Suppose that the corp decides to save the jobs of the smartest and hardest-working 10% of those on doomed projects. Now you have to fire the bottom 10% from other projects to make room for the keepers. This is often against employment law - certainly in my jurisdiction.
In the medium / long term, it's OK. Those of us old enough to remember the distant days of the early 90s will remember "downsizing" "rightsizing" and "flatter pyramids" - a whole chunk of a business cycle consumed by the fashionable idea that greater efficiency could be gained by sweeping away multiple layers of middle management, supposedly improving communications between the shop floor and boardroom, as well as saving lots of salary costs. No doubt the same thing will happen again, but this time it looks like the recession is going to be a lot bigger and longer-lasting. (One of many unexpected consequences of the hollowing-out process was an acceleration of the growing gulf between the ratio of a small number of very rich senior management and a huge army of poorly paid drones, with a much smaller middle class.) How much further can this process go before we find ourselves living in Bladerunner?
explain to me what issues are there for which in 2008 we still have to resort to sub-sonic air flights? Simple. Drag increases as the square of velocity. Have you seen fuel prices lately?
Who's killing and who's dying enables humanity to attribute the status of hero, villain, martyr, and maniac to people. When that doesn't matter, we become something less than human. No, you're moving the goalposts. This started with assertions about the number of "in Iraq". Of course the details of each event matter enormously to those directly involved in them, but that's not the matter under discussion.
The other issue is that there is no consensus between all the parties about who's a hero and who's a villain. That's why people are killing each other in the first place:(
The reason why some of us are what you refer to as "bleeding hearts" is that it was obvious to many, many of us that the slowly unfolding slow-motion humanitarian catastrophe was completely predictable. If it was so obvious to those of us who marched, why wasn't it obvious to those who gave the orders?
Incidentally, your assertion that thinking about the war without attributing "hero and villain" roles to people is "less than human" condemns any attempt to study those events in a dispassionate, dare-I-say "scientific" manner - whether it be historical[1], geopolitical, sociological, epidemiological, hell even the study of military strategy. There's no mention of heroes and villains in Sun Tsu...
[1] I mean history, the proper academic discipline, not "what it says in the Chambers Big List of Events in the 21st Century".
Further, if a guerrilla fires an rpg from the middle of a crowd and the return fire kills or maims members of the crowd, how can you reasonably attribute the casualties to anyone other than the guerrilla? How can you reasonably attribute the casualties to anything else than the decision to invade in the first place?
The question of who pulled the trigger (or turned on the electric drill in the case of many sectarian torture/murders) is irrelevant. None of that sectarian killing and ethnic cleansing would have happened had we not invaded. The people who've died from typhoid[1] because the sewage works hasn't worked for 3 years are still just as dead as if they'd been bombed by mistake or used as human shields by Al Qaeda in Iraq.
[1] (Random hypothetical example to stand for deaths caused by infrastructure damage and social breakdown - I've no idea if anyone actually died of typhoid.)
They're people who are dead today who wouldn't be if it weren't for the invasion.
Incidentally that's why the Lancet number was so much higher than, say icasualites.org: it's answering a different question. And whilst it was certainly not 100% precise and accurate, it did follow the same basic epidemilogical methodology used for assessing casualities from other major public health, uh, events.
80-90,000? You're out by a factor of between five and ten. The Lancet study made it 5-600,000, and that was 18 months ago IIRC - before the worst of the sectarian terror got going.
Readers of the mighty 2000AD who recognise my name will know my opinion with regard to this one already. Death to the flesh ones!! ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!
"It's crap being Scottish. We're the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth, the most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shown to civilization. Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, were colonized by wankers. Can't even find a decent civilization to be colonized by.
--Mark, in "Trainspotting"
Same here - mail between my Gmail account and my work account, which gets Messagelabs spam/malware filtering, works fine in both directions. Sounds like a badly-sourced story to me...
Solar power satellites, which are... drumroll... science fiction! When someone somewhere evem proposes (seriously) a proof-of-concept demonstration that such a thing would be possible, let alone practical,... I'm all ears. Until then, you're jus tpulling make-believe technological deus ex machinas out, waving them in the air and proclaiming they'll solve the problem.
