While it's true that English departments cost less to run than, say, a chemistry department, there are generally larger grants and scholarships available to science departments to offset their costs. The fixed costs, such as professor salaries and department administration, would be about the same across like-sized departments.
I disagree with your assertion that a unit needs to be profitable to exist. There are many worthwhile pursuits that often fall under the radar of popularity, and thus profitability. To axe, say, the philosophy, languages or forestry departments would be doing a disservice to the society as a whole. Research isn't about what is profitable *now,* it's about trying to figure out what might be useful for society in the future. That's an expensive task that's littered with more failures than successes, but the successes need the failures. It's like trying to find a single door in a very large room blindfolded. You're going to bump in to more walls than you are the door, but that's all part of the process.
If there was a magic wand that we could wave that would show us only the most efficient and profitable ways forward, you could be sure it would be used. The reality is, however, that we don't know what research will bring us from one moment to the next. Did we know that research into computer networks in the 50's & 60's would eventually allow us to converse across distances like this? Of course not, but we're glad it did.
Hmm... Stephen Hawking might have something to say about that stance.
There are those who are extremely productive members of society that can only survive with heroic medical care. On the other hand, there are quite a few people who contribute nothing or even cause society to go backwards who are, on paper, as healthy as can be expected.
"Breeding" the problems out of society has been attempted many times. Every time it is attempted it does more harm than good by isolating a segment of society that is seen as "worthless" by the society in power and ultimately ends up in a slaughter of innocents. It's probably one of the best paved roads to hell, with all the good intentions. IT DOES NOT WORK and should be an idea that is left in the dust of history.
...and then look at the number of office workstation sales vs. the number of personal computers. I would bet that removing that segment would narrow the gap significantly.
The GP has a point. Technically savvy folks & University students are getting Macs in far greater numbers. Apple sold 2.6m Macs last quarter, and I would bet that the vast majority of them were to individuals and not to corporate workstations. Sure, the business segment is what makes money now, but the personal segment is what drives the industry in the long run.
I think you more prove his point than refute it...
If someone wants to investigate a phenomenon by putting it in a different light, what is it to you? Yet you spit vitriol at anyone who attempts to frame an argument that goes against the "general wisdom."
The EU theory may very well be wrong. But it's an idea, and it's an idea that helps frame understanding the universe in a new light. That's the way of progress. If it's a bad idea, it will die on its own merits; but if it's a good idea, killing it prematurely by putting it down simply because it goes against conventional wisdom is doing nobody any good.
Lord of the Rings characters is my favourite theme at home. My favourites are Pippin (my first iPod), Radagast (my USB key), Osgiliath (my wireless SSID), Isildur (internal HD) Aragorn (external HD, "Isildur's Heir").
At work they're named after composers/performers: Copland, Gershwin, Coltrane, etc.
The Government of Canada is currently led by Stephen Harper. The Parliament of Canada is 308 House of Commons members and 105 Senators; the government answers to the House of Commons, and the Governor General asks the membership of the Commons to form a government from their membership which, by custom, is the leader of the majority party. Parliament is above the Government, and serves to keep the Government in check.
Technically, then, the Government is a part of the Parliament, not the other way around.
(Fun fact: There are actually three components of Parliament: The House, the Senate, and the Library of Parliament.)
You need to read "Guns, Germs & Steel" by Jared Diamond. The conclusion he comes to is that it's absolutely not genetics - it's a combination of geography and natural plant & animal life, leading to more stable populations (farmers vs. hunter/gatherers). This then leads to disease resistance (contact with domesticated animals boosts our immune systems), better, more nutritional crops, and greater population density leading to faster innovation.
Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer.
Try writing notated music on a computer and then get back to me on how hard writing and manipulating text is.
I don't agree with Apple's closed-phone approach, but I don't think it's the same deal as their losing to MS. In the infant home computer market, the open system led the way because the 'trend setters' were geeks. Computers were becoming more and more powerful *usefully*; that is, you would suddenly have the ability to record audio, or view video. The geeks were interested in extending and expanding their usefulness, and had the ability to manage and fix their own computers.
