> Love is just a chemical reaction in your brain, anyway. It's not magical, or sacred, or even very special.
The same can be said about the process of thinking. It is "just" neurotransmitters being emitted and absorbed. Nothing special, there.
Sufficient reductionism can make anything seem "meaningless" since, after all, on the scale of the entire Universe viewed over tens of billions of years, nothing looks important. Therefore, from my level, your reductionism is a waste of noise.
Your explanation also ignores the purely visual components; I rather doubt that viewing "high quality" porn leaves the average viewer any smarter, either. For that matter, do Romance novels make the readers any smarter? Where is the histocompatibility complex of Lord Fabio-On-The-Cover (or whoever the latest hot cover model is) detected?
> - oracle: all knowledge, all questions, answered all the time (that might change the way we think of our education system!)
This has been true for years, now. Back in 2002, one of the big cheeses at AT&T (pre SBC takeover) said that he could look up anything with just Google Search and five search terms. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.
Of course, it was true long before that if you had an Encyclopedia Britannica at home or in the local library (to some limited version of "all"); if you don't believe that, just ask one of the salesmen that they had, then:-)
> The most succesful the would probably be bubonic plague
> Anthrax deserves a mention as one that many militaries vaccinate against,
> In the nonhuman realm, myxamitosis is probably the best known animal killer deliberately deployed by humans,
As another reply to the post that I replied to pointed out, the above are all bacteria, whereas the article concerned viruses. Also, "successful" was originally defined in the virus's terms (lots of descendants and a population not resistant or immune due to the first exposure). Killing humans is only good if that helps spread the germs (like Ebola victims bleeding out does).
BTW, the blankets that Lord Amherst proposed (and only proposed) giving to the Indians to wipe them out were contaminated with smallpox, not bubonic plague.
> what would stop another country or business from "stealing" the energy from the satellite
The satellite would beam over a limited angle, rather than over the whole Earth. Also, anything not in the rectenna area would be wasted by the receiver, anyways, and so they would have no more complaints than someone whose trash is stolen before the garbage truck arrives.
There are some implants like this, but they have VERY few pixels (64x64 IIRC).
Also, the "existing data stream" for a human is fairly complex (lots of processing done in the retina) and quite idiosyncratic (each neural net had its own training set, after all); dealing with the blind is far easier, since they will just learn the new data streams from scratch.
> The second-most successful virus was the one that struck the > Roman Empire circa 600 A.D. because if that virus had not struck, > the Eastern Roman Emperor's army would have succeeded in his > mission to reclaim Italy, Rome, and possibly France/Gaul too.
Was this after Narses the court eunuch and general conquered Italy, then let the Lombards attack the North to show the Emperor that he was needed (and committed suicide in shame when they succeeded)?
> he most-successful virus struck Europe in the mid-1200s, > Thus the middle class was born.
The middle class existed for long before that. It merely improved the lot of peasants for about 60 years (until population levels came back) and created the "Rotten Boroughs" in England (abandoned towns that didn't lose their representation in Commons until the early 19th Century).
Anyway, the common cold beats them in almost any two year period. Further, people continue to catch colds all through their lives.
Now, if the goal of the virus were to wipe out humanity or at least change history, then your viruses would have won. Prove that either was deliberately weaponized, or introduced by aliens making a multi-sense recording for "viewers" in the Galactic Community (to make a season-ending cliffhanger, or else because a new bunch of writers wanted to "reboot" the franchise), and I will accept your definition of successful.
Marvel has been going downhill for a long time. So much so that I consider this deal to be part of a natural progression. Between poor writing and poor management, I haven't seen anything good from Marvel Comics since the late 90s, or maybe early 00s. Some of their movies have been good, some have been horrid. I know "continuity" is optional at best, but you can only "re-imagine" a plot so many times before it becomes complete drivel.
Both Marvel and DC just publish comic books to maintain their trademarks, while their real business is as a store of intellectual property (stories, characters, etc.). Thus, whether their new stories (let alone new characters) are good or bad are fairly unimportant; only the old ones have enough fans to attract initial audiences. Once a movie hits with audiences, the original becomes irrelevant (who cared about the Disneyland/DisneyWorld Pirates Of The Caribbean ride, after the first film came out?).
Anyway, an entire planet may deserve to be named after a god, but a rocket? No more than a nymph, or some animal. Pegasus, for example, is a perfectly appropriate name for a rocket. Ares is not...
