouched, and a new series of events unfold. Unfortunately for Doc Brown's plot, you could easily prevent your mom and dad from dating and it wouldn't cause you to disappear -- Because they're dating elsewhere in another universe that you will be from in the future, thus eliminating any paradox.
One could think of the paradox resolution through predestination as well. The probability of you traveling back in time to do the split was already encoded in the state of the universe that allows you to do so. When looking at the time-line hierarchy, as a whole there were events leading up to the discovery of time travel and those universes up to those points all had probability for your splitting of them by returning to them, so by the time you got in the time machine, you had already done the things in the past. From a single time tree moving forward, as time marched forward you would see time travelers appearing and branching off from the time-lines where time travel would become possible up to and beyond the invention of the time machine, this way your single destination still has its quantum probability distribution of when and where to arrive.
So, if you are waiting for time travelers and they don't show up, it could be that they are all showing all around you in separate universes, and this is the universe from which the time machine will first be invented. In other words: You could send yourself yesterday's lottery ticket, but that ticket would exist in an alternate time and you'd remain just as poor as you are in this universe, in some other universe you may get all (or only most) of the lottery numbers correct (depending on if your interaction caused the numbers probabilities to change). If you could maintain stream of information to the past you could call yourself up, and have a conversation, and the current you wouldn't remember being called, and the past you may never get around their past self. This is no paradox in the Many Worlds interpretation.
However, I'm not convinced that interpretation is correct. It hints at mock-free will through predestination of every possible outcome, but it would mean the infinite dissipation of energy for the encoding and processing of all outcomes would be strangely detached from reality. I think it far more feasible that things like quantum "teleportation" will work out to be far more mundane than they first appear -- Hint: the "tele" in "teleportation" has to do with transmitting information, and the teleport is not faster than light... Entropy would seem to suggest that travel to the past in a single time-line would take as much (and more) energy as all the events that led up to the present. However, I have a corner of the house that's always empty the event that I'm wrong since our dreams have often proven more powerful than reality.
Time travel is such a plot destroyer, such a deus ex machina, it ought to be dropped from SF altogether,
SPOILER WARNING. I thought as you did once, until I read Julian May's Many Colored Land, which opens in the not too distant but radically different future, and then jumps straight into the past, far removed from the current timeline, to the Pleistocene epoch. I liked her trilogy where explorers and misfits who didn't fit in the future sought to explore a simpler time in the distant past, before humans had yet formed. So, I continued to read her books, the next was Intervention, which happens in near past, through present and near future setting: At the height of the cold war humans begin to evolve psychic powers, and aliens finally intervene to prevent global war despite their rule against this -- humans have just too much potential for good says the highest order of aliens, though the others don't see how anyone can know such a thing -- just look at murderous primates! --still having wars! The next in the series is the Galactic Milieu trilogy which take places after the alien Intervention and follows the Remillard family's exploits along with strange alien overseer races. The most enigmatic, powerful, and ethereal race of aliens has particular interest in Marc Remillard and his uncle; You see, while alien tech allows rejuvenation tanks, their family has a natural immortality gene. Stop now, if you plan on reading the stories for I shall severely spoil the series next.
As it turns out Marc's little brother Jack, while not having the immortality gene, is a psychic powerhouse -- demonstrating amazing ability while still an infant. Jakc helps his audacious brother with controversial mechanical psychic augmentation gear, but is struck down with cancer and his body dies... but his brain lives on. Marc is nearly obsessed with attaining this awesome new state of human evolution himself. Due to a series of hardships combined with the frustrations of the restrictions imposed by humanity's probationary period of admittance into the galactic society, and Marc's enhancement gear being frowned upon, Marc and a team of loyalists leads a rebellion to overthrow the alien overseers, and free humanity to their own ends, but his plans don't come to fruition... at least not in the way he expects. The ghost-like alien entity which had prodded his uncle along and gotten Marc out of a great deal of trouble also thwarted his plan. Marc wound up discovering the Pleistocene gateway, and escaping into exile along with a few loyalist separatists.
