More importantly, it doesn't in any way assist with efficiently creating ASCII phalli of various lengths. After all, some cases only require 8===D whereas other scenarios may necessitate 8==============D.
Where is your peak oil now, bitches?! This is why I'm essentially a cornucopian. Never, ever underestimate the capacity of billions of minds to find some way of doing the previously impossible.
I cut my teeth in professional IT support at Seattle University's Law School almost a decade ago, and they had exactly this environment. They had one policy for student computers: you have to have a computer. Everything else was up for grabs. We had every OS imaginable walk through the doors of the Dept. of IT and Media Services, running on every brand you've ever heard of, and it was our job to support them all to the best of our ability. We had people come in with thousands of viruses, mangled peripherals, failing components, corrupted installations, illicit materials, and just plain old user stupidity all day every day.
And you know what, it was the most fun I ever had in IT support. Every day brought new and different problems, which, if you actually enjoy troubleshooting, is a lot better than the same damn thing breaking in the same damn way over and over and over, which is pretty much the sum of the rest of my support career. I'm pretty sick of the monotony of it and I'm going to shift to education in a few years.
Aw man, why do you have to go disabusing people of their misguided self-righteous indignation? Don't you know everything is ok so long as it's done to people who are unpopular?
Why should I be proud of being German? If there's a reason for me for being proud of *that*, somebody from the US or from Turkey could as well be proud of being German. And I could as well be proud of being Chinese or whatever.
Pride as a concept is too often denigrated, and that is done as a means of disempowerment and control instigated by religious and secular power structures to rob the populace of initiative, will, and self-actualization.
Rather than being a sin or a weakness of character, pride should be the emotional reward for real accomplishment. Religious doctrine and secular political correctness dictate that people should 'humbly' diminish their own accomplishments, which acts actually as a psychological deterrent to accomplishment itself. It creates an invisible barrier to achievement, as why should a person work to do something difficult if immediately thereafter they are socially expected to spit on themselves.
National pride should be nothing more than personal pride writ large. If a nation is doing valuable things and avoiding demonstrably damaging acts, its people should be proud of their collective efforts. At the same time, if a nation is not doing valuable things and is doing damaging acts, collectively its people should be ashamed and should be working to change their government. National pride should not be reflexive or automatic, as practiced by 'my nation right or wrong' ideologues, but earned by each generation through honest valuation of real actions.
But it is totally strange for us *how* US Americans talk about independence, freedom, and the several amendments. It is not weird *that* these things get discussed, e. g., on/., but the way people get agitated has a weird twist for us.
I think Europeans get nervous about passionate 'freedom fighters' because of things like the French Revolution. The American Revolution was uniquely ethical because so many of its leaders were infatuated with the mimicry of a romanticized ideal of the early Roman Republic. It's an important distinction that they were not just interested in the abstraction of a republic, but a romanticized ideal, because when Washington cast himself in the role of Cincinnatus by not only rejecting absolute power, stopping coups d'état, and decisively retiring from command both as general and as President, he was manifesting an ideal without surrendering his realism. When Thomas Jefferson pushed for religious freedom and social pluralism, it was as much for mirroring Roman pluralism as it was for intrinsic value.
The comparison I'm trying to draw here is that where the French Revolution was full of idealists doing stupid, reckless things and would-be tyrants doing selfish, ruthless things, it was all done under the banner of 'liberty'. I'm sure that after watching the entire country bounce between blind idealists and merciless dictators for the better part of a century that Europeans on the whole would be rather apprehensive of anybody bawling for 'liberty'. It's an unfortunate association, and the attitude will lead to a unsustainable political and economic order. The economic debacle in Greece recently should have been a wake up call, that Europe cannot hope to survive on a model that relies on ever expanding national debt so that everybody can pay themselves to work for the government. Without robust private industries producing real things, the idealized model will reach a physical impasse that it will be unable to hand-wave away at the stroke of a pen to create some new virtual economy.
But now this has degenerated into a rambling rant.
I'd really like to travel to Germany at some point... but I'm sure that's about a decade away for me. Travel to Europe is so expensive, especially when you're a pretentious jerk like me who is above hosteling and peasant food. I'd really like to do a river tour of the Rhein through Uniworld or similar.