So much for Projects Mercury and Apollo, and the Saturn and Atlas boosters, I guess. Failed due to hubris, no doubt.
Sure, we could make our jet fighters 10% more fuel efficient, if we added 50% to the cost of the engines, and a similar amount to the upkeep.
Umm, fuel efficiency is usually not important in fighters, fighting capability is. There is no prize for second best in a dogfight.
OTOH, transport planes (and bombers) DO benefit from fuel efficiency. And reduced upkeep for fighters, since they tend to be more useful if they don't spend all their time being reconditioned from the last mission.
Going back to computers, "Good Enough" beating "The Right Thing" is old news; that is why everybody uses a variant of Unix or Windows, rather than ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System of the 60's and 70's era MIT AI Lab), which handled errors "correctly" at great difficulty, whereas Unix just gave an error return value and depended on the programmer fixing the problem or halting the program. As a result of depending on the programmer, rather than the OS, to handle errors, Unix could be easily ported, while ITS was seldom if ever ported to other machines. Since Unix could be everywhere (relatively cheaply), it gradually was everywhere.
> So instead of just snow, you'll be driving on a layer of slush/ice on top of a little water.
You forgot that everything is on top of the super-tough (snicker) glass layer, just to make it more fun. I don't know how thick the snow in Minnesota gets, but I remember hearing of 6 ft of snow in Upstate New York (at RPI, specifically, when visiting colleges before applying). I think that melting the snow will be less than effective.
It's a bit much for foreign leader like Menelaus to go to the trouble of war over his wife leaving him for another man. Especially in an era where women were considered simple commodities.
Bull. Menelaus needed to go after his "kidnapped" wife because he had the same claim to Sparta as Phillip II of Spain had to being King of England, that he had married the Queen Regnant and was supposed to shut up and get her pregnant; if she wasn't kidnapped, Paris of Troy gets to be King Matrimonial, and Menelaus is once again Agamemnon's little brother with few prospects. Agamemnon supports his brother's Quest because it is a Casus Belli to justify pillaging Troy. If it had been ended by the duel between Menelaus and Paris, the whole war would have been a failure, from the Argive perspective.
Women were no more simple commodities when they were major heiresses than was Eleanor Of The Aquitaine a simple commodity in the Middle Ages.
I always assumed that R2-D2 couldn't (or at least, didn't) "talk human" because all the humans were also fluent in Droid. Do you ever hear a Star Wars Universe ask what the droid is talking about? No, because the understand him reasonably well, anyway. C3-PO only "translates" when R2-D2 seems to be talking nonsense, like belonging to some old General Obiwan Ken-obi guy that no one had heard about.
Really, did you think that the Star Wars Universe was filled with monolingual Americans?
(Writing as one:-)
> In his time, there would have at least three - likely four - levels of professional play. > > You could be a consistent, entertaining, player and never make it into major league ball.
This still holds true, today. There are many levels of the minor leagues, as well as semi-pro and outright amateur leagues. Most players never make it anywhere near "The Show" (the Major League teams, for those who never saw Bull Durham).
OTOH, even Major League players usually had off-season jobs in the pre-free agency period. Now, maintaining oneself in playing condition is the off-season job, usually.
> even though we do get bottom-barrel pricing through them here at SAIC (via secretive back-room dealings).
You at SAIC once owned part of Networks Solutions (you may still, for all that I know); I expect this is why, and I expect that the dealings were not very secretive, either. I know as SAIC also once owned part of the company that I worked for, as well, back in the late 1990s.
> The biggest mistake was a naive belief that TLDs would be respected, with their silly.com,.org, etc.
No, the biggest mistake was opening the domain registration process so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry thought that they should have their own. Things were much better controlled when the domain fees were too high to make fake domains worth it except for those with a real interest and those with an obsession.
> Now companies have to buy up.com,.org,.net, etc to protect their > domain name, otherwise someone will use other TLDs to sucker in > unsuspecting victims into scams.
Tough luck for them. This problem would exist for any method, including eliminating getipaddrbyname().
> how many.tv domains do you think are legitimately Tuvalu domains?
Tuvalu domains are sold to non-residents on a regular basis, with the excess fees going towards projects to help Tuvaluan local residents. This is a long-standing practice, and reasonably well publicized. Unless you are a citizen of that country, you have no standing for complaining about it. Furthermore, any other country's registrar could do it as well; at one time, there was a serious proposal to have Moldava sell domains to physicians' practices and which ever country is.me to sell domains to individuals who wanted their own domain, again to help fund development of those countries.