Fast forward to today, and more and more people are viewing computers as appliances. They don't want to care about managing, upgrading, fixing, etc, they just want it to work. Apple knows this. In fact, they knew it to start with but they were ahead of the right time for them to implement it in the Mac.
I also think a not-so-insignificant factor is that Apple is a much more mature company, with smarter, more stable leadership and the ability to see trends. Back in the 80s they were idyllic, wanting to push people in a certain way and not giving a damn about them pushing back. They were also a management mess, with SJ being forced out, product camps fighting each other, etc. Now I think they're much more open to recognizing important trends and acting on them, which is why it's so important to bitch and complain to them when they do stupid things.
Upgrades are generally $129. The new OS, Snow Leopard is $29. They generally offer significant enhancements over their previous versions.
Just because Microsoft didn't release an OS in over 6 years, while Apple was busy offering their users better, faster and more secure OS updates in the same time span, doesn't mean you can compare the two and say "see! Apple is more expensive! XP to Vista was $XXX, while 10.1 to 10.5 was $XXX!"
Don't forget: For a while, PPC *was* better than Intel. And for new users (i.e. anyone who hadn't grown up with using mice), 1 button was less confusing than two. But you know what? Things changed. Intel got off their ass and made great chips (while Moto/IBM sat on their ass with PPC) and the number of people who knew how to use a mouse became a majority of their market.
As many others have pointed out, you cannot absolutely prove that God does not exist, therefore you need to make a 'reasonable assumption' about the nature of the universe in order to arrive at atheism. That 'reasonable assumption' for atheists is also called 'faith' for theists. Taking an absolute stand on theism OR atheism requires that you take as much evidence as there is into account, and then assume the rest.
I think you're trying to make a useful argument here, and on the surface you're trying to challenge the idea of racial intelligence. But your post is horribly misguided. I can't decide if you're flaming on purpose, or just plain ignorant, so I'll bite.
You're assuming that everything that has value is somehow linked to science and technology. You completely dismiss differences in cultural values as being somehow 'less' than the output of the Europeans. The IQ test has, built into it, the cultural bias of the white, european, while completely disregarding other values. You can bet that if the IQ test included intelligence and observations on how nature behaves outside of the constraints of 'the scientific method' the Europeans would have their asses handed to them by the native americans, the australian aboriginals, or any other culture that couldn't give two pig shits about European science or technology.
Walk, don't run, to your nearest library and check out "Guns, Germs and Steel". The author successfully challenges and completely and systematically demolishes the idea of some sort of inherent racial intelligence difference.
These are real numbers. All you have is your pseudo-Ayn Randian Libertarian bullshit. We all went through that phase, and once we realized that it had serious flaws, we relegated it to "interesting, but not viable". The reaction to global warming is regulating our lives because so far we've been incapable of doing it ourselves. Capitalism is so concerned with the short-term wealth of its shareholders that it has failed to see the long-term implications of its actions. Burn another rainforest? Bah! We don't live there. Another Alaskan Oil Field? We'll die rich because of it, and screw the rest of ya.
Grow up and look around you. We're doing this. You're part of the problem.
Sorry, health care would suffer the same fate as the telcos if it were to 'open up to competition.'
The reason that there is so little competition in the telco space is that it has a prohibitively expensive startup cost. You can't run your own lines and maintain your own switching systems, cell towers, etc. before you even get a single customer... no VC would fund that.
It's the same with health care. It's prohibitively expensive to start up - hospital infrastructure, equipment, staff - before you even see a paying customer. So you would only get the large, entrenched corporations that are sufficiently well funded that would actually be able to survive.
Not only that, it would suffer from the natural inclination for 'vendor lock-in' that a private company would inflict on its customers in order to produce a monopoly. They would want to keep you from switching providers, so they'll keep your medical records proprietary. They would have a vested interest in making me dependent on their service and only their service. They would do this because it's easier and cheaper than actually providing a good service, and it would make their shareholders happy.
To avoid this, of course, you would need regulation, and then the private companies would try to get around the regulations, which means more regulation or de-regulation. At some point it would just be easier to nationalize the health care system, leading us back to where we're at now.
I'm happy I live in Canada where, although our system is far from perfect, at least I know that a) I can walk into any hospital in the country and receive treatment, b) that won't bankrupt me, c) the government has no vested interest in keeping me sick.