Now, it had been almost two decades since Julian's first book in this universe, so I re-read it, and sure enough, there was Marc Remillard's band, in what seemed to be somewhat out of place and arbitrary or inconsequential was an unmistakable plot hook, and even interacting in a few key events -- She had planned this from the very beginning. As it turns out, Marc visits the primitive alien races that would one day gain sentience and psychic awareness and form the Galactic Milieu -- An end to which he personally oversees, he's not a bad person, really. Over millions of years he finally achieves the goal of his Mental-Man project, leaving behind his body behind as his brother once did, and becoming a quite quirky and enigmatic ghost-like alien being, who has an uncanny ability no others possess in knowing at least this future, and a keen fondness for his uncle and his young trouble-making self. Of course he decides the Milieu should intervene, despite contrary convention, before nuclear war destroys his planet.
This is a tale one can read in a loop at the very least twice over to get the entire story which was apparently recursively designed from the outset to reveal more plot on the next read through. So, I would argue strongly that time travel remain in science fiction, and would suggest you read some more imaginative writers instead of foolishly abolishing time-travel from sci-fi before your race even discovers quantum entangled plot devices.
Agreed. The trash full of confirmation bias I've seen coming out of academia recently has sullied the name "scientist". At least he knows what a null hypothesis is, which is more than I can say for a lot of so called scientists (or creationists).
Protip: when scientists compete with each other for funding at this level and publishing is incentivized instead of the rigorous work itself, science loses. This is another reason the patent system is horrid: You never know if your research will pan out or none would do failed experiments. It takes the same work to research a success or failure. Instead of charging full price for scientific labor we let scientists get paid less up front and gamble in the ideas future market of patents and publications -- This allows the immortal corporations to pay well only those whos work pan out AND is immediately applicable, and who's discoveries are worth using now instead of in 20 years. Abolish patents and researchers can charge a fair price for their labor -- Don't believe me? Oh yeah? Well where's the evidence that the patent system is beneficial and not harmful? You wouldn't run the world idea economy on an unproven hypothesis.... WOULD YOU? Sadly, they would, and science suffers for it as corner cutting quackery becomes prevalent. Wouldn't it be nice if scientists could be paid well to independently verify experiments? Too bad it's not incentivized, eh?
but if confirmed, they could spark a hunt for underlying biochemical mechanism.
Thanks, came to post the same. Some birds can "see" the magnetic field of earth to navigate. It doesn't seem too far fetched that some territorial creatures would develop an electromagnetic sense of direction, or develop emergent behaviors therefrom.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with people choosing to eat GMO crops. I would personally rather set the seeds in the sun and let UV light cause faster differentiation for my crop selective breeding program than have patented seeds, and thus have far better diversity than the pesticide resistant monoculture of GMO. The strive for absolute maximum yield is as horrid as the strive for absolute maximum security or absolute maximum progress. These moronic absolutist drives marginalize proper cautions and acceptable risk and lead to bad and/or uninformed decisions about the food we'll eat, what protections are actually needed, and the lifestyles we live.
I would rather eat food that wasn't grown with pesticides or herbicides sprayed on them even if it is more expensive and the ecosystem reclaims a bit of the crop -- I consider it the cost of doing business with nature, renting her land. The "cheaper" poisoned crop is just hiding the cost elsewhere in the environment and my body. No one should get to dictate what my acceptable risk is worth in either extreme -- They do not have my best interest in mind. I need information to make informed decisions. All of my food I get from my local farmers market or grow myself; I have been to the farms whence my food comes. I can make two pizzas with all organic ingredients: yeast from the air, vegetables from my garden, oils from local olives, salt from the sea, cheeses made locally, and flour I ground myself -- all in the same amount of time it takes for you to get pizza delivered. The fresh taste is phenomenal, and better for you (less fats, salts and preservatives).