> Without their work, my knowledge of Tolkien would probably be limited to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Without Christopher, as a child, correcting his father when he told some story differently than the first time, JRRT wouldn't have written anything down, and only the family and some friends would have any knowledge of Middle Earth, and unless you were heavily into Saxon Literature you would never have heard of him except as a friend of C. S. Lewis and member of his writing circle.
> Tolkien clearly, obviously, lifted a lot of his LOTR trilogy from Wagner's opera Ring of the Nibelungs.
No, he stole from the same sources that Wagner's sources used to compose the Nibelungenlied and the Volsung Sagas, even going back to old Finnish epics.
Admittedly, LoTR could have been made using animation much earlier, as it WAS (look the two movies up on IMDB). The animated versions don't come close to the film adaptation, though.
> Lastly, was anyone ever wondering why there was no Lord of the Rings movies officially for so long?
Because Ralph Bakshi didn't finish his animated version from the 1970s, which only covered the first two books.
Eventually, the state of the (CGI) art became good enough that someone could dream of re-doing LoTR with actors supplying images as well as just voices.
> What happens to countries which depend on oil for revenue?
Really smart ones invest in it. Merely smart ones are and have invested outside the Middle East, so that when their oil runs out their revenue doesn't. Dumb ones return to where ever they were, economically, in the early 19th century.
> But human greed says some kind of war will happen if space solar energy becomes reality.
Oil exporting countries without other revenue streams have not demonstrated a lot of geosynchronous launch capability.
Java - when properly written - has been proven to be as fast in file operations, memory access and sequential processing as true "compiled" applications.
Will the conversion program "properly write" its Java code, though? Care to lay odds? Especially considering that most COBOL code still in use is the code that uses COBOL's documented features (what were bugs in IBM 360, until they were written down, used, and so had to be replicated in any "real" COBOL implementation) to... an unfortunate extent?
The place that I worked at had a project to convert its legacy COBOL to C/C++, and it got to 90% easily, but the last 10% required manual conversion and/or rewriting the converter to handle the "missing" elements. I doubt that conversion to Java will be any more successful, at least on live, rather than sample, code.
Slashdot Mirror
> Love is just a chemical reaction in your brain, anyway. It's not magical, or sacred, or even very special.
The same can be said about the process of thinking. It is "just" neurotransmitters being emitted and absorbed. Nothing special, there.
Sufficient reductionism can make anything seem "meaningless" since, after all, on the scale of the entire Universe viewed over tens of billions of years, nothing looks important. Therefore, from my level, your reductionism is a waste of noise.
Your explanation also ignores the purely visual components; I rather doubt that viewing "high quality" porn leaves the average viewer any smarter, either. For that matter, do Romance novels make the readers any smarter? Where is the histocompatibility complex of Lord Fabio-On-The-Cover (or whoever the latest hot cover model is) detected?
> - oracle: all knowledge, all questions, answered all the time (that might change the way we think of our education system!)
This has been true for years, now. Back in 2002, one of the big cheeses at AT&T (pre SBC takeover) said that he could look up anything with just Google Search and five search terms. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.
Of course, it was true long before that if you had an Encyclopedia Britannica at home or in the local library (to some limited version of "all"); if you don't believe that, just ask one of the salesmen that they had, then :-)
> The most succesful the would probably be bubonic plague
> Anthrax deserves a mention as one that many militaries vaccinate against,
> In the nonhuman realm, myxamitosis is probably the best known animal killer deliberately deployed by humans,
As another reply to the post that I replied to pointed out, the above are all bacteria, whereas the article concerned viruses. Also, "successful" was originally defined in the virus's terms (lots of descendants and a population not resistant or immune due to the first exposure). Killing humans is only good if that helps spread the germs (like Ebola victims bleeding out does).
BTW, the blankets that Lord Amherst proposed (and only proposed) giving to the Indians to wipe them out were contaminated with smallpox, not bubonic plague.
The cuckoo clock was invented in Germany (before the Thirty Years Wars, alas for Harry's point), not Switzerland.
> what would stop another country or business from "stealing" the energy from the satellite
The satellite would beam over a limited angle, rather than over the whole Earth. Also, anything not in the rectenna area would be wasted by the receiver, anyways, and so they would have no more complaints than someone whose trash is stolen before the garbage truck arrives.