I have a relative who was diagnosed with Cancer and a week later started Chemotherapy. I have another 80-year old relative who just received a hip replacement and didn't pay a cent for it - he had to wait 6 months, yes, but it's better than paying it off for the rest of his natural life. Even with competition, there are fixed costs (doctor's salaries, equipment, staffing) that wouldn't lower the rate down past, say, $10k. I'd say that's a pretty good deal.
Your anecdote may be true, but it's not universal.
Exactly! Like how Neo-Cons will get more adherents if only they used more facts.
Not everybody is driven by science or data. In fact, for a lot of people, putting numbers like this in front of them is the only way that they'll understand that they have an impact on the environment, whether it's empirically true or not.
I actually think that Religion is complimentary to science.
Consider: Religion exists to help us explain the unknown because we're not comfortable (and can't function normally) in uncertainty. That's why every religion has a creation myth - to allow us to formulate a nice, succinct answer to "where we came from." Religion is a scaffold through which we build an understanding of the world.
As we gradually explain the things around us, we replace the religious scaffold with knowledge: That's why it's not generally socially acceptable to longer think that our crops suffer because God is mad at us, or that if we don't pray hard enough, the growing season will not come. We've answered those questions.
But religion is still strong in the area of metaphysics, like what happens after we die. That's something that 'science' may never explain, because it does not deal with the physical world. Even if you don't believe in an afterlife, you've convinced yourself of such. That, in essence, becomes your 'religion.'
Because, let's face it - Nobody has proven the existence of "God" or "gods," but nobody has disproven it either. All we've done with science is replace some of the beliefs that we've held previously, like creation, with other beliefs that seem to have more of a basis in the physical world. But even the most rigorous scientist cannot point to the evidence for there *not* being a supreme being.
I think if you strictly adhere to the principles of the scientific method, the question of "Is there or isn't there a $(DEITY)" should be answered with "there is not enough data to support either assumption." Anything more than that is you projecting your already-held beliefs into the mix; something that "real" scientists would abhor. You're not letting the data speak for itself.
So, religion continues to gives us a cognitive scaffold ("sense-making") method for understanding the bits of our experience that we cannot explain yet. Science has become a religion, not because it provides "real" answers (because, lets face it, they're called "theories" because with sufficient evidence to their contrary they can be replaced), but because its adherents believe that it can provide answers to things that it has not sufficiently explained yet. (this is called "faith" in religious circles). Adherents to "science" seem to bash adherents to "religion" without understanding that they're essentially trying to do the same thing, just with different methods. In fact, I would say it's the same mechanism that has Jews fighting Muslims, Catholics fighting Protestants, Baptists fighting Anglicans, Human Global Warming vs. Natural Global Warming, Big Bang vs. The Cyclic Model etc.
We are resistant to that which we do not understand, and do our damndest to prove the other person wrong when we don't understand what they mean.
And this, friends, is why Apple's the player to beat and everyone else can't figure out why.
Yes, if you wanted to do it the clunky way of navigate to website / browse / shopping-cart / checkout / download / copy to player / copy to portable - that can be done without much work.
However, for the rest of the people who *don't want to* or *can't* do that, Apple's packaged it up nicely. You don't go to your browser to buy music - you go to your music player. You don't manage files on your portable through your computer, you manage it through your music player. You can sync your playlists, drag-and-drop music from one playlist to another, all within iTunes. See a theme here?
So good luck with that music website. There are thousands more like it, all with as little impact as yours would have. But Apple's still going to beat you because they know what people want, and you don't.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's true that English departments cost less to run than, say, a chemistry department, there are generally larger grants and scholarships available to science departments to offset their costs. The fixed costs, such as professor salaries and department administration, would be about the same across like-sized departments.
I disagree with your assertion that a unit needs to be profitable to exist. There are many worthwhile pursuits that often fall under the radar of popularity, and thus profitability. To axe, say, the philosophy, languages or forestry departments would be doing a disservice to the society as a whole. Research isn't about what is profitable *now,* it's about trying to figure out what might be useful for society in the future. That's an expensive task that's littered with more failures than successes, but the successes need the failures. It's like trying to find a single door in a very large room blindfolded. You're going to bump in to more walls than you are the door, but that's all part of the process.