There will be outposts and mining and manufacturing in space when it's better to do it there than here. I agree completely.
Well, yeah, but by that logic we're a step closer to manned bases on Venus or faster-than-light travel. Those things were SF before ATV and they're SF now (and I maintain they will always be SF, but that's beside the point.) Likewise, asteroid mining is SF last week, this week, and next week. (In that case though it's not only the extreme technological difficulty of the task, it's that the whole process is utterly futile. If there were a solid gold asteroid it would still never be economic to go mine it.) As someone else has said, when there are permanent human settlements in the middle of the Gobi Desert,... let's talk about manned spaceflight.
I realise you're joking, of course, because only an imbecile could think that a low-earth orbit rendezvous between the ATV and ISS does anything to change "asteroid mining"'s status from "science fiction".
If you think about it from an evolutionary psychology stance, men and women will likely have rather different criteria when selecting partners.
Hate to sound like a biological reductionist (but I am, so I do) but a lot of gender roles (be they hardwired or culturally determined, strictly speaking) boild down to the biological differences. A woman has a huge investment when she selects a sexual partner, as pregnancy is a potentially life-threatening condition (which obviously limits one's chances of reproducing one's genes.) A man on the other hand can have many sexual partners, siring many offspring with different women, with la very low investment. Thus it's in women's interest to be extremely picky about a mate, and a man's interest to seek many sexual partners. (Of course things get a bit more complex when you factor in chances of a mother successfully rearing a child on her own.)
Modern healthcare, birth-control and the social support provided by technologically advanced societies dramatically change the goalposts, whilst leaving men and women still playing the hand evolutionary biology dealt them on the savannah a couple of million years ago. I've a latent interest in (what would you call it?) paleo-anthropology - the structure of prehistoric human society basically - however it's by definition 99.99% conjecture and theorising. Which is why I say: stuff putting humans on mars, let's have a government-funded time machine programme!
I don't know where the current internet pipes are located but if they pass close to Alaska then this idea would be worth some consideration. Can you guess the fatal flaw in your scheme? Hint, how big a pipe do you need to serve the population of Alaska?
What's the betting that the Linux and MacOS versions of Flash are also vulnerable to this 0day? It's rare for a Flash issue to affect only one platform (the same is true of the Acrobat reader and other typical cross-platform browser plug-ins.) Let's wait for the Adobe advisory before jumping to conclusions, shall we? (Disclaimer, I'm a Linux user.)
He's very rich and successful, true (although Private Eye has been pointing out major issues with the capital structure of Virgin and the accounting tricks they use for years.) But tremendous wisdom? Puh-lease. He's a manic self-publicist with an ego the size of Marvin's brain.
s/when/if ever/, otherwise I totally agree. Nothing wrong with looking at the stars, especially if you're lucky enough to have dark skies - I myself harbour long-cherished dreams of getting myself a nice Meade LX200 16" Schmidt-Cassegrain when I win the lottery as it goes - but I just wish more people would keep in mind the boundary between science fiction and something that is technically feasible and might one day be attempted, like say a tunnel from Alaska to Sibera, a mile high building, robots generating enough power for a lightbulb for eight hours to last four years on the surface of Mars, whilst having their entire OS and application stack upgraded remotely multiple times for less than a hundredth of the salary of the best-paid US CEO, terabyte USB sticks,.. - you know, the sort of thing that genuinely inspires. As opposed to a cool 40 minutes of TV once or twice a week, which is great and all, but... it's just TV.
Well, space travel, sure, that's absolutely a pipe dream. Oh wait, you're talking about the sort of thing where a huge industrial nation spends 5% of it's GDP for a decade in order to prove a point to a geopolitical rival, rather than actual practical spaceflight? Well, whatever, let's not go there.
Anyway as Professor Sagan famously remarked, they laughed at Bozo the Clown, too. When someone's built a functioning prototype...