There are some implants like this, but they have VERY few pixels (64x64 IIRC).
Also, the "existing data stream" for a human is fairly complex (lots of processing done in the retina) and quite idiosyncratic (each neural net had its own training set, after all); dealing with the blind is far easier, since they will just learn the new data streams from scratch.
> The second-most successful virus was the one that struck the
> Roman Empire circa 600 A.D. because if that virus had not struck,
> the Eastern Roman Emperor's army would have succeeded in his
> mission to reclaim Italy, Rome, and possibly France/Gaul too.
Was this after Narses the court eunuch and general conquered Italy, then let the Lombards attack the North to show the Emperor that he was needed (and committed suicide in shame when they succeeded)?
> he most-successful virus struck Europe in the mid-1200s,
> Thus the middle class was born.
The middle class existed for long before that. It merely improved the lot of peasants for about 60 years (until population levels came back) and created the "Rotten Boroughs" in England (abandoned towns that didn't lose their representation in Commons until the early 19th Century).
Anyway, the common cold beats them in almost any two year period. Further, people continue to catch colds all through their lives.
Now, if the goal of the virus were to wipe out humanity or at least change history, then your viruses would have won. Prove that either was deliberately weaponized, or introduced by aliens making a multi-sense recording for "viewers" in the Galactic Community (to make a season-ending cliffhanger, or else because a new bunch of writers wanted to "reboot" the franchise), and I will accept your definition of successful.
Both Marvel and DC just publish comic books to maintain their trademarks, while their real business is as a store of intellectual property (stories, characters, etc.). Thus, whether their new stories (let alone new characters) are good or bad are fairly unimportant; only the old ones have enough fans to attract initial audiences. Once a movie hits with audiences, the original becomes irrelevant (who cared about the Disneyland/DisneyWorld Pirates Of The Caribbean ride, after the first film came out?).
So much for Projects Mercury and Apollo, and the Saturn and Atlas boosters, I guess. Failed due to hubris, no doubt.
> 'Good enough' is what funds 'advancement.' See Bugatti Veyron for reference.
I think that you will have to elaborate on this step. What does Bugatti have to do with cheap, but good enough, cars?
Umm, fuel efficiency is usually not important in fighters, fighting capability is. There is no prize for second best in a dogfight.
OTOH, transport planes (and bombers) DO benefit from fuel efficiency. And reduced upkeep for fighters, since they tend to be more useful if they don't spend all their time being reconditioned from the last mission.
Going back to computers, "Good Enough" beating "The Right Thing" is old news; that is why everybody uses a variant of Unix or Windows, rather than ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System of the 60's and 70's era MIT AI Lab), which handled errors "correctly" at great difficulty, whereas Unix just gave an error return value and depended on the programmer fixing the problem or halting the program. As a result of depending on the programmer, rather than the OS, to handle errors, Unix could be easily ported, while ITS was seldom if ever ported to other machines. Since Unix could be everywhere (relatively cheaply), it gradually was everywhere.
> So instead of just snow, you'll be driving on a layer of slush/ice on top of a little water.
You forgot that everything is on top of the super-tough (snicker) glass layer, just to make it more fun. I don't know how thick the snow in Minnesota gets, but I remember hearing of 6 ft of snow in Upstate New York (at RPI, specifically, when visiting colleges before applying). I think that melting the snow will be less than effective.
As in the earlier term "bootlegger".
Thank you, Larry Niven.
Bull. Menelaus needed to go after his "kidnapped" wife because he had the same claim to Sparta as Phillip II of Spain had to being King of England, that he had married the Queen Regnant and was supposed to shut up and get her pregnant; if she wasn't kidnapped, Paris of Troy gets to be King Matrimonial, and Menelaus is once again Agamemnon's little brother with few prospects. Agamemnon supports his brother's Quest because it is a Casus Belli to justify pillaging Troy. If it had been ended by the duel between Menelaus and Paris, the whole war would have been a failure, from the Argive perspective.
Women were no more simple commodities when they were major heiresses than was Eleanor Of The Aquitaine a simple commodity in the Middle Ages.