There's no empty space around Ballard either, and the former town hall of Ballard was destroyed by an earthquake in 1965, but that doesn't stop some people from gathering every year in the place where it used to be to protest 'Seattle hegemony' and such. It's almost entirely a joke these days, and I'm sure it won't go on much longer as I said before so many of the original families have been diluted or moved away.
I suppose it could be a difference between American and European/German cultural norms. Independence is generally considered important and valuable and so even though it's been four generations or so since there was an independent Ballard, the fact that there ever was is enough for some people to wax nostalgic about an abstraction they never even knew or experienced personally. It's harmless anyway.
I don't think Germans have cared all that much about "independence" since the days of the Hansa (which, coincidentally as I'm sure you already know, remains Hamburg's official affiliation). Speaking of the Hansa and Nazis, I just learned in refreshing my knowledge of the Hansa that the city of Lübeck was stripped of its free and Hanseatic status because the Senat of Lübeck had denied Hitler permission to speak in the city during his political campaign.
Hey AC, did you know that the human body is capable of increasing its own blood pressure? Further, that some people have naturally high blood pressure (granted they usually don't get selected to go to space because it would be a preclusive condition)?
Fertilization and early embryonic development takes place in fluid. If anything diminished gravity would help.
But yeah, you're right about development over the long term. If ossification took place wholly or in part in microgravity the kid probably couldn't live anywhere but microgravity, and even then I wouldn't be too optimistic about how long.
While these things are true, it nonetheless remains really, really optional. Those gametes have flagella for a reason. I would bet money that the overwhelming majority of pregnancies in human history have not relied on female orgasms, especially given the patriarchal social models observable throughout most of human history. Hell, concubinage was common practice in most societies for millennia, do you think men cared if their furniture had an orgasm? Do you think from the other perspective that a woman who had been torn from her family and society (either of which could have been destroyed in the process) as a battle prize is going to be all that turned on by being a living sex toy to be cast off at the earliest convenience?
Ballard used to be an independent city before it was annexed by Seattle in 1907, but when talking to locals my parents and grandparents still say they are from Ballard. Just because a place is no longer "legally" independent does not mean that the people there don't maintain a separate identity. Some neighborhood/borough identities are really strong, as strong as any independent city. Sadly I think after a century Ballard's identity is finally fading. The Scandinavians that used to make it distinct are being diluted by an influx of transplant yuppies.
That might change the timescale, but it doesn't change the end result. The differences between a Martian and Terrestrial environment would ultimately drive different selection modes, even if initial "adaptations" are more simply expressions of developmental differences such as lower gravity reducing bone density or whatever that are not the result of any real genetic change.
That the tech is 20 years old is irrelevant when everybody else's is too. Further, there are NO operational interceptor drones, and it will be decades before one is more capable than an F-22. The demands of an interceptor are completely different from the surveillance and light ground attack roles that drones are filling now.
The end result of a cancelled program and a defunded program is the same: no more aircraft will be produced.
You overestimate people. The problem with dismissing the nature of the mob with a hand wave about 'it's just a matter of learning about it' is that people don't learn. Most people, those that comprise the center/down majority of the bell curve, don't of their own initiative seek to learn beyond the requirements of their education, employment, and a hobby or two. Few and far between are the Renaissance men who are living encyclopedias because learning itself is important to them.
You're right that people don't like being told what to do, the binding motivation of human order, religious or political, is not simple authority, but the abdication of responsibility. People are more willing to submit to authority if that means they are no longer responsible for consequences. It makes people feel secure that they can point to a law (once again, religious or political) and say 'look, I did what it said, so I'm right and safe' regardless of whether the law is moral or ethical in itself. The less people think about and criticize their framework, the more secure they feel and the cleaner their conscience.
Pessimists are right much more frequently than optimists, and that's because pessimism is a fundamentally lazy outlook.
Holy logic fail Batman! Did you think about that enthymeme before you wrote it? If people are right because they are lazy, then people should be lazy so they can be right. You're trying so hard to push an irrational criticism that you have transformed a vice into a virtue.
Is it bad because we can't do it or can we not do it because it's bad?
