How the hell is it NOT a meme ? Meme is defined as an idea that spreads between people.
The hitler videos as various satires and parodies are an idea, that idea has spread widely, gotten wide recognition and been repeatedly reused in new ways - this is not only a perfect example of what a meme IS, it's a perfect example of a highly SUCCESSFUL meme at that. Remember that memetics deliberately sounds like genetics, and the metaphor in the theory is to think of meme's as a parasitic lifeform. A meme that's highly adaptable and flexible as well as contagious is the most successful (just like a highly mutable virus is the most successful - we still can't cure the common cold because it's never the same two years in a row).
Don't try to sell me:D I despise apple - so whatever they do doesn't much affect me. I pretty much think of Apple's products as an etch-a-sketch with a filter so you can't draw naughty pictures. I was just wondering if your sig may be out of date. I think it's clear that the product you dream of there is not the one they are marketing so hard.
The standard legal assumption is the same as when a child buys a candy bar at the corner store (yes that is also a legal contract - albeit a purely verbal one): that the child has the permission of his/her legal guardian and said legal guardian would cosign any physical contract.
This provides however a powerful challenge to unfair contracts/dealings/rip-offs practiced on kids as any parent who challenges by merely so doing automatically voids the contract (clearly the permission wasn't there). This would normally only apply to such verbal contracts as a physical one would contain both signatures.
Generally if a parent comes and complains the store will immediately just accede the matter as they know full well they WILL lose in court (usually small-claims) and be ordered to pay costs.
I daresay it makes video game EULA's agreed to by minors utterly unenforceable however, when there isn't even ONE signature there certainly isn't two. When most ADULTS can read it, there is no way a child could have [including any instruction that his/her parents should read it as well]. It's standard practise for example with phone-in children's shows to state clearly that children should ask permission before calling - because failing to do so could make the show liable to significant criminal and civil penalties (at the very least - paying the phonebill).
EULA's are on shaky legal ground as it is and court cases have repeatedly found them invalid (and yes UK courts ARE allowed to use US court decisions as precedent unless a clear distinction in the written law exists - for contract law, it really doesn't) - where signed by minors they have about the same legal enforceability as the Godfather's offer-he-couldn't-refuse (and slightly less moral enforceability).
All that said: IANAL - but I do come from a family of lawyers - this sort of thing was dinner-table conversation my whole life.
That's odd, I seem to remember the copyright debate starting with visionaries like Frank Zappa in the 70's, and the systems we now support being initially defined by people like RMS in the early 80's. It's major current proponents are people like Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig... I am not exactly seeing a lot of "naive children" on the list there...
I'm sorry - no, this behavior is unacceptable no matter WHERE you are. It may be easier to get AWAY with elsewhere, that doesn't make it OKAY there, or anywhere.
I think the Tetris company is full of shit then, there's plenty of case-law that says cloning is legal.
That said - I was making a joke. GP spoke of regretting cracks he had done in the past, and I demand a link to download the cracks he regrets... you see the humorous intent ?
No it doesn't and there absolutely isn't a masked man standing behind me with a very big scary looking M16 submachine gun to my temple making sure I never again post anything bad about apple. Steve Jobs is a sexy human gawd and I want to have a daughter so she can have his babies.
>>[...] and I said that having a large family when you lack a very large income means the PARENTS are stupid.
>Maybe they're unable to control their urges, maybe their religion prohibits birth control. This is a layer (for lack of a better word) of human behavior that's not related to cognitive ability.
I disagree. Acting against your own best interests is stupid. Directly related to cognitive ability. Intelligent religious people tend to disagree with those tenets of their religion that are in their own disinterest and subscribe to sects of their religion that allow more leeway. Complete unquestioning obeysance of religion has a distinct correlation with low education levels and, I believe, with low intelligence levels.
>There are some cases where people solved problems outside their field partly because they weren't trained in that field. Enabled >them to go about things differently. >I'm not even so sure Einstein would have come up with relativity if he were a trained physicist. >Many musicians I know play the way they do partly because they aren't trained. Were they educated musicians, their music would >most likely not exist. Sure, it's not very likely they'll have a direct influence on human culture, but I for one wouldn't want to >miss their way of making music.
All of these are edge-cases, improving general availability of education won't remove them - and without any exception if you truly look you will find that these individuals ARE trained in the fields in question - the only difference is that they found their training through nontraditional means. Einstein studied physics on his own, without existing tutelage, but he didn't just wake up with relativity out of thin-air, he knew the prevailing theories BEFORE he improved them. Nothing happens in a vaccuum. Even with that despite, society should honor and enable the rare few people who make radical improvements, but it cannot be structured around them because they *are* rare and few. Society has to be structured so as to maximize the potential of everybody else. It should provide structures for the geniuses to develop within, but first and foremost should ensure basic traditional education is available to as many people as possible. Sure we make our greatest progress when people think out of the box - but the fact is, out of the box is for SMART people, VERY smart people. Everybody else STAY IN THE BOX. When people who are not smart try to think out of the box... we get our biggest fuckups.
>There just isn't a way to quantify how much good a person does to society. I've seen very highly educated people do as many stupid things as I've seen otherwise ignorant people do what turned out to be the right thing[tm] intuitively.