If there was a magic wand that we could wave that would show us only the most efficient and profitable ways forward, you could be sure it would be used. The reality is, however, that we don't know what research will bring us from one moment to the next. Did we know that research into computer networks in the 50's & 60's would eventually allow us to converse across distances like this? Of course not, but we're glad it did.
Hmm... Stephen Hawking might have something to say about that stance.
There are those who are extremely productive members of society that can only survive with heroic medical care. On the other hand, there are quite a few people who contribute nothing or even cause society to go backwards who are, on paper, as healthy as can be expected.
"Breeding" the problems out of society has been attempted many times. Every time it is attempted it does more harm than good by isolating a segment of society that is seen as "worthless" by the society in power and ultimately ends up in a slaughter of innocents. It's probably one of the best paved roads to hell, with all the good intentions. IT DOES NOT WORK and should be an idea that is left in the dust of history.
...and then look at the number of office workstation sales vs. the number of personal computers. I would bet that removing that segment would narrow the gap significantly.
The GP has a point. Technically savvy folks & University students are getting Macs in far greater numbers. Apple sold 2.6m Macs last quarter, and I would bet that the vast majority of them were to individuals and not to corporate workstations. Sure, the business segment is what makes money now, but the personal segment is what drives the industry in the long run.
I think you more prove his point than refute it...
If someone wants to investigate a phenomenon by putting it in a different light, what is it to you? Yet you spit vitriol at anyone who attempts to frame an argument that goes against the "general wisdom."
The EU theory may very well be wrong. But it's an idea, and it's an idea that helps frame understanding the universe in a new light. That's the way of progress. If it's a bad idea, it will die on its own merits; but if it's a good idea, killing it prematurely by putting it down simply because it goes against conventional wisdom is doing nobody any good.
Lord of the Rings characters is my favourite theme at home. My favourites are Pippin (my first iPod), Radagast (my USB key), Osgiliath (my wireless SSID), Isildur (internal HD) Aragorn (external HD, "Isildur's Heir"). At work they're named after composers/performers: Copland, Gershwin, Coltrane, etc.
The Government of Canada is currently led by Stephen Harper. The Parliament of Canada is 308 House of Commons members and 105 Senators; the government answers to the House of Commons, and the Governor General asks the membership of the Commons to form a government from their membership which, by custom, is the leader of the majority party. Parliament is above the Government, and serves to keep the Government in check.
Technically, then, the Government is a part of the Parliament, not the other way around.
(Fun fact: There are actually three components of Parliament: The House, the Senate, and the Library of Parliament.)
You need to read "Guns, Germs & Steel" by Jared Diamond. The conclusion he comes to is that it's absolutely not genetics - it's a combination of geography and natural plant & animal life, leading to more stable populations (farmers vs. hunter/gatherers). This then leads to disease resistance (contact with domesticated animals boosts our immune systems), better, more nutritional crops, and greater population density leading to faster innovation.
Why?
Try writing notated music on a computer and then get back to me on how hard writing and manipulating text is.
I don't agree with Apple's closed-phone approach, but I don't think it's the same deal as their losing to MS. In the infant home computer market, the open system led the way because the 'trend setters' were geeks. Computers were becoming more and more powerful *usefully*; that is, you would suddenly have the ability to record audio, or view video. The geeks were interested in extending and expanding their usefulness, and had the ability to manage and fix their own computers.
Fast forward to today, and more and more people are viewing computers as appliances. They don't want to care about managing, upgrading, fixing, etc, they just want it to work. Apple knows this. In fact, they knew it to start with but they were ahead of the right time for them to implement it in the Mac.
I also think a not-so-insignificant factor is that Apple is a much more mature company, with smarter, more stable leadership and the ability to see trends. Back in the 80s they were idyllic, wanting to push people in a certain way and not giving a damn about them pushing back. They were also a management mess, with SJ being forced out, product camps fighting each other, etc. Now I think they're much more open to recognizing important trends and acting on them, which is why it's so important to bitch and complain to them when they do stupid things.
Whose ass did you pull those numbers out of?