When I started thinking about this I couldn't help but draw connections to the Star Trek episode Return of the Archons where a computerized facsimile of a philosopher (Landru) runs the whole planet, deciding what people should and shouldn't do, making them practically zombies, except for pre-programmed times where the restrictions are lifted (festivals). However, after generations of complete control rigidly enforced at all times by an external agent (as opposed to the more pliant give and take of the individual in society), the people under Landru's control go absolutely batshit nuts during festivals, raping and murdering etc.
I'm forced to wonder if something similar would happen where self-control/discipline is externalized to automation. Doesn't that make the character of those 'users' inherently weaker/less developed? What would happen should the systems be 'down', would the users be able to stop themselves from spending/overeating/whatever after having relied on a machine to be their own conscience for so long (especially having been weak enough in the area to have needed it in the first place)? What prevents scope/mission creep from turning the whole race into behavior-on-rails zombies?
That's actually the one joke in Zhang Yimou's Hero (Ying Xiong)... when Chen Daoming says all the different languages and styles of writing are too difficult to understand so he would mandate one common language after conquering all the kingdoms, he used 'putonghua' for common language, and Jet Li looks at him with this horrified expression, like 'you're going to make everybody speak putonghua? You bastard!' It's just about the only funny part of the movie, but most other Westerners don't get the nuances.
How many generations has your family been in Canada? After two or three the assimilation is usually pretty high. I was really talking about mainlanders. Overseas Chinese really start to get quirky (no offense intended) based on their locality after the second generation. I can spot a Californian 2+ generation a mile away they are so distinct from even those who grow up in Oregon or Washington. Of course this is all just my opinion.
There is a difference between racist and offensive. For instance "pot calling the kettle black" is as racist a metaphor as exists, and yet it is still in common usage and is not generally considered offensive. Language has only the power given to it by its listeners. "Sensitive" people surrender to the power of the language of others and allow it to manipulate them. I pity them really.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, it doesn't in any way assist with efficiently creating ASCII phalli of various lengths. After all, some cases only require 8===D whereas other scenarios may necessitate 8==============D.
Dude, seriously, ^THIS^
Where is your peak oil now, bitches?! This is why I'm essentially a cornucopian. Never, ever underestimate the capacity of billions of minds to find some way of doing the previously impossible.
It is for n00bz like you, I'm running 9.0.597.47 beta.
Another victim of 'I disagree!' moderation... there's nothing flamebait about this. Alas I have no mod points to undo this injustice.
I cut my teeth in professional IT support at Seattle University's Law School almost a decade ago, and they had exactly this environment. They had one policy for student computers: you have to have a computer. Everything else was up for grabs. We had every OS imaginable walk through the doors of the Dept. of IT and Media Services, running on every brand you've ever heard of, and it was our job to support them all to the best of our ability. We had people come in with thousands of viruses, mangled peripherals, failing components, corrupted installations, illicit materials, and just plain old user stupidity all day every day.
And you know what, it was the most fun I ever had in IT support. Every day brought new and different problems, which, if you actually enjoy troubleshooting, is a lot better than the same damn thing breaking in the same damn way over and over and over, which is pretty much the sum of the rest of my support career. I'm pretty sick of the monotony of it and I'm going to shift to education in a few years.
Aw man, why do you have to go disabusing people of their misguided self-righteous indignation? Don't you know everything is ok so long as it's done to people who are unpopular?
Why should I be proud of being German? If there's a reason for me for being proud of *that*, somebody from the US or from Turkey could as well be proud of being German. And I could as well be proud of being Chinese or whatever.
Pride as a concept is too often denigrated, and that is done as a means of disempowerment and control instigated by religious and secular power structures to rob the populace of initiative, will, and self-actualization.
Rather than being a sin or a weakness of character, pride should be the emotional reward for real accomplishment. Religious doctrine and secular political correctness dictate that people should 'humbly' diminish their own accomplishments, which acts actually as a psychological deterrent to accomplishment itself. It creates an invisible barrier to achievement, as why should a person work to do something difficult if immediately thereafter they are socially expected to spit on themselves.