Your point ? We don't need to quantify to study history and show that societies with high levels of education have INVARIABLY been wealthier, healthier, more peaceful and more stable than societies without, and that the correlation is not only exact but causal.
Within a society full of educated people even though they will do stupid things at times, generally your social constructs function much better, this also means that the genius thinking outside the box whether educated in the particular field or not, will be doing so within a support structure that actually makes it possible to develop his ideas. When you have a rare genius in a world of uneducated people -you get Da Vinci syndrome, thousands of great ideas, ground breaking medical research that could have advanced heart-disease treatments by 200 years - all of it, lost and wasted. His invention wasted on a world without the practical means of production to develop them, his research locked away by religious censorship (something that is generally eradicated in educated societies) until nearly a hundred years after it was independently rediscovered by other researchers - more than 200 years later. Education don't make Da Vinci's but it does make a good citizenry, and more importantly - it makes th
And you can die from too much exposure to the sun right now. It causes melanoma's, too little, and you die from a vitamin-D deficiency.
I'm quite sure we can't build any technology that could actually beam more known harmful radioactive energy at us than the sun already does, what the technology does propose to do is to send it to a targeted location even when that location is currently pointed away from the sun (e.g. nighttime). It's not the amount it increases, but the availability. Trust me, no reasonable current human technology can outproduce the energy of a giant multi-billion year fusion reactor.
>which has very little to do with intelligence. You do realize you are saying the large family means all the children will be stupid? Nope, I'm saying however that it's ipso facto stupid behavior to have more children than you could provide the best possible opportunities for. This actually means that the wealthiest members of society are the only ones who can have large families and claim to be acting intelligently - and we find the inverse. The people least capable of SUPPORTING large families are the most likely to have them. Education has little to do with theoretical intelligence (perhaps potential intelligence) but basically it has everything to do with practical intelligence because lack of education with very few exceptions equates to ignorance, which in turn implies the inability to act in the best interest of yourself, your community and your species (because you simply lack the understanding and information to make the best choices). Examples of such bad choices from being uninformed would BE having a very large family when you earn the equivalent of 3USD per month. 50 years ago, what I said wasn't true in even my own society, today it definitely is. But I didn't say a large family means all the children will be stupid (though the likelihood is high), I said the children will likely not be educated to their full potential, and I said that having a large family when you lack a very large income means the PARENTS are stupid.
>Logical fallacy. Your whole premise is based on something provably not true. >People who don't go to school can be smart, people that go to school can by less smart. Who the hell cares how smart somebody is if they lack the potential and opportunity to do anything USEFUL with it ? A high IQ combined with ignorance is STILL stupid. Some people achieve the exceptional DESPITE lack of education but they are so extremely rare as to represent a statistical anomaly that can be safely ignored without fear of skewing the prediction in any meaningful way. By far the people most likely to make the best contributions to society today will HAVE to be highly educated. Sorry, but the cure for aids is NOT going to be discovered by a gardener, a medical researcher may have a chance. Same goes even for other fields. The singer whose song can change the world will almost certainly never do so unless somebody TEACHES him music. Ignorant intelligence and Ignorant stupidity are effectively identical in their results. Furthermore, there is only one thing more dangerous and actively HARMFUL to society than ignorance and that is DELIBERATE ignorance, choosing to ignore facts that don't fit your worldview rather than adjusting it. Intriguingly willful and deliberate ignorance (like religion with which it is closely associated) is primarily an activity of people with little or no education.
>You are assuming your life is the smartest and best way to sue it. Well forget what I assume, I know that having gone to school past third grade means I know the difference between "to sue" and "to use". I even fully acknowledge the existence of the exceptions to what I point out. You are relying on those one in a million people to find an excuse not to care about the fact that education levels around the world are dismally low and this can ONLY lead to disaster for ALL the people on the planet. But I guess you're one of those people who thinks a PHD that's actually proud of his title "elitist" right ?
Sorry, equality is a principle of how the government and law should treat our rights, not a fact of life. Equality means that stupid people have just as much free speech as smart people, it doesn't mean they will use it with the same benefit to society. Some people ARE better than others, mostly because they worked harder to GET better. That's the entire point of meritocratic thinking.
For the record, I'm not even describing MY life. I never finished my degree, I did two seperate once and both times I didn't do the finals. I never cared about the papers. I went to univers
>WOW, you could not possible be more myopic. My eyes are perfectly fine. I got the good fortune of being one of the few geeks who don't need glasses. Sorry, myopic is a medical term - not a synonymn for "shortsighted" in the context you tried to use it. That said - how is extrapolating possible consequences of trends a shortsighted activity ? Quite the contrary, it's a visionary activity. Ignoring the potential consequences of societal trends and simply focusing on participating IN them without regard for that... now THAT is shortsighted. >PLease tell me which of the things you list have no drive towards some goal? Please tell me where I denied that they do ? My point was that the goals they pursue run contrary to intelligent and the growth of an intelectual, free-thinking and critical society. The fact that the people involved tend to have more children than people involved were more noble pursuits is indeed frightening.