I always assumed that R2-D2 couldn't (or at least, didn't) "talk human" because all the humans were also fluent in Droid. Do you ever hear a Star Wars Universe ask what the droid is talking about? No, because the understand him reasonably well, anyway. C3-PO only "translates" when R2-D2 seems to be talking nonsense, like belonging to some old General Obiwan Ken-obi guy that no one had heard about.
Really, did you think that the Star Wars Universe was filled with monolingual Americans? :-)
(Writing as one
> In his time, there would have at least three - likely four - levels of professional play.
>
> You could be a consistent, entertaining, player and never make it into major league ball.
This still holds true, today. There are many levels of the minor leagues, as well as semi-pro and outright amateur leagues. Most players never make it anywhere near "The Show" (the Major League teams, for those who never saw Bull Durham).
OTOH, even Major League players usually had off-season jobs in the pre-free agency period. Now, maintaining oneself in playing condition is the off-season job, usually.
> even though we do get bottom-barrel pricing through them here at SAIC (via secretive back-room dealings).
You at SAIC once owned part of Networks Solutions (you may still, for all that I know); I expect this is why, and I expect that the dealings were not very secretive, either. I know as SAIC also once owned part of the company that I worked for, as well, back in the late 1990s.
> The biggest mistake was a naive belief that TLDs would be respected, with their silly .com, .org, etc.
No, the biggest mistake was opening the domain registration process so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry thought that they should have their own. Things were much better controlled when the domain fees were too high to make fake domains worth it except for those with a real interest and those with an obsession.
> Now companies have to buy up .com, .org, .net, etc to protect their
> domain name, otherwise someone will use other TLDs to sucker in
> unsuspecting victims into scams.
Tough luck for them. This problem would exist for any method, including eliminating getipaddrbyname().
> how many .tv domains do you think are legitimately Tuvalu domains?
Tuvalu domains are sold to non-residents on a regular basis, with the excess fees going towards projects to help Tuvaluan local residents. This is a long-standing practice, and reasonably well publicized. Unless you are a citizen of that country, you have no standing for complaining about it. Furthermore, any other country's registrar could do it as well; at one time, there was a serious proposal to have Moldava sell domains to physicians' practices and which ever country is .me to sell domains to individuals who wanted their own domain, again to help fund development of those countries.
> Without their work, my knowledge of Tolkien would probably be limited to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Without Christopher, as a child, correcting his father when he told some story differently than the first time, JRRT wouldn't have written anything down, and only the family and some friends would have any knowledge of Middle Earth, and unless you were heavily into Saxon Literature you would never have heard of him except as a friend of C. S. Lewis and member of his writing circle.
> Tolkien clearly, obviously, lifted a lot of his LOTR trilogy from Wagner's opera Ring of the Nibelungs.
No, he stole from the same sources that Wagner's sources used to compose the Nibelungenlied and the Volsung Sagas, even going back to old Finnish epics.
Admittedly, LoTR could have been made using animation much earlier, as it WAS (look the two movies up on IMDB). The animated versions don't come close to the film adaptation, though.
> Lastly, was anyone ever wondering why there was no Lord of the Rings movies officially for so long?
Because Ralph Bakshi didn't finish his animated version from the 1970s, which only covered the first two books.
Eventually, the state of the (CGI) art became good enough that someone could dream of re-doing LoTR with actors supplying images as well as just voices.
> I've noticed over my life, that incredible claims of new ways to deal with energy issues are '7 years out'.
What a lie! Fusion has always been just *50* years out, for the past 50 years.
Really smart ones invest in it. Merely smart ones are and have invested outside the Middle East, so that when their oil runs out their revenue doesn't. Dumb ones return to where ever they were, economically, in the early 19th century.
> But human greed says some kind of war will happen if space solar energy becomes reality.
Oil exporting countries without other revenue streams have not demonstrated a lot of geosynchronous launch capability.
Russia already took it over, after WWII. OTOH, that is territory that Imperial Russia lost in the Russo-Japanese War, so it ends up a wash.
Will the conversion program "properly write" its Java code, though? Care to lay odds? Especially considering that most COBOL code still in use is the code that uses COBOL's documented features (what were bugs in IBM 360, until they were written down, used, and so had to be replicated in any "real" COBOL implementation) to ... an unfortunate extent?
The place that I worked at had a project to convert its legacy COBOL to C/C++, and it got to 90% easily, but the last 10% required manual conversion and/or rewriting the converter to handle the "missing" elements. I doubt that conversion to Java will be any more successful, at least on live, rather than sample, code.