Y'know, the 60s "Way We'll Live Tomorrow" book I had as a kid said we'd be living in huge colonies on the bottom of the ocean in the 21st century. When there are cities in the Gobi Desert, which is far more accessible and rich in valuable resources than anything out of LEO[1], I'll start taking space elevators seriously.
([1] excluding the simple coolness factor of pure research into planetary science, performed with robotic vehicles of course. I'm a total obsessive over such stuff for 25 years, anyway. Are you following Cassini, Messenger, the MERs, Phoenix, etc? Really incredible stuff that can be done today for what amounts to chump change from the national budget. Dream all the dreams you want, of course, just don't bore the rest of us with them the next day, you know?;)
Slashdot Mirror
So, what you're saying is that we should live to work?
Wow, I think we just made Slashdot redundant. There's nothing more to say.
Suppose that the corp decides to save the jobs of the smartest and hardest-working 10% of those on doomed projects. Now you have to fire the bottom 10% from other projects to make room for the keepers. This is often against employment law - certainly in my jurisdiction.
In the medium / long term, it's OK. Those of us old enough to remember the distant days of the early 90s will remember "downsizing" "rightsizing" and "flatter pyramids" - a whole chunk of a business cycle consumed by the fashionable idea that greater efficiency could be gained by sweeping away multiple layers of middle management, supposedly improving communications between the shop floor and boardroom, as well as saving lots of salary costs. No doubt the same thing will happen again, but this time it looks like the recession is going to be a lot bigger and longer-lasting. (One of many unexpected consequences of the hollowing-out process was an acceleration of the growing gulf between the ratio of a small number of very rich senior management and a huge army of poorly paid drones, with a much smaller middle class.) How much further can this process go before we find ourselves living in Bladerunner?
The other issue is that there is no consensus between all the parties about who's a hero and who's a villain. That's why people are killing each other in the first place :(
The reason why some of us are what you refer to as "bleeding hearts" is that it was obvious to many, many of us that the slowly unfolding slow-motion humanitarian catastrophe was completely predictable. If it was so obvious to those of us who marched, why wasn't it obvious to those who gave the orders?
Incidentally, your assertion that thinking about the war without attributing "hero and villain" roles to people is "less than human" condemns any attempt to study those events in a dispassionate, dare-I-say "scientific" manner - whether it be historical[1], geopolitical, sociological, epidemiological, hell even the study of military strategy. There's no mention of heroes and villains in Sun Tsu...
[1] I mean history, the proper academic discipline, not "what it says in the Chambers Big List of Events in the 21st Century".
The question of who pulled the trigger (or turned on the electric drill in the case of many sectarian torture/murders) is irrelevant. None of that sectarian killing and ethnic cleansing would have happened had we not invaded. The people who've died from typhoid[1] because the sewage works hasn't worked for 3 years are still just as dead as if they'd been bombed by mistake or used as human shields by Al Qaeda in Iraq.
[1] (Random hypothetical example to stand for deaths caused by infrastructure damage and social breakdown - I've no idea if anyone actually died of typhoid.) They're people who are dead today who wouldn't be if it weren't for the invasion.
Incidentally that's why the Lancet number was so much higher than, say icasualites.org: it's answering a different question. And whilst it was certainly not 100% precise and accurate, it did follow the same basic epidemilogical methodology used for assessing casualities from other major public health, uh, events.
80-90,000? You're out by a factor of between five and ten. The Lancet study made it 5-600,000, and that was 18 months ago IIRC - before the worst of the sectarian terror got going.
We could rip out^w^w circuit-bend his voicebox for a start.
Readers of the mighty 2000AD who recognise my name will know my opinion with regard to this one already. Death to the flesh ones!! ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!
"It's crap being Scottish. We're the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth, the most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shown to civilization. Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, were colonized by wankers. Can't even find a decent civilization to be colonized by. --Mark, in "Trainspotting"
unmetalled public roads? Where the hell do you live?!
Same here - mail between my Gmail account and my work account, which gets Messagelabs spam/malware filtering, works fine in both directions. Sounds like a badly-sourced story to me...