>"American Idol" - a drive to become successful in ones art. The only "art" in the entire history of A.I. was Jack Black's rendition of "Kissed by a Rose" and even THAT was a parody.
>For someone reason you confuse ideology with intelligence. A common mistake of ignorant or stupid people. I did not confuse ideology with intelligence in any way. I equated lack of ideology (more specifically lack of concern and understanding for the greater issues in our world) and deliberate, self-imposed ignorance with stupidity.
>" Soap Operas" - yes, morality stories are just horrid and accomplish nothing~ Soap Operas are morality stories now? I've seen a fair few when I couldn't avoid it. Vapid and meaningless stories with terrible acting they are. Morality ? What morality ? They are nothing but rampant escapism - including from morality. One week the leading lady is in the arms of the love her life, the next she's chasing somebody else... yeah real moral. More than half of all soap operas center around families of very wealthy and corrupt businessmen... only in America could that be deemed "morality stories"... shees. You're not even informed about the trends you defend !
What everything I pointed out had in common were these attributes: escapist, vapid, shallow, vain and ignorant. They all deliberately avoid anything of consequence and offer mindless entertainment without meaning or care for the world. I despise America's celebration of mediocrity. Once upon a time your country revered those who pursued science, invention and philosophy. Who offered genuine thought and critical opinions. Once upon a time you celebrated the exceptional. As somebody put it during your election: the last thing you want in a leader is a man of the people. You want a man who UNDERSTAND's the people yes. You want somebody who cares about what Joe the Plumber needs, but the very last thing you need is Joe the Plumber himself.
I prefer to continue to celebrate the exceptional. My heroes are the Da Vincis, the Ciceros, The Einsteins, the Bohrs - people who made genuine contributions to human knowledge and to society. That's intelligence, true intelligence can only even BEGIN when you reject popularity as a measure of success - because popular thought is by definition not CRITICAL thought, and it's pretty much impossible to be informed or intelligent without thinking critically. Nobody will spoonfeed you knowledge you can actually RELY on. To get any kind of truth, you have to question everything you're told. That's never a popular thing... oh and by that criteria, morality stories actually ARE bad for you.
Actually... you forced me to consider the idea seriously: Let's see it's a verifiable fact that there is a clear inverse correlation between level of education and size of families. To put it otherwise, poor and uneducated people have more children than wealthier educated people. In fact exactly the same correlation exists with people who are just stupid - but it's much harder to quantify, so we'll just look at education levels and ignore actual intelligence levels. This makes our results conservative - but of course knowing that figures are conservative strengthens the argument.
This is true on international levels (countries with low levels of education consistently have high rates of population growth and frequently battle with problems related to overpopulation as evidenced in Africa, Asia, South America and other developing regions as well as on regional levels (poorer, ruralized and less educated communities in wealthy countries like the USA consistently tend to larger families than educated urban communities). The trend has been well established since at least the dawn of the industrial revolution (about two centuries) and may well go back much further than that. However, until fairly recently - this would not have had a major impact on evolution. The reason being that the survival rate of children was roughly in line with the same differential. The wealthier families had poorer children but they mostly survived into adulthood. The poorer families had more children but would rarely see more than one or two survive their childhood (this is evidenced by data on child mortality and life-expectancy rates). During the industrial revolution, British census data show that only 10% of children born survived to the age of 10 years old.
The 20th century saw the advent of numerous changes however. Child-labor was banned. Antibiotics were discovered. Nutrition and higiene standards greatly improved. All this combined to reduce the child-mortality rate worldwide by a massive margin. Today such high figures are only associated with countries in dire straights of long-running civil wars, famines etc. (Sudan, Darfur and the like) but even in very poor and low-education countries where basic medical infrastructure is in place there is a population explosion. At the same time population growth in many wealthy countries including South Korea, Denmark and Sweden have over the past 30 years actually become negative if one excludes immigration despite a near-zero child-mortality rate. Basicaly people in countries where the vast majority have both the opportunity and finances for high education are having so few children that the national populations are actively decreasing. At the same time, populations in poor regions and countries are exploding while education levels are dropping - and the more the population grows the bigger the burden of attempted education becomes and the less likely the trend is to be reversed.
So there you go. Using nothing but readily verifiable scientific data - we can show that currently low-education populations around the world are reproducing at a much faster rate than high education populations. The practical effect of that on evolution is no different than if low education had been a major survival enhancing trait, and so talents for education hold no survival benefit and in fact could even be having the same results as a survival detriment (like it or not, among all people outside the high-education, high intelligent grouping the attributes of high-intelligence is seen as UNattractive, and reducing sexual appeal [ on the other hand this is at least somewhat mitigated by the frequent wealth of people with these traits wealth being a very well known aphrodisiac] ). Simple evolutionary principles then say that this will lead to a reduction in the average IQ of the population. As the effect increases over time, the size disparity between the high and low intelligence groups adds yet another issue as it becomes ever harder for highly intelligent people to find anothe
Jerry Springer begs to differ. Also: American Idol, Soap Operas, Beauty Contestants wanting world peace, the ENTIRE fashion industry, Hannah Montana, The Spice Girls, Pro-wrestling fans, Hollywood movie stars (ever heard one of them when talking unscripted ? With a few rare exceptions... they sound like they learned English from a user's manual for a Taiwanese VCR translated from Korean by a Japanese toddler), G.W. Busch, Homophobes, $Religion Fundamentalists, Soldiers, Patriots, Censorship-advocates and people who use the phrase "think of the children", MTV, voters, racists, christian scientists, scientologists... and that's just what I could think of in five minutes.
