I think we need to start thinking about the possibility that there are other forces in the universe that the mind cannot comprehend or hold on it for very long.
You mean like God? If so, I hope I'm not surprising you by mentioning that this idea is something most humans have thought about for many millennia, at least as long as we have written records, and probably as long as there have been humans.
Our position in history right now (or since the scientific revolution) is unique, exactly because it allows us to ignore superstition, and focus on things that exist, instead of having to rely upon wishful thinking.
We can catch a glimmer of infinity, but we will never be able to full understand it.
By taking an introductory math course at a university, you can understand infinity too. "Never" is a slight exaggeration here.
We are only using like 10% of our capacity as human beings
This stems from one of those hard-to-kill modern myths that says that "we are only using 10% of our brains". Aside from the fact that this myth is wrong (and even if it was right, it would be misleading, as not every circuit in a pentium processor is active during every point of every computation either), extending it to "human capacity" doesn't make it more correct.
If you want to use 100% of human capacity, start by running a marathon while teaching yourself a new language, solving math puzzles, juggling three balls (in each hand), humming to a tune you compose at the moment, keeping in touch with your friends through your cell-phone, jerking yourself off, fighting off an infection you deliberately introduced to yourself, restoring some tissue damage from a few small knife-wounds, and eating spoiled food. I'm sure you aren't using 100% of your capacity even then, but it's at least more like it than when you're writing nonsense on slashdot.
Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that America and Russia would become rival superpowers back in 1835.
He was wrong. I'm quite sure he didn't predict the Russian revolution in 1917, or the first and second world war, which led to the cold war. His prediction was mostly based on Russia being a big country, USA rising to become a big country, and therefore, eventually, rivals. In the mean time, just about anything could have happened. That events eventually played out to make this particular prediction true for a few decades, is pure coincidence.
Re:The Movie you're looking for is called
on
The Shape of the Future
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· Score: 3, Interesting
who would want to record every single waking --and sleeping!-- moment?
People who have amnesia. People who would like to record every waking moment but not have to deal with turning the recording on and off. People in law-enforcement. People who need to document fraud and/or abuse by other people, but can't necessarily predict when the interesting bits happen. Students who like to review one of their classes. Perverts who like to sell their sex-experiences on the Internet. Journalists who don't like taking notes. Anyone who have trouble remembering names, or directions, or whatever. In short, just about anyone, I guess.
Well, yes, all that indexing and searching possibilities are cool and all, but you would still have to spend some time looking it up
Sure. The idea is that if it's no hassle to record stuff, why not just record it all. The device could be embedded in your wrist-watch and/or cellphone, which most people carry around anyway. Or it could be an implant. If you don't need to access it, you won't waste any time accessing it, and the additional weight you have to carry is less than the extra weight you already carry because you forgot to cut your toenails.
memories get embellished by our minds. Just go back and read your high school angst-ridden writings and if you're matured just a bit
I know I feel that way, but I'm not sure everyone feels that way. But even if you do feel that way (like I do), that doesn't remove the usefulness of such a device. Nobody is forcing you to review your angst-ridden teenage depression all the time. But if you need to remember something, you could.
And there's the waste in recording again what you already saw (because you would be recording yourself watching those records... bleh).
Why is that wasteful? Storage is cheap. Micro-managing it is wasteful, because it costs more money and time than not managing it at all. Besides, you may end up some day wanting to see how much time you waste inspecting older memories. In short, you could just as well argue that everyone should use letters of maximum 2mm height, and no paragraph breaks or whitespace, when handwriting, since otherwise you would waste ink and paper. The world just doesn't work that way.
But I find that when it comes to science topics, I often find Wikipedia more of a hinderance than a help. Curious about just what epigenetics is?
I'm not really that curious. But ok, let's look at the link: Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene regulation that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). When a cell undergoes such an epigenetic change, it is the phenotype of the cell that is affected.