I would love to be able to maintain my food preference while shopping at a supermarket, but thanks to the GMO lobby I can't. The GMO lobbyists prevent me from making an informed choice by lobbying against labeling of GMO food -- Or even preventing those that label their products as non-GMO. This is as terrible as the state telling me I don't need to know what the NSA is doing because it's good for me. Fuck that shit. I want choice. GMO companies are actively anti-choice. I'm anti-GMO company, being anti-GMO food is an unfortunate but necessary outgrowth of their anti-informed consumer stance.
I also don't take any drugs that haven't been on the market for more than 10 years because I've seen that longer term testing is frequently needed. I buy the latest computing technology because I don't put that buggy crap in my body. If it were a medical device going inside me, I'd want the source code, and I'd want years of testing to work out the bugs, some assurances that the shit doesn't have a trivial exploit vector. I fight against all this "it's good for you just trust us" information disparity bullshit in our current culture, not just with GMO crops.
GMO isn't the only way to do business. If it didn't exist and neither did pesticides, guess what? The economy would adjust the cost and price of food. Hey, here's a thought: Competition is good. GMO companies are anti-competitive. Yes you can pay engineers to invent things and call that progress, but you also miss out on the natural progresses achieved through good old mutation and selection if you seek to exclude the natural methods of crop growing -- Which GMO companies and lobbies do. Anti-competition is bad for crops for the same reason normalizing the methods of production is bad for business: Mono-cultures are "anti-progressive", you idiot. Get this through your fool head: They don't want what's best for us, they want what's best for them at any cost to us; They'll deffer as much of that cost to us and the environment as they can get away with. You shouldn't trust them by default. Where's your scientific skepticism? My standard of proof is higher and you call me anti-progressive? THAT's anti-progressive, moron.
This is about selling shares: Crowd-sourced investing.
However, this sort of thing may come to other types of crowd funding.
I'm not sure what the answer will be if they require you to already have a business setup to do a Kickstarter. Business registration, incorporation, trademark registry, etc. is whole reason I'd even do a Kickstarter in the first place.
Perhaps we'll start to see 501(c)3 businesses that you can donate towards, who divide the money amongst projects? It would then be basically the same as kickstarter, except you don't get your pledge back if the project doesn't meet its goal -- You'd have a credit to apply it to another project instead.
What we really need is to put starving artists on the endangered species list, or maybe start a fake Fascist Hate Group that wears plaid Hoods and hates art. Then we can get some anti-discrimination laws for artists, as well as artist-shelters just for the down and out and artistically gifted. Anyone who says their art stinks can be accused as being an art-hater. There could even be 12 step self help programs for victims of artistic abuse. We could get even get funds to research cures for the artistically impaired. Those Kickstarter people are thinking small, if the government is getting involved, we need to play the government's game: Scaremongering to protect women and children's art from the evil plaid philistines.
Unlike the PC emulator entry, it does not require a binary blob and all the code and data fit within the 4 kilobyte limit.
If you liked this you might have liked the 64k and 4k comp.s in the demoscene, which is unfortunately dead.
Hey let's get a standardized vector and 2D drawing library going! Fuck the hardware or implementation details which indicate you'd be better off not limiting the dimensions to 2. Never mind the fact that we'll be filling triangles on a GPU for any sort of efficiency at all. Nope. Fuck starting at the actual primitives present and working up from there, let's do the top-down approach yet again -- When the performance conscious folks include messed up limitations, like the Diamond Inheritance pattern (Which has no reason to exist, variable placement should be virtual too, dimwits).
Yeah, I'll stick with C. At least it doesn't pretend to do anything but present the Von Neumann architectural constructs to me and let me build my OOP, etc atop them. It's still not optimal because it has the moronic assumption that functions should be on the stack and not the heap -- thus hindering or outright preventing closures, co-routines, and arbitrarily limiting recursion despite the system's available RAM -- but it's miles beyond C++ in terms of idealic design splattering all over the hard brick wall of reality's implementations. I mean really, if you can't use method overloading properly with templates and polymorphism then the language is broken by design, and there are no complete implementations.