Basically... the sad reality is that if thinking I'm smarter than those people makes me an elitist, I'd rather be an elitist than an idiot. Unfortunately, the reality is that everyone of those elitists probably will have more children than me- on account of I figured out how to use condoms and even more than most of the rest of slashdot on account of actually having sex sometimes. While the smart people are on slashdot watching porn, we're not exactly the highest reproducing members of the gene-pool anymore...
You must favor the complete privatization of police forces, so the protection of lives and property and the arrests of criminals is bought on an open market and only available to those who can afford to buy it.
See what I did there ? Let's analyse your post:
Fallacy 1: Begs the question Fallacy 2: Does not follow. Fallacy 3: Strawman attack.
Stating that capitalism has no place at the sickbed does not imply or advocate that the correct method of paying doctors and research is governmental. This is the most common alternate system that has been tried (with huge success in general) but it's by no means the only one. There are quite a few completely different setups out there. Even your own country has thousands of free clinics run by charitable donation - e.g. there is no profit motive and it's not paid by government EITHER.
There are at least four other healthcare systems in the world where the cost of healthcare is shared by various entities - so not all paid by government and that's just what's in active use. The amount of possible ways to do it that hasn't been tried and perhaps hasn't even been thought of yet is potentially infinite.
The parent pointed out problems with profit-motive in healthcare. You assumed without any evidence that he must therefore be advocating government paid healthcare. He may or may not advocate this, but the point is - you don't know if that is what he advocates because he did NOT suggest any particular alternate system - he merely said that he is not in favor of capitalist medicine. You then took what you perceive as the worst possible alternative, stated that he *must* be advocating it, and attacked that. Three fallacies in one short sentence- impressive.
Or is it just typical American dualist thinking ? Every issue only has two sides and two possible answers right ? That's why you can have a "democracy" where only two parties have any actual power, it works because your your entire 350 million strong population consists of people who have only one of the same two opinions on everything, and conveniently - your opinion one one issue means you must have the exact same opinion on all other issues as all the other people who share your opinion on this one...
Actually... that sounds rather silly when you think about it... it suggests a culture that has utterly and completely marginalized any individual thinking when all the other parties out there (the greens, the libertarians etc.) even in coalition can't get enough votes for a single seat in government. You've had an independent candidate in every single election for at least a hundred years, but I don't believe you've had an independent candidate *win* the presidential election in your entire history...
Well... the real world is not so simple. Most issues don't have just two extremes as answers, and people who actually think about things can adjust their opinion to the specific issue rather than attempting to fit one ideological extreme to all issues. The best way for society to solve any given problem may be completely different from the best way to solve another. Very few people would think that police protection should cost you money - because when you need it most, is often when you can least afford it (not to mention - a truly private police force would have zero motivation to pursue a murderer unless the family of the victim is wealthy). You happily accept that law enforcement is best done when provided entirely by the government (there is no logical requirement that the people who make the law should enforce it - we do it that way because historically we've learned it works best) but you cannot contemplate that perhaps the same failures of the market may apply to healthcare ? So maybe the government paying for all would, while not perfect, actually be better than a capitalist system ? You didn't actually state your reasons for being against that - you merely declared that you are with no justification - when the arguments in favor of it are quite strong, and cleverly avoided having to even consider that there are a multitude of OTHER ways medicine could be funded which may be better than EITHER capitalism OR government paid.
Well actually the term historically originated in quite a different way to how it's used to do. Authors used the term 'pirate' to describe publishing companies that printed their works and sold it while dodging out of / simply failing to pay / actively refused to pay the royalties due. Or to put it differently, the term pirate was coined by the people who actually create new art to describe the very people (content publishers and distributors) who now use it to describe ordinary people (a group that, until the fairly recent past basically never got affected by copyright law -it was more of an industrial regulation on the publishing industry than it ever was a law that the average book READER had to care about ).
I replied to two different people in one post, I quoted them separately and replied to them separately. My reply to you was short, and explained the context of my "idiot" comment only. I guess my implication (that you seem to be an exception to the rule) was not clear enough. Sorry about that.
>I mean really, what could go wrong when sending massive amounts of energy through the air?
Well looking at an existing experiment doing just that... a random planet can have multiple elements starting to behave in highly abherent ways, self-replicate, become self-aware and call itself "life" ? You do realize that, that is exactly what the sun does every single day right ?
Slashdot Mirror
>but it still bears some stigmata in Xen community.
You mean when Xen community members here "KVM" they hit nails through their wrists ?
How the hell is it NOT a meme ?
Meme is defined as an idea that spreads between people.
The hitler videos as various satires and parodies are an idea, that idea has spread widely, gotten wide recognition and been repeatedly reused in new ways - this is not only a perfect example of what a meme IS, it's a perfect example of a highly SUCCESSFUL meme at that.