Well, yeah, but by that logic we're a step closer to manned bases on Venus or faster-than-light travel. Those things were SF before ATV and they're SF now (and I maintain they will always be SF, but that's beside the point.) Likewise, asteroid mining is SF last week, this week, and next week. (In that case though it's not only the extreme technological difficulty of the task, it's that the whole process is utterly futile. If there were a solid gold asteroid it would still never be economic to go mine it.) As someone else has said, when there are permanent human settlements in the middle of the Gobi Desert,... let's talk about manned spaceflight.
I realise you're joking, of course, because only an imbecile could think that a low-earth orbit rendezvous between the ATV and ISS does anything to change "asteroid mining"'s status from "science fiction".
Hate to sound like a biological reductionist (but I am, so I do) but a lot of gender roles (be they hardwired or culturally determined, strictly speaking) boild down to the biological differences. A woman has a huge investment when she selects a sexual partner, as pregnancy is a potentially life-threatening condition (which obviously limits one's chances of reproducing one's genes.) A man on the other hand can have many sexual partners, siring many offspring with different women, with la very low investment. Thus it's in women's interest to be extremely picky about a mate, and a man's interest to seek many sexual partners. (Of course things get a bit more complex when you factor in chances of a mother successfully rearing a child on her own.)
Modern healthcare, birth-control and the social support provided by technologically advanced societies dramatically change the goalposts, whilst leaving men and women still playing the hand evolutionary biology dealt them on the savannah a couple of million years ago. I've a latent interest in (what would you call it?) paleo-anthropology - the structure of prehistoric human society basically - however it's by definition 99.99% conjecture and theorising. Which is why I say: stuff putting humans on mars, let's have a government-funded time machine programme!
Icelandic, of course. Plus English for ATC, shipping and international business, and Perl for getting stuff working, of course :)
What's the betting that the Linux and MacOS versions of Flash are also vulnerable to this 0day? It's rare for a Flash issue to affect only one platform (the same is true of the Acrobat reader and other typical cross-platform browser plug-ins.) Let's wait for the Adobe advisory before jumping to conclusions, shall we? (Disclaimer, I'm a Linux user.)
Hint: script kiddies don't tend to have 0day in the real world.
He's very rich and successful, true (although Private Eye has been pointing out major issues with the capital structure of Virgin and the accounting tricks they use for years.) But tremendous wisdom? Puh-lease. He's a manic self-publicist with an ego the size of Marvin's brain.
s/when/if ever/, otherwise I totally agree. Nothing wrong with looking at the stars, especially if you're lucky enough to have dark skies - I myself harbour long-cherished dreams of getting myself a nice Meade LX200 16" Schmidt-Cassegrain when I win the lottery as it goes - but I just wish more people would keep in mind the boundary between science fiction and something that is technically feasible and might one day be attempted, like say a tunnel from Alaska to Sibera, a mile high building, robots generating enough power for a lightbulb for eight hours to last four years on the surface of Mars, whilst having their entire OS and application stack upgraded remotely multiple times for less than a hundredth of the salary of the best-paid US CEO, terabyte USB sticks,.. - you know, the sort of thing that genuinely inspires. As opposed to a cool 40 minutes of TV once or twice a week, which is great and all, but... it's just TV.
Anyway as Professor Sagan famously remarked, they laughed at Bozo the Clown, too. When someone's built a functioning prototype...
Y'know, the 60s "Way We'll Live Tomorrow" book I had as a kid said we'd be living in huge colonies on the bottom of the ocean in the 21st century. When there are cities in the Gobi Desert, which is far more accessible and rich in valuable resources than anything out of LEO[1], I'll start taking space elevators seriously.
([1] excluding the simple coolness factor of pure research into planetary science, performed with robotic vehicles of course. I'm a total obsessive over such stuff for 25 years, anyway. Are you following Cassini, Messenger, the MERs, Phoenix, etc? Really incredible stuff that can be done today for what amounts to chump change from the national budget. Dream all the dreams you want, of course, just don't bore the rest of us with them the next day, you know? ;)