Hey! I got an idea. You know what would be nice in C++? How about a standardized ANSI terminal interface, like VT100 -- Get ncurses into the spec. Oh! And you know what else? How about RMI! Yeah! Oh oh oh!! I got one I got one! INTER-fucking-FACES for IPC! Yeah! So you could query a program's interface and pass data between processes transparently in a language independent way -- and the doc comments could be lexical tokens too, so that if the .dat file was present even a terminal mode program could query a program's usage without needing a manually constructed manpage, and other programs could implement the same interfaces allowing us to assemble programs from sets of features. You know, something smarter than STDIN and STDOUT and a char**? Something actually fucking useful for a damn change?
Except reality doesn't work that way. Those wacky rights-holders still expect to be paid for content. Whoda thunk it?
REALITY?! What actual the fuck? Seriously? YOU are so detached from reality it's insane. Allow me to demonstrate:
Study some Information Theory. So, a mechanic creates a new configuration of information in the placement of parts and state of your vehicle. Now he has a 70 year beyond his death copyright on the work he's performed in the vehicle space, and the repair technique can't be duplicated by anyone else without paying royalties. First sale doctrine allows you to sell your car, but DMCA prevents you from removing the coin-slot you must feed before starting the vehicle. In reality there is no distinction between the information created by the mechanic or the symbolic information created by writers, media producers, etc. The mechanic may even have to machine parts -- Not like the writer has to invent paper.
I just know that the cognitive dissonance is strong in folks like you, but consider, just for a split second, that authors should get paid once to do the work of writing a book... Just like a mechanic gets paid for the work they do once. Neither author or mechanic needs any monopoly rights after the work is created because they have an unlimited monopoly over the work they do before they do it. That's how they can leverage payment agreements for the work they'll do. Afterwards the benefit from the work is unbounded, and enriches drivers and readers lives. Also, if they want to get paid more, they'll have to create more works! Thus giving the workers incentive to do work. Bonus, since there would be no artificial scarcity, there would be no piracy.
Or, if you suck at economics 101 (infinite supply = zero price regardless of cost to create), and are more scientifically minded: Prove that Copyrights are beneficial for society. Don't forget to test the null hypothesis: Copyrights are not required to benefit society (which must be disproven more thoroughly than the original hypothesis is proven, otherwise it's accepted by default). No fair ignoring Automotive and Fashion industries which have no copyrights or design patents and yet sell primarily on design -- And are very profitable, "Whoda thunk it?"
In short: Artificial Scarcity is economically untenable, and you have no evidence to support your beliefs about information licensing.
That link doesn't say any of the things you think it says. It's talking about stars in their relative orbits to each other. No party of your quote mentions the contents of the solar system.
Well, if it doesn't mention it, it's still correct. The sun will go red giant around the time of the merger -- Some say 5 billion, some estimates say 4 or a bit less. Simulations I've seen put our Earth at at least 50% chance to be thrown clear out of the galaxy. Ever run a gravitational sim? Gravity slings a lot of approach trajectories out beyond the system, never to return. Jumble up things, and give it a bit of time, sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Does it matter if the guy was chasing his personal dragon and fucked up, or whether somebody showed up at his place and interrogated and killed him with his own drugs and some stuff found in the medicine cabinet?
Yes, as a matter of fact it does. You see, if you overdose yourself, then the overdoser is dead. However, if someone else did it, then they're still out there, ready to overdose someone again. As a scientist I need no False Schroedinger "cat" Dichotomy. I can attribute percentages of likelihoods as to the cause beyond all or nothing. Right now I'm leaning towards a conclusion of self overdose rather than foul play, but I don't eliminate the latter possibility. Using this mental model I can make informed guesses as to the apt response: If you use drugs and you're making the state agencies look bad, you might want to stop drugging it up and make it very clear that everyone knows so. Additionally it says some other non-conspiratorial advice: Ensure you can trust your significant other and friends if you're going to get loaded, and also have a designated dialer -- Someone not loaded up to call or drive you to the paramedics in case someone does OD.