Remember that memetics deliberately sounds like genetics, and the metaphor in the theory is to think of meme's as a parasitic lifeform. A meme that's highly adaptable and flexible as well as contagious is the most successful (just like a highly mutable virus is the most successful - we still can't cure the common cold because it's never the same two years in a row).
Now gimme my +5 informative darn you :P
Don't try to sell me :D
I despise apple - so whatever they do doesn't much affect me. I pretty much think of Apple's products as an etch-a-sketch with a filter so you can't draw naughty pictures. I was just wondering if your sig may be out of date. I think it's clear that the product you dream of there is not the one they are marketing so hard.
I feel the need to comment to your sig...
That mac pro mini you mention... wouldn't that be the Ipad ?
If so - 2 down, 2 to go.
The standard legal assumption is the same as when a child buys a candy bar at the corner store (yes that is also a legal contract - albeit a purely verbal one): that the child has the permission of his/her legal guardian and said legal guardian would cosign any physical contract.
This provides however a powerful challenge to unfair contracts/dealings/rip-offs practiced on kids as any parent who challenges by merely so doing automatically voids the contract (clearly the permission wasn't there). This would normally only apply to such verbal contracts as a physical one would contain both signatures.
Generally if a parent comes and complains the store will immediately just accede the matter as they know full well they WILL lose in court (usually small-claims) and be ordered to pay costs.
I daresay it makes video game EULA's agreed to by minors utterly unenforceable however, when there isn't even ONE signature there certainly isn't two. When most ADULTS can read it, there is no way a child could have [including any instruction that his/her parents should read it as well].
It's standard practise for example with phone-in children's shows to state clearly that children should ask permission before calling - because failing to do so could make the show liable to significant criminal and civil penalties (at the very least - paying the phonebill).
EULA's are on shaky legal ground as it is and court cases have repeatedly found them invalid (and yes UK courts ARE allowed to use US court decisions as precedent unless a clear distinction in the written law exists - for contract law, it really doesn't) - where signed by minors they have about the same legal enforceability as the Godfather's offer-he-couldn't-refuse (and slightly less moral enforceability).
All that said: IANAL - but I do come from a family of lawyers - this sort of thing was dinner-table conversation my whole life.
That's odd, I seem to remember the copyright debate starting with visionaries like Frank Zappa in the 70's, and the systems we now support being initially defined by people like RMS in the early 80's. It's major current proponents are people like Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig... I am not exactly seeing a lot of "naive children" on the list there...
I'm sorry - no, this behavior is unacceptable no matter WHERE you are. It may be easier to get AWAY with elsewhere, that doesn't make it OKAY there, or anywhere.
I think the Tetris company is full of shit then, there's plenty of case-law that says cloning is legal.
That said - I was making a joke. GP spoke of regretting cracks he had done in the past, and I demand a link to download the cracks he regrets... you see the humorous intent ?
> If I look back at the game I cracked and released to the scene
Download-link or it didn't happen.
Actually yes it doe...
No it doesn't and there absolutely isn't a masked man standing behind me with a very big scary looking M16 submachine gun to my temple making sure I never again post anything bad about apple. Steve Jobs is a sexy human gawd and I want to have a daughter so she can have his babies.
>>[...] and I said that having a large family when you lack a very large income means the PARENTS are stupid.
>Maybe they're unable to control their urges, maybe their religion prohibits birth control. This is a layer (for lack of a better word) of human behavior that's not related to cognitive ability.
I disagree. Acting against your own best interests is stupid. Directly related to cognitive ability. Intelligent religious people tend to disagree with those tenets of their religion that are in their own disinterest and subscribe to sects of their religion that allow more leeway. Complete unquestioning obeysance of religion has a distinct correlation with low education levels and, I believe, with low intelligence levels.
>There are some cases where people solved problems outside their field partly because they weren't trained in that field. Enabled >them to go about things differently.
>I'm not even so sure Einstein would have come up with relativity if he were a trained physicist.
>Many musicians I know play the way they do partly because they aren't trained. Were they educated musicians, their music would >most likely not exist. Sure, it's not very likely they'll have a direct influence on human culture, but I for one wouldn't want to >miss their way of making music.
All of these are edge-cases, improving general availability of education won't remove them - and without any exception if you truly look you will find that these individuals ARE trained in the fields in question - the only difference is that they found their training through nontraditional means. Einstein studied physics on his own, without existing tutelage, but he didn't just wake up with relativity out of thin-air, he knew the prevailing theories BEFORE he improved them. Nothing happens in a vaccuum. Even with that despite, society should honor and enable the rare few people who make radical improvements, but it cannot be structured around them because they *are* rare and few. Society has to be structured so as to maximize the potential of everybody else. It should provide structures for the geniuses to develop within, but first and foremost should ensure basic traditional education is available to as many people as possible. Sure we make our greatest progress when people think out of the box - but the fact is, out of the box is for SMART people, VERY smart people. Everybody else STAY IN THE BOX.
When people who are not smart try to think out of the box... we get our biggest fuckups.
>There just isn't a way to quantify how much good a person does to society. I've seen very highly educated people do as many stupid things as I've seen otherwise ignorant people do what turned out to be the right thing[tm] intuitively.