National pride should be nothing more than personal pride writ large. If a nation is doing valuable things and avoiding demonstrably damaging acts, its people should be proud of their collective efforts. At the same time, if a nation is not doing valuable things and is doing damaging acts, collectively its people should be ashamed and should be working to change their government. National pride should not be reflexive or automatic, as practiced by 'my nation right or wrong' ideologues, but earned by each generation through honest valuation of real actions.
But it is totally strange for us *how* US Americans talk about independence, freedom, and the several amendments. It is not weird *that* these things get discussed, e. g., on /., but the way people get agitated has a weird twist for us.
I think Europeans get nervous about passionate 'freedom fighters' because of things like the French Revolution. The American Revolution was uniquely ethical because so many of its leaders were infatuated with the mimicry of a romanticized ideal of the early Roman Republic. It's an important distinction that they were not just interested in the abstraction of a republic, but a romanticized ideal, because when Washington cast himself in the role of Cincinnatus by not only rejecting absolute power, stopping coups d'état, and decisively retiring from command both as general and as President, he was manifesting an ideal without surrendering his realism. When Thomas Jefferson pushed for religious freedom and social pluralism, it was as much for mirroring Roman pluralism as it was for intrinsic value.
The comparison I'm trying to draw here is that where the French Revolution was full of idealists doing stupid, reckless things and would-be tyrants doing selfish, ruthless things, it was all done under the banner of 'liberty'. I'm sure that after watching the entire country bounce between blind idealists and merciless dictators for the better part of a century that Europeans on the whole would be rather apprehensive of anybody bawling for 'liberty'. It's an unfortunate association, and the attitude will lead to a unsustainable political and economic order. The economic debacle in Greece recently should have been a wake up call, that Europe cannot hope to survive on a model that relies on ever expanding national debt so that everybody can pay themselves to work for the government. Without robust private industries producing real things, the idealized model will reach a physical impasse that it will be unable to hand-wave away at the stroke of a pen to create some new virtual economy.
But now this has degenerated into a rambling rant.
I'd really like to travel to Germany at some point... but I'm sure that's about a decade away for me. Travel to Europe is so expensive, especially when you're a pretentious jerk like me who is above hosteling and peasant food. I'd really like to do a river tour of the Rhein through Uniworld or similar.
There's no empty space around Ballard either, and the former town hall of Ballard was destroyed by an earthquake in 1965, but that doesn't stop some people from gathering every year in the place where it used to be to protest 'Seattle hegemony' and such. It's almost entirely a joke these days, and I'm sure it won't go on much longer as I said before so many of the original families have been diluted or moved away.
I suppose it could be a difference between American and European/German cultural norms. Independence is generally considered important and valuable and so even though it's been four generations or so since there was an independent Ballard, the fact that there ever was is enough for some people to wax nostalgic about an abstraction they never even knew or experienced personally. It's harmless anyway.
I don't think Germans have cared all that much about "independence" since the days of the Hansa (which, coincidentally as I'm sure you already know, remains Hamburg's official affiliation). Speaking of the Hansa and Nazis, I just learned in refreshing my knowledge of the Hansa that the city of Lübeck was stripped of its free and Hanseatic status because the Senat of Lübeck had denied Hitler permission to speak in the city during his political campaign.
Hey AC, did you know that the human body is capable of increasing its own blood pressure? Further, that some people have naturally high blood pressure (granted they usually don't get selected to go to space because it would be a preclusive condition)?
Fertilization and early embryonic development takes place in fluid. If anything diminished gravity would help.
But yeah, you're right about development over the long term. If ossification took place wholly or in part in microgravity the kid probably couldn't live anywhere but microgravity, and even then I wouldn't be too optimistic about how long.
I like how you have two '3's. Numbnuts.
While these things are true, it nonetheless remains really, really optional. Those gametes have flagella for a reason. I would bet money that the overwhelming majority of pregnancies in human history have not relied on female orgasms, especially given the patriarchal social models observable throughout most of human history. Hell, concubinage was common practice in most societies for millennia, do you think men cared if their furniture had an orgasm? Do you think from the other perspective that a woman who had been torn from her family and society (either of which could have been destroyed in the process) as a battle prize is going to be all that turned on by being a living sex toy to be cast off at the earliest convenience?