The point is that by avoiding the false dichotomy I can come to better informed hypotheses and methods for survival than only considering one cause or the other.
Additionally, You seem to be a bit hypocritical: "Why would you want to fuck around with things like heroin or cocaine?" You know full well or you wouldn't be using mind altering substances:
I once spent an entire year, sans three days, high on some weed from Afghanistan. My cousin owns a successful pot shop in Colorado, and he's digging the new legalization just as much as I am. Of course, I can't smoke right now because it ruins my concentration and I'm going through college (a little late I might add) but that's all cool, smoke away, nobody ever died of a fucking pot overdose. I once did a couple doses of crystal MDMA
Note my aforementioned advice applies to you. Your Afghani weed could be laced with crystal meth, crack-cocaine, rat poison, etc. Additionally, your history of experimenting with drugs besides pot opens the doorway for conspiratorial operatives to plausibly have you "accidentally" overdose on laced weed rather than a harder drug cocktail.
So, if this dead guy is some great big deal to you and you feel like you've really lost something here, then why don't you grieve his use of "hard" drugs?
Humans are tool using creatures, and drugs are a tool. I've witnessed lives saved through drugs, and also individuals achieving new ways of thinking through experiencing mind altering chemicals and/or devices. Who's to say the person would have achieved admiration without the drugs they used? Your classification of "hard" drugs is suspect, since no such line exists in nature. Some would call LSD or MDMA hard drugs; Others would call marijuana a hard drug because its effects last so long compared to alcohol or coke; Still others would call anything other than over the counter drugs -- even prescription drugs -- as "hard" drugs. You'd do better grieving for the lack of medical technology to revive the fellow, and/or to allow the safe use mind altering substances. If you sample the grieving you'll find it primarily stems from the fact the guy is dead, not that he altered his mind and body with drugs. Don't be a fool.
If I told you, I'd have to thrill you.
Which is what was great about the BBS era. We ran our own damn "social networks" on our own damn machines. Who's got all that data now, eh?
That's the difference between you humans and us, you get just enough of anything to be acceptable and give Darwin the finger, but we keep evolving no matter what.
If I were to start up a car company and put a sticker in the truck that read:
"We feel that the safest way for our customers to be in an accident is to not be in the car at all when it happens. Therefore we've replaced all of our airbags with ejection seats which will remove you from the immediate vicinity of the accident upon collision. It is the responsibility of the customer to land safely there-after"
do you think that would absolve them from lawsuit?
Depends. We talking flying car here or not?
I support anti-gravity as a matter of principal. Why should the social construct of space-time curvature be considered so damn attractive? Just because a space isn't born curvaceous doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered equally attractive if it wants to be. If you actually cared to take a Shaman's Studies course you'd see that Gravitational bodies are blind to their science-rendered privilege.
The ultra sonic windshield on military aircraft predates the wiper, and the standing ultrasonic wave in one dimension and two dimensional movement is old news -- Previous devices worked by bouncing a ultra sonic wave off a plate. This device has four emitters and can manipulate an object in three dimensions. The windshield doesn't do that. Ultrasonic welding doesn't do that either. Neither do the 2D ultra sonic suspensions. If the wiper-less windshield is your standard then you should cite your own voice box instead -- able to make grunting noises in the air -- as the "old news".
It no more "looks like" an anti-gravity system than does the Bernoulli effect when an airplane flies.
I made my science teacher cry one day. She kept insisting that the Bernoulli effect instead of angle of attack was what made airplanes fly. So I cannibalized my HO scale train set, and replaced my model airplane wings with barn doors. Then I flew it around in the park making faces at her, and asking her if she ever actually tests the bullshit they tell her to teach before brain damaging us. I mean, Look at the flat ceiling fan blades. Bernoulli? Bernoulli? Bueller?