Your point ? We don't need to quantify to study history and show that societies with high levels of education have INVARIABLY been wealthier, healthier, more peaceful and more stable than societies without, and that the correlation is not only exact but causal.
Within a society full of educated people even though they will do stupid things at times, generally your social constructs function much better, this also means that the genius thinking outside the box whether educated in the particular field or not, will be doing so within a support structure that actually makes it possible to develop his ideas.
When you have a rare genius in a world of uneducated people -you get Da Vinci syndrome, thousands of great ideas, ground breaking medical research that could have advanced heart-disease treatments by 200 years - all of it, lost and wasted. His invention wasted on a world without the practical means of production to develop them, his research locked away by religious censorship (something that is generally eradicated in educated societies) until nearly a hundred years after it was independently rediscovered by other researchers - more than 200 years later.
Education don't make Da Vinci's but it does make a good citizenry, and more importantly - it makes th
And you can die from too much exposure to the sun right now. It causes melanoma's, too little, and you die from a vitamin-D deficiency.
I'm quite sure we can't build any technology that could actually beam more known harmful radioactive energy at us than the sun already does, what the technology does propose to do is to send it to a targeted location even when that location is currently pointed away from the sun (e.g. nighttime). It's not the amount it increases, but the availability. Trust me, no reasonable current human technology can outproduce the energy of a giant multi-billion year fusion reactor.
>which has very little to do with intelligence. You do realize you are saying the large family means all the children will be stupid?
Nope, I'm saying however that it's ipso facto stupid behavior to have more children than you could provide the best possible opportunities for. This actually means that the wealthiest members of society are the only ones who can have large families and claim to be acting intelligently - and we find the inverse. The people least capable of SUPPORTING large families are the most likely to have them. Education has little to do with theoretical intelligence (perhaps potential intelligence) but basically it has everything to do with practical intelligence because lack of education with very few exceptions equates to ignorance, which in turn implies the inability to act in the best interest of yourself, your community and your species (because you simply lack the understanding and information to make the best choices). Examples of such bad choices from being uninformed would BE having a very large family when you earn the equivalent of 3USD per month.
50 years ago, what I said wasn't true in even my own society, today it definitely is. But I didn't say a large family means all the children will be stupid (though the likelihood is high), I said the children will likely not be educated to their full potential, and I said that having a large family when you lack a very large income means the PARENTS are stupid.
>Logical fallacy. Your whole premise is based on something provably not true.
>People who don't go to school can be smart, people that go to school can by less smart.
Who the hell cares how smart somebody is if they lack the potential and opportunity to do anything USEFUL with it ? A high IQ combined with ignorance is STILL stupid. Some people achieve the exceptional DESPITE lack of education but they are so extremely rare as to represent a statistical anomaly that can be safely ignored without fear of skewing the prediction in any meaningful way. By far the people most likely to make the best contributions to society today will HAVE to be highly educated. Sorry, but the cure for aids is NOT going to be discovered by a gardener, a medical researcher may have a chance. Same goes even for other fields. The singer whose song can change the world will almost certainly never do so unless somebody TEACHES him music. Ignorant intelligence and Ignorant stupidity are effectively identical in their results.
Furthermore, there is only one thing more dangerous and actively HARMFUL to society than ignorance and that is DELIBERATE ignorance, choosing to ignore facts that don't fit your worldview rather than adjusting it. Intriguingly willful and deliberate ignorance (like religion with which it is closely associated) is primarily an activity of people with little or no education.
>You are assuming your life is the smartest and best way to sue it.
Well forget what I assume, I know that having gone to school past third grade means I know the difference between "to sue" and "to use". I even fully acknowledge the existence of the exceptions to what I point out. You are relying on those one in a million people to find an excuse not to care about the fact that education levels around the world are dismally low and this can ONLY lead to disaster for ALL the people on the planet.
But I guess you're one of those people who thinks a PHD that's actually proud of his title "elitist" right ?
Sorry, equality is a principle of how the government and law should treat our rights, not a fact of life. Equality means that stupid people have just as much free speech as smart people, it doesn't mean they will use it with the same benefit to society. Some people ARE better than others, mostly because they worked harder to GET better. That's the entire point of meritocratic thinking.
For the record, I'm not even describing MY life. I never finished my degree, I did two seperate once and both times I didn't do the finals. I never cared about the papers. I went to univers
Lol, well put :D
>WOW, you could not possible be more myopic.
My eyes are perfectly fine. I got the good fortune of being one of the few geeks who don't need glasses. Sorry, myopic is a medical term - not a synonymn for "shortsighted" in the context you tried to use it.
That said - how is extrapolating possible consequences of trends a shortsighted activity ? Quite the contrary, it's a visionary activity. Ignoring the potential consequences of societal trends and simply focusing on participating IN them without regard for that... now THAT is shortsighted.
>PLease tell me which of the things you list have no drive towards some goal?
Please tell me where I denied that they do ? My point was that the goals they pursue run contrary to intelligent and the growth of an intelectual, free-thinking and critical society. The fact that the people involved tend to have more children than people involved were more noble pursuits is indeed frightening.