Ballard used to be an independent city before it was annexed by Seattle in 1907, but when talking to locals my parents and grandparents still say they are from Ballard. Just because a place is no longer "legally" independent does not mean that the people there don't maintain a separate identity. Some neighborhood/borough identities are really strong, as strong as any independent city. Sadly I think after a century Ballard's identity is finally fading. The Scandinavians that used to make it distinct are being diluted by an influx of transplant yuppies.
That might change the timescale, but it doesn't change the end result. The differences between a Martian and Terrestrial environment would ultimately drive different selection modes, even if initial "adaptations" are more simply expressions of developmental differences such as lower gravity reducing bone density or whatever that are not the result of any real genetic change.
Just because US Navy SEALs can do it doesn't mean it's easy. Those are some of the toughest, most skilled motherfuckers on the planet.
That is one of my favorite sketches... I don't know why it isn't more widely appreciated.
A lot of life is mostly water, including you.
That the tech is 20 years old is irrelevant when everybody else's is too. Further, there are NO operational interceptor drones, and it will be decades before one is more capable than an F-22. The demands of an interceptor are completely different from the surveillance and light ground attack roles that drones are filling now.
The end result of a cancelled program and a defunded program is the same: no more aircraft will be produced.
You're right that people don't like being told what to do, the binding motivation of human order, religious or political, is not simple authority, but the abdication of responsibility. People are more willing to submit to authority if that means they are no longer responsible for consequences. It makes people feel secure that they can point to a law (once again, religious or political) and say 'look, I did what it said, so I'm right and safe' regardless of whether the law is moral or ethical in itself. The less people think about and criticize their framework, the more secure they feel and the cleaner their conscience.
Pessimists are right much more frequently than optimists, and that's because pessimism is a fundamentally lazy outlook.
Holy logic fail Batman! Did you think about that enthymeme before you wrote it? If people are right because they are lazy, then people should be lazy so they can be right. You're trying so hard to push an irrational criticism that you have transformed a vice into a virtue.
Star Trek predicted that decades earlier with the future history of the Eugenics Wars.
Is it bad because we can't do it or can we not do it because it's bad?
When I started thinking about this I couldn't help but draw connections to the Star Trek episode Return of the Archons where a computerized facsimile of a philosopher (Landru) runs the whole planet, deciding what people should and shouldn't do, making them practically zombies, except for pre-programmed times where the restrictions are lifted (festivals). However, after generations of complete control rigidly enforced at all times by an external agent (as opposed to the more pliant give and take of the individual in society), the people under Landru's control go absolutely batshit nuts during festivals, raping and murdering etc.
I'm forced to wonder if something similar would happen where self-control/discipline is externalized to automation. Doesn't that make the character of those 'users' inherently weaker/less developed? What would happen should the systems be 'down', would the users be able to stop themselves from spending/overeating/whatever after having relied on a machine to be their own conscience for so long (especially having been weak enough in the area to have needed it in the first place)? What prevents scope/mission creep from turning the whole race into behavior-on-rails zombies?
That's actually the one joke in Zhang Yimou's Hero (Ying Xiong)... when Chen Daoming says all the different languages and styles of writing are too difficult to understand so he would mandate one common language after conquering all the kingdoms, he used 'putonghua' for common language, and Jet Li looks at him with this horrified expression, like 'you're going to make everybody speak putonghua? You bastard!' It's just about the only funny part of the movie, but most other Westerners don't get the nuances.
How many generations has your family been in Canada? After two or three the assimilation is usually pretty high. I was really talking about mainlanders. Overseas Chinese really start to get quirky (no offense intended) based on their locality after the second generation. I can spot a Californian 2+ generation a mile away they are so distinct from even those who grow up in Oregon or Washington. Of course this is all just my opinion.
It is the will of Landru...
You are not of the body!
There is a difference between racist and offensive. For instance "pot calling the kettle black" is as racist a metaphor as exists, and yet it is still in common usage and is not generally considered offensive. Language has only the power given to it by its listeners. "Sensitive" people surrender to the power of the language of others and allow it to manipulate them. I pity them really.
Goddamn checked AC box by mistake... above was me.