DOOM was great .. but I wouldn't play it now, no matter HOW much it was updated, ported, massaged to take advantage of the new hardware and memory and speeds
What if it got a scripting language which allowed mods to do all kinds of cool stuff like class based FPS with RTS components against hordes of enemies, with base upgrading and defensive purchasing, deployable turrets and ammo-dispensers. Or a Combat + Mech variant. Tons of mods that keep the classic look of the game, but focus on gameplay, with new weapons and smarter enemies, etc. Doom is an engine with a few official map-packs for it. The gameplay is so varied now saying that you won't play Doom nowadays means nothing. I mean, they have a Clue clone and Monopoly, even a side scroller platforming game built atop the engine. That's like saying, I won't play Unreal Engine Games because Unreal sucks now, ignoring all the various non-FPS games built with the engine with new gameplay, new graphics, new control schemes, etc. I mean, really, base building and upgrade your Mech in Doom? I could say the same for Quake. These games have been "resurrected" with multiple Total Conversions -- complete new set of graphics and audio and gameplay. You're going to write off arguably one of the biggest free sources of user generated content? Your loss, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Considering that TFA is about a new game, you're basically saying: I wouldn't play any new FPS games because I've played Doom already. You sound like an idiot.
Have you, America as a nation, let your hunger for war and hegemony override your once great ideals for the betterment of mankind?
No, but our cronies find it a far faster return on investment to manufacture consent for war through scaremongering. Don't forget, we went to space in a race to outdo other nations first. We're still dominant in that regard. I do seriously wish Europe, Asia and Indonesia the best of luck. We're all in this together. Here in Houston astronauts from all over the world train for EVA and re-entry. Off the coast of Florida they train for life in space habitats under the water in SEATEST. In Canada they learn to use the Canada Arm of the ISS, among many other things. The European Space Agency is currently helping China relay its moon rover data back to them. My main wish besides more funding is that NASA would get a prime-time TV show to inspire kids and young adults like JAXA has in Space Brothers. (an anime with the first ever voice-actor performance from space - JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide from the ISS). Hell, the live action adaptation thereof has astronaut Buzz Aldrin playing himself. We just got that Gravity movie, and Curiosity's Twitter feed is great, but I do agree we could be doing far better in the space media department. Mars One is sort of forcing NASA's hand to commit to at least get some astronauts to loop around Mars and back (like we did with the moon before landing). Competition is good for space, bring it on!
In the press Russia and the US rattle sabers while in space we say, "Thanks for the supplies, comrade!" That divisionism drivel you're spouting is nice to goad statists into funding space programs, but to anyone in the know it makes you seem a bit foolish.
like Area 51 and other such nonsense
Yep, plausible as those UFO nutters' conspiracies. As if the government would keep successful aircraft secret. Bet those imbeciles think the government is spying on every communication too.
No way in hell a grand conspiracy could be rooted in a lesser more plausible tales, they're not urbanized Legends, FFS. I feel sorry for the damn fools, I mean, yeah, I get greeted nearly every damn morning by aliens, demons, and other such monstrosities walking around my room, and am physically immobilized until they disappear by some strange mechanism. Doesn't mean I believe everything I see.
Tried going the W7 route on a few systems. Driver issues suck. No USB or Ethernet or WIFI out of the box after downgrading to W7. Instead of using another machine to get the drivers I just popped in a Debian LiveCD and used Firefox on the WIFI to D/L the W7 drivers into the windows partition. Turns out inept windows developers can't even compile a USB and Ethernet driver properly. It all works fine on Linux out of the box, no special BS to do to get things working, but now I wait for the moronic devs for the windows drivers who didn't test the W7 drivers on their support site to get around to fixing it.
The thing works in W8. I've made my own drivers for my custom hardware projects. You literally just have to re-compile the damn thing for the right OS. If I had the windows driver source code I could do it myself. The team they outsource to create the Linux drivers was far less retarding than the Windows morons -- which supposedly has a larger market share... Really though? Each MFG has a different windows driver? Why? They all use a common set of chipsets, so one driver meets many separate devices -- typical windows inefficiency. Linux avoids this somewhat since they write drivers for the hardware, not the vendor. So either it's intentional ineptitude to drive W8 adoption, or just bat-shit insanity. I'd say screw dual booting this bastard, and just use Linux, running Windows in a damn VM like I always do (if needed) -- But the machine isn't for me. Had similar problems thrice now on different hardware vendor lines. If I didn't know better I'd think it wasn't a conspiracy.