>"American Idol" - a drive to become successful in ones art.
The only "art" in the entire history of A.I. was Jack Black's rendition of "Kissed by a Rose" and even THAT was a parody.
>For someone reason you confuse ideology with intelligence. A common mistake of ignorant or stupid people.
I did not confuse ideology with intelligence in any way. I equated lack of ideology (more specifically lack of concern and understanding for the greater issues in our world) and deliberate, self-imposed ignorance with stupidity.
>" Soap Operas" - yes, morality stories are just horrid and accomplish nothing~
Soap Operas are morality stories now? I've seen a fair few when I couldn't avoid it. Vapid and meaningless stories with terrible acting they are. Morality ? What morality ? They are nothing but rampant escapism - including from morality. One week the leading lady is in the arms of the love her life, the next she's chasing somebody else... yeah real moral. More than half of all soap operas center around families of very wealthy and corrupt businessmen... only in America could that be deemed "morality stories"... shees. You're not even informed about the trends you defend !
What everything I pointed out had in common were these attributes: escapist, vapid, shallow, vain and ignorant.
They all deliberately avoid anything of consequence and offer mindless entertainment without meaning or care for the world. I despise America's celebration of mediocrity. Once upon a time your country revered those who pursued science, invention and philosophy. Who offered genuine thought and critical opinions. Once upon a time you celebrated the exceptional.
As somebody put it during your election: the last thing you want in a leader is a man of the people. You want a man who UNDERSTAND's the people yes. You want somebody who cares about what Joe the Plumber needs, but the very last thing you need is Joe the Plumber himself.
I prefer to continue to celebrate the exceptional. My heroes are the Da Vincis, the Ciceros, The Einsteins, the Bohrs - people who made genuine contributions to human knowledge and to society. That's intelligence, true intelligence can only even BEGIN when you reject popularity as a measure of success - because popular thought is by definition not CRITICAL thought, and it's pretty much impossible to be informed or intelligent without thinking critically. Nobody will spoonfeed you knowledge you can actually RELY on. To get any kind of truth, you have to question everything you're told. That's never a popular thing... oh and by that criteria, morality stories actually ARE bad for you.
Actually... you forced me to consider the idea seriously:
Let's see it's a verifiable fact that there is a clear inverse correlation between level of education and size of families.
To put it otherwise, poor and uneducated people have more children than wealthier educated people. In fact exactly the same correlation exists with people who are just stupid - but it's much harder to quantify, so we'll just look at education levels and ignore actual intelligence levels. This makes our results conservative - but of course knowing that figures are conservative strengthens the argument.
This is true on international levels (countries with low levels of education consistently have high rates of population growth and frequently battle with problems related to overpopulation as evidenced in Africa, Asia, South America and other developing regions as well as on regional levels (poorer, ruralized and less educated communities in wealthy countries like the USA consistently tend to larger families than educated urban communities).
The trend has been well established since at least the dawn of the industrial revolution (about two centuries) and may well go back much further than that.
However, until fairly recently - this would not have had a major impact on evolution. The reason being that the survival rate of children was roughly in line with the same differential. The wealthier families had poorer children but they mostly survived into adulthood. The poorer families had more children but would rarely see more than one or two survive their childhood (this is evidenced by data on child mortality and life-expectancy rates). During the industrial revolution, British census data show that only 10% of children born survived to the age of 10 years old.
The 20th century saw the advent of numerous changes however. Child-labor was banned. Antibiotics were discovered. Nutrition and higiene standards greatly improved. All this combined to reduce the child-mortality rate worldwide by a massive margin. Today such high figures are only associated with countries in dire straights of long-running civil wars, famines etc. (Sudan, Darfur and the like) but even in very poor and low-education countries where basic medical infrastructure is in place there is a population explosion. At the same time population growth in many wealthy countries including South Korea, Denmark and Sweden have over the past 30 years actually become negative if one excludes immigration despite a near-zero child-mortality rate.
Basicaly people in countries where the vast majority have both the opportunity and finances for high education are having so few children that the national populations are actively decreasing.
At the same time, populations in poor regions and countries are exploding while education levels are dropping - and the more the population grows the bigger the burden of attempted education becomes and the less likely the trend is to be reversed.
So there you go. Using nothing but readily verifiable scientific data - we can show that currently low-education populations around the world are reproducing at a much faster rate than high education populations. The practical effect of that on evolution is no different than if low education had been a major survival enhancing trait, and so talents for education hold no survival benefit and in fact could even be having the same results as a survival detriment (like it or not, among all people outside the high-education, high intelligent grouping the attributes of high-intelligence is seen as UNattractive, and reducing sexual appeal [ on the other hand this is at least somewhat mitigated by the frequent wealth of people with these traits wealth being a very well known aphrodisiac] ).
Simple evolutionary principles then say that this will lead to a reduction in the average IQ of the population. As the effect increases over time, the size disparity between the high and low intelligence groups adds yet another issue as it becomes ever harder for highly intelligent people to find anothe
It (like the movie the post is about) was a Satirical post. Never heard of Satire ? Don't worry, it's new.
WTF have you been smoking ?
Jerry Springer begs to differ. ... and that's just what I could think of in five minutes.