Upgrades are generally $129. The new OS, Snow Leopard is $29. They generally offer significant enhancements over their previous versions.
Just because Microsoft didn't release an OS in over 6 years, while Apple was busy offering their users better, faster and more secure OS updates in the same time span, doesn't mean you can compare the two and say "see! Apple is more expensive! XP to Vista was $XXX, while 10.1 to 10.5 was $XXX!"
Don't forget: For a while, PPC *was* better than Intel. And for new users (i.e. anyone who hadn't grown up with using mice), 1 button was less confusing than two. But you know what? Things changed. Intel got off their ass and made great chips (while Moto/IBM sat on their ass with PPC) and the number of people who knew how to use a mouse became a majority of their market.
As many others have pointed out, you cannot absolutely prove that God does not exist, therefore you need to make a 'reasonable assumption' about the nature of the universe in order to arrive at atheism. That 'reasonable assumption' for atheists is also called 'faith' for theists. Taking an absolute stand on theism OR atheism requires that you take as much evidence as there is into account, and then assume the rest.
I think you're trying to make a useful argument here, and on the surface you're trying to challenge the idea of racial intelligence. But your post is horribly misguided. I can't decide if you're flaming on purpose, or just plain ignorant, so I'll bite.
You're assuming that everything that has value is somehow linked to science and technology. You completely dismiss differences in cultural values as being somehow 'less' than the output of the Europeans. The IQ test has, built into it, the cultural bias of the white, european, while completely disregarding other values. You can bet that if the IQ test included intelligence and observations on how nature behaves outside of the constraints of 'the scientific method' the Europeans would have their asses handed to them by the native americans, the australian aboriginals, or any other culture that couldn't give two pig shits about European science or technology.
Walk, don't run, to your nearest library and check out "Guns, Germs and Steel". The author successfully challenges and completely and systematically demolishes the idea of some sort of inherent racial intelligence difference.
Intel, AMD & NVIDIA's customers aren't the same as Apple's. Their big customers are the people making the computers, not the people buying them.
Libertarians think they're the only ones that *are* thinking people... and never waste an opportunity to tell you about it.
Seriously? The top hit for that quote is a website that doesn't cite its sources. Trying to track down the origins of that quote leads to OTHER websites that don't cite their sources either. (c.f. this one, from 2007, this one, which looks suspiciously familiar, from 2005, and this one, which just links back to the first one. You gotta do better than that.
[Citation Needed]
Wow. You're full of hate. The sad part is, I don't think you're trolling - I think you actually believe that stuff.
You "highly doubt" that man-made carbon output is killing this planet? Take a look at this chart: List of Countries Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions
After you look at it, tell me that, for the US alone, 20.4 metric tons of CO2 times 300,000,000 people, isn't having an effect.
Or how about this chart? Greenhouse Gas Emissions Per Capita See how much of an impact deforestation is having?
These are real numbers. All you have is your pseudo-Ayn Randian Libertarian bullshit. We all went through that phase, and once we realized that it had serious flaws, we relegated it to "interesting, but not viable". The reaction to global warming is regulating our lives because so far we've been incapable of doing it ourselves. Capitalism is so concerned with the short-term wealth of its shareholders that it has failed to see the long-term implications of its actions. Burn another rainforest? Bah! We don't live there. Another Alaskan Oil Field? We'll die rich because of it, and screw the rest of ya.
Grow up and look around you. We're doing this. You're part of the problem.
I first read this as "...ten ways to Sudbury..." I like that better.
Sorry, health care would suffer the same fate as the telcos if it were to 'open up to competition.'
The reason that there is so little competition in the telco space is that it has a prohibitively expensive startup cost. You can't run your own lines and maintain your own switching systems, cell towers, etc. before you even get a single customer... no VC would fund that.
It's the same with health care. It's prohibitively expensive to start up - hospital infrastructure, equipment, staff - before you even see a paying customer. So you would only get the large, entrenched corporations that are sufficiently well funded that would actually be able to survive.
Not only that, it would suffer from the natural inclination for 'vendor lock-in' that a private company would inflict on its customers in order to produce a monopoly. They would want to keep you from switching providers, so they'll keep your medical records proprietary. They would have a vested interest in making me dependent on their service and only their service. They would do this because it's easier and cheaper than actually providing a good service, and it would make their shareholders happy.