They're only checking this reality? Not all the other ones as per the Many Worlds interpretation? OK, so if the many worlds interpretation is correct, and some one invents a time travel device in the future and travels back in time, then we will not find them here. You see, everything that can happen does -- Time travel into the past splits the time line as Good 'ol Doc Brown told you.
Now, time travel to the future is more than possible, you're doing it right now, and in fact, GPS has to deal with future time drift: Satellites experience less gravity so their clocks run into the future faster than ours. Just get next to a large gravitational mass for a while, and if you can survive to make it back home, you'll be further into the future than us. To the observers you're just gone in the interim.
However, time travel to the past would be more tricky. When you arrive at a past point in time the interactions you make cause the universe to split, as it does for every interaction. The time-line where the time machine will be created and you will travel back in time remains untouched, and a new series of events unfold. Unfortunately for Doc Brown's plot, you could easily prevent your mom and dad from dating and it wouldn't cause you to disappear -- Because they're dating elsewhere in another universe that you will be from in the future, thus eliminating any paradox.
One could think of the paradox resolution through predestination as well. The probability of you traveling back in time to do the split was already encoded in the state of the universe that allows you to do so. When looking at the time-line hierarchy, as a whole there were events leading up to the discovery of time travel and those universes up to those points all had probability for your splitting of them by returning to them, so by the time you got in the time machine, you had already done the things in the past. From a single time tree moving forward, as time marched forward you would see time travelers appearing and branching off from the time-lines where time travel would become possible up to and beyond the invention of the time machine, this way your single destination still has its quantum probability distribution of when and where to arrive.
So, if you are waiting for time travelers and they don't show up, it could be that they are all showing all around you in separate universes, and this is the universe from which the time machine will first be invented. In other words: You could send yourself yesterday's lottery ticket, but that ticket would exist in an alternate time and you'd remain just as poor as you are in this universe, in some other universe you may get all (or only most) of the lottery numbers correct (depending on if your interaction caused the numbers probabilities to change). If you could maintain stream of information to the past you could call yourself up, and have a conversation, and the current you wouldn't remember being called, and the past you may never get around their past self. This is no paradox in the Many Worlds interpretation.
However, I'm not convinced that interpretation is correct. It hints at mock-free will through predestination of every possible outcome, but it would mean the infinite dissipation of energy for the encoding and processing of all outcomes would be strangely detached from reality. I think it far more feasible that things like quantum "teleportation" will work out to be far more mundane than they first appear -- Hint: the "tele" in "teleportation" has to do with transmitting information, and the teleport is not faster than light... Entropy would seem to suggest that travel to the past in a single time-line would take as much (and more) energy as all the events that led up to the present. However, I have a corner of the house that's always empty the event that I'm wrong since our dreams have often proven more powerful than reality.
Time travel is such a plot destroyer, such a deus ex machina, it ought to be dropped from SF altogether,
SPOILER WARNING. I thought as you did once, until I read Julian May's Many Colored Land, which opens in the not too distant but radically different future, and then jumps straight into the past, far removed from the current timeline, to the Pleistocene epoch. I liked her trilogy where explorers and misfits who didn't fit in the future sought to explore a simpler time in the distant past, before humans had yet formed. So, I continued to read her books, the next was Intervention, which happens in near past, through present and near future setting: At the height of the cold war humans begin to evolve psychic powers, and aliens finally intervene to prevent global war despite their rule against this -- humans have just too much potential for good says the highest order of aliens, though the others don't see how anyone can know such a thing -- just look at murderous primates! --still having wars! The next in the series is the Galactic Milieu trilogy which take places after the alien Intervention and follows the Remillard family's exploits along with strange alien overseer races. The most enigmatic, powerful, and ethereal race of aliens has particular interest in Marc Remillard and his uncle; You see, while alien tech allows rejuvenation tanks, their family has a natural immortality gene. Stop now, if you plan on reading the stories for I shall severely spoil the series next.