Also: American Idol, Soap Operas, Beauty Contestants wanting world peace, the ENTIRE fashion industry, Hannah Montana, The Spice Girls, Pro-wrestling fans, Hollywood movie stars (ever heard one of them when talking unscripted ? With a few rare exceptions... they sound like they learned English from a user's manual for a Taiwanese VCR translated from Korean by a Japanese toddler), G.W. Busch, Homophobes, $Religion Fundamentalists, Soldiers, Patriots, Censorship-advocates and people who use the phrase "think of the children", MTV, voters, racists, christian scientists, scientologists
Basically... the sad reality is that if thinking I'm smarter than those people makes me an elitist, I'd rather be an elitist than an idiot. Unfortunately, the reality is that everyone of those elitists probably will have more children than me- on account of I figured out how to use condoms and even more than most of the rest of slashdot on account of actually having sex sometimes.
While the smart people are on slashdot watching porn, we're not exactly the highest reproducing members of the gene-pool anymore...
In the "Don't that Robots" propaganda video !
You must favor the complete privatization of police forces, so the protection of lives and property and the arrests of criminals is bought on an open market and only available to those who can afford to buy it.
See what I did there ? Let's analyse your post:
Fallacy 1: Begs the question
Fallacy 2: Does not follow.
Fallacy 3: Strawman attack.
Stating that capitalism has no place at the sickbed does not imply or advocate that the correct method of paying doctors and research is governmental. This is the most common alternate system that has been tried (with huge success in general) but it's by no means the only one. There are quite a few completely different setups out there. Even your own country has thousands of free clinics run by charitable donation - e.g. there is no profit motive and it's not paid by government EITHER.
There are at least four other healthcare systems in the world where the cost of healthcare is shared by various entities - so not all paid by government and that's just what's in active use.
The amount of possible ways to do it that hasn't been tried and perhaps hasn't even been thought of yet is potentially infinite.
The parent pointed out problems with profit-motive in healthcare. You assumed without any evidence that he must therefore be advocating government paid healthcare. He may or may not advocate this, but the point is - you don't know if that is what he advocates because he did NOT suggest any particular alternate system - he merely said that he is not in favor of capitalist medicine. You then took what you perceive as the worst possible alternative, stated that he *must* be advocating it, and attacked that. Three fallacies in one short sentence- impressive.
Or is it just typical American dualist thinking ? Every issue only has two sides and two possible answers right ? That's why you can have a "democracy" where only two parties have any actual power, it works because your your entire 350 million strong population consists of people who have only one of the same two opinions on everything, and conveniently - your opinion one one issue means you must have the exact same opinion on all other issues as all the other people who share your opinion on this one...
Actually... that sounds rather silly when you think about it... it suggests a culture that has utterly and completely marginalized any individual thinking when all the other parties out there (the greens, the libertarians etc.) even in coalition can't get enough votes for a single seat in government. You've had an independent candidate in every single election for at least a hundred years, but I don't believe you've had an independent candidate *win* the presidential election in your entire history...
Well... the real world is not so simple. Most issues don't have just two extremes as answers, and people who actually think about things can adjust their opinion to the specific issue rather than attempting to fit one ideological extreme to all issues.
The best way for society to solve any given problem may be completely different from the best way to solve another.
Very few people would think that police protection should cost you money - because when you need it most, is often when you can least afford it (not to mention - a truly private police force would have zero motivation to pursue a murderer unless the family of the victim is wealthy). You happily accept that law enforcement is best done when provided entirely by the government (there is no logical requirement that the people who make the law should enforce it - we do it that way because historically we've learned it works best) but you cannot contemplate that perhaps the same failures of the market may apply to healthcare ? So maybe the government paying for all would, while not perfect, actually be better than a capitalist system ?
You didn't actually state your reasons for being against that - you merely declared that you are with no justification - when the arguments in favor of it are quite strong, and cleverly avoided having to even consider that there are a multitude of OTHER ways medicine could be funded which may be better than EITHER capitalism OR government paid.
In short... EPIC FAIL.
Well actually the term historically originated in quite a different way to how it's used to do. Authors used the term 'pirate' to describe publishing companies that printed their works and sold it while dodging out of / simply failing to pay / actively refused to pay the royalties due.
Or to put it differently, the term pirate was coined by the people who actually create new art to describe the very people (content publishers and distributors) who now use it to describe ordinary people (a group that, until the fairly recent past basically never got affected by copyright law -it was more of an industrial regulation on the publishing industry than it ever was a law that the average book READER had to care about ).
I replied to two different people in one post, I quoted them separately and replied to them separately.
My reply to you was short, and explained the context of my "idiot" comment only. I guess my implication (that you seem to be an exception to the rule) was not clear enough. Sorry about that.
>I mean really, what could go wrong when sending massive amounts of energy through the air?
Well looking at an existing experiment doing just that... a random planet can have multiple elements starting to behave in highly abherent ways, self-replicate, become self-aware and call itself "life" ? You do realize that, that is exactly what the sun does every single day right ?
>>After all, everyone on slashdot is in the market for a multi million dollar laser.
>In our heart of hearts, yes.
Especially if it's attached to the head of a frickin' shark...