To avoid this, of course, you would need regulation, and then the private companies would try to get around the regulations, which means more regulation or de-regulation. At some point it would just be easier to nationalize the health care system, leading us back to where we're at now.
I'm happy I live in Canada where, although our system is far from perfect, at least I know that a) I can walk into any hospital in the country and receive treatment, b) that won't bankrupt me, c) the government has no vested interest in keeping me sick.
I have a relative who was diagnosed with Cancer and a week later started Chemotherapy. I have another 80-year old relative who just received a hip replacement and didn't pay a cent for it - he had to wait 6 months, yes, but it's better than paying it off for the rest of his natural life. Even with competition, there are fixed costs (doctor's salaries, equipment, staffing) that wouldn't lower the rate down past, say, $10k. I'd say that's a pretty good deal.
Your anecdote may be true, but it's not universal.
Exactly! Like how Neo-Cons will get more adherents if only they used more facts.
Not everybody is driven by science or data. In fact, for a lot of people, putting numbers like this in front of them is the only way that they'll understand that they have an impact on the environment, whether it's empirically true or not.
I actually think that Religion is complimentary to science.
Consider: Religion exists to help us explain the unknown because we're not comfortable (and can't function normally) in uncertainty. That's why every religion has a creation myth - to allow us to formulate a nice, succinct answer to "where we came from." Religion is a scaffold through which we build an understanding of the world.
As we gradually explain the things around us, we replace the religious scaffold with knowledge: That's why it's not generally socially acceptable to longer think that our crops suffer because God is mad at us, or that if we don't pray hard enough, the growing season will not come. We've answered those questions.
But religion is still strong in the area of metaphysics, like what happens after we die. That's something that 'science' may never explain, because it does not deal with the physical world. Even if you don't believe in an afterlife, you've convinced yourself of such. That, in essence, becomes your 'religion.'
Because, let's face it - Nobody has proven the existence of "God" or "gods," but nobody has disproven it either. All we've done with science is replace some of the beliefs that we've held previously, like creation, with other beliefs that seem to have more of a basis in the physical world. But even the most rigorous scientist cannot point to the evidence for there *not* being a supreme being.
I think if you strictly adhere to the principles of the scientific method, the question of "Is there or isn't there a $(DEITY)" should be answered with "there is not enough data to support either assumption." Anything more than that is you projecting your already-held beliefs into the mix; something that "real" scientists would abhor. You're not letting the data speak for itself.
So, religion continues to gives us a cognitive scaffold ("sense-making") method for understanding the bits of our experience that we cannot explain yet. Science has become a religion, not because it provides "real" answers (because, lets face it, they're called "theories" because with sufficient evidence to their contrary they can be replaced), but because its adherents believe that it can provide answers to things that it has not sufficiently explained yet. (this is called "faith" in religious circles). Adherents to "science" seem to bash adherents to "religion" without understanding that they're essentially trying to do the same thing, just with different methods. In fact, I would say it's the same mechanism that has Jews fighting Muslims, Catholics fighting Protestants, Baptists fighting Anglicans, Human Global Warming vs. Natural Global Warming, Big Bang vs. The Cyclic Model etc.
We are resistant to that which we do not understand, and do our damndest to prove the other person wrong when we don't understand what they mean.
Party like it's 7pm on Dec. 31, 1998? Geez... at least wait until 915166800
And this, friends, is why Apple's the player to beat and everyone else can't figure out why.
Yes, if you wanted to do it the clunky way of navigate to website / browse / shopping-cart / checkout / download / copy to player / copy to portable - that can be done without much work.
However, for the rest of the people who *don't want to* or *can't* do that, Apple's packaged it up nicely. You don't go to your browser to buy music - you go to your music player. You don't manage files on your portable through your computer, you manage it through your music player. You can sync your playlists, drag-and-drop music from one playlist to another, all within iTunes. See a theme here?
So good luck with that music website. There are thousands more like it, all with as little impact as yours would have. But Apple's still going to beat you because they know what people want, and you don't.