As it turns out Marc's little brother Jack, while not having the immortality gene, is a psychic powerhouse -- demonstrating amazing ability while still an infant. Jakc helps his audacious brother with controversial mechanical psychic augmentation gear, but is struck down with cancer and his body dies... but his brain lives on. Marc is nearly obsessed with attaining this awesome new state of human evolution himself. Due to a series of hardships combined with the frustrations of the restrictions imposed by humanity's probationary period of admittance into the galactic society, and Marc's enhancement gear being frowned upon, Marc and a team of loyalists leads a rebellion to overthrow the alien overseers, and free humanity to their own ends, but his plans don't come to fruition... at least not in the way he expects. The ghost-like alien entity which had prodded his uncle along and gotten Marc out of a great deal of trouble also thwarted his plan. Marc wound up discovering the Pleistocene gateway, and escaping into exile along with a few loyalist separatists.
Now, it had been almost two decades since Julian's first book in this universe, so I re-read it, and sure enough, there was Marc Remillard's band, in what seemed to be somewhat out of place and arbitrary or inconsequential was an unmistakable plot hook, and even interacting in a few key events -- She had planned this from the very beginning. As it turns out, Marc visits the primitive alien races that would one day gain sentience and psychic awareness and form the Galactic Milieu -- An end to which he personally oversees, he's not a bad person, really. Over millions of years he finally achieves the goal of his Mental-Man project, leaving behind his body behind as his brother once did, and becoming a quite quirky and enigmatic ghost-like alien being, who has an uncanny ability no others possess in knowing at least this future, and a keen fondness for his uncle and his young trouble-making self. Of course he decides the Milieu should intervene, despite contrary convention, before nuclear war destroys his planet.
This is a tale one can read in a loop at the very least twice over to get the entire story which was apparently recursively designed from the outset to reveal more plot on the next read through. So, I would argue strongly that time travel remain in science fiction, and would suggest you read some more imaginative writers instead of foolishly abolishing time-travel from sci-fi before your race even discovers quantum entangled plot devices.
Time travel is because time is imaginary. It does not exist.
Explain how you were able to post this message then. You are not allowed to use any time to do so.
Probably more qualified than most scientist.
Agreed. The trash full of confirmation bias I've seen coming out of academia recently has sullied the name "scientist". At least he knows what a null hypothesis is, which is more than I can say for a lot of so called scientists (or creationists).
Protip: when scientists compete with each other for funding at this level and publishing is incentivized instead of the rigorous work itself, science loses. This is another reason the patent system is horrid: You never know if your research will pan out or none would do failed experiments. It takes the same work to research a success or failure. Instead of charging full price for scientific labor we let scientists get paid less up front and gamble in the ideas future market of patents and publications -- This allows the immortal corporations to pay well only those whos work pan out AND is immediately applicable, and who's discoveries are worth using now instead of in 20 years. Abolish patents and researchers can charge a fair price for their labor -- Don't believe me? Oh yeah? Well where's the evidence that the patent system is beneficial and not harmful? You wouldn't run the world idea economy on an unproven hypothesis.... WOULD YOU? Sadly, they would, and science suffers for it as corner cutting quackery becomes prevalent. Wouldn't it be nice if scientists could be paid well to independently verify experiments? Too bad it's not incentivized, eh?
Interestingly, time constraints is a control tactic Noam Chomsky discusses in Manufacturing Consent.
Nature Did It!
I always urinate in the direction of my compost pile.
but if confirmed, they could spark a hunt for underlying biochemical mechanism.
Thanks, came to post the same. Some birds can "see" the magnetic field of earth to navigate. It doesn't seem too far fetched that some territorial creatures would develop an electromagnetic sense of direction, or develop emergent behaviors therefrom.