I must ask, exactly what is it that is so hard about this? Ok, it uses terms that the reader may not be familiar with, but, and it's a big "but", all those terms have hyperlinks to their own articles. I'm a far cry from a cell biologist, but I could understand what epigenetics is within 15 seconds of viewing the article using only the background knowledge I had from biology in high school. If you lack almost any kind of useful background knowledge, I would expect at most half an hour would be needed. Which, in my eye, is fair. If you don't want to put in some effort in trying to understand a technical subject for which you lack almost any kind of useful background knowledge, you have no right to complain.
Now I'm sure that's accurate, but it's way too rich for my blood. A better primer can be found at the backgrounder from Johns Hopkins that ranks as the number three hit:
Ok, to me they read the same. I think you must work on your reading skills. Wikipedia is intended to be an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias have always strived to be brief and precise. If you want hand holding and a textbook approach, you seem to already have found it, so I'm not sure why you're complaining.
Figure you really should know what mitochondria do? Don't count on Wikipedia - odds are their analysis is too pedantic for you, as it is for me.
Ok, let's look at wikipedia again. The second sentence reads: Mitochondria are sometimes described as "cellular power plants," because they churn out energy for the cell [snip]. This is the kind of language you would find in childrens books. I agree that there were other bits that were more technical, but if this isn't enough to put you on the right track, nothing is.
Besides, encyclopedias were never intended to be textbooks. If you really have no idea what mitochondria are, and no background knowledge that helps you understand the terse language of an encyclopedia article, maybe you should look at a biology textbook instead. You know, at school, when they teach biology, they don't use encyclopedias. Textbooks are what they use for teaching people stuff. Encyclopedias should instead be classified as reference works.
Here's the first line for the entry on fluid mechanics: [snip]
Sorry, you lost me at "continuum."
Sorry, but that's your problem. You can either click on the link, and learn what it means, or you can ignore it for now, and still get a pretty good understanding. It's "[strange word] mechanics for gases and liquids".
And sometimes there's been the laudable foresight to add "introduction to" pages, such as those for quantum mechanics and quantum physics.
I agree that this is a good idea. I fail to see why every article should be for dummies, though...
it's the tragedy of the uncommon, meaning topics that the common folk just don't get - and thus can't help in editing the entry on.
Good. If they don't even understand the subject, I don't want them editing the article.
I got older and my interest in new music dwindled. I already know what I like, and it's right there on my shelf.
The Internet came into existence. It's cheaper AND more convenient for me to download than to buy stuff
CDs are of no interest to me. I listen to music from my computer or my mp3-player
That some companies unwisely decided to poison the CD-medium with copy-"protection" as well, didn't make a dent of difference. Since the music industry failed to reinvent themselves to changing times, they die. They could have made themselves filthy rich if they had started early on with a subscription service, or something like that. But they chose the route of DRM, lawyers, and plain old idiocy. And like any business not paying attention to the world around them, they are slowly dying as a result.
but nowadays "decimated" means something a lot more drastic
Literally, I believe it means to reduce to a tenth part, or by 90%.
No. If you want the "literal" meaning, it's exactly what the romans meant. To reduce by 10%, or in more direct terms: to randomly kill every tenth person. Such as when a new general was to take over some troops that didn't necessarily be fanatically devoted to him, he would start by decimating the troops to make sure they were obedient to him from now on... (and yeah, this worked most of the time, although today the technique is generally frown upon, as it is considered to be of questionable ethical judgement)
The point the grandparent was making was that (a) decimate now means something else, and usually more drastic than it mean to the Romans (b) the music industry isn't decimated in this new sense
3. Feds investigate, find nothing, no charges are filed
Yeah, but why did the feds need to investigate anything beyond the actual web-comic? I mean, for any sane, normal person, it would be obvious that the person complaining needs to make his case a bit stronger. At least before the feds should start wasting taxpayer money on it. This should have been forgotten away in a closet (or wastebasket) the moment it came in.
Yeah, we're turning into a real fscking police state here.
Unless you know everyone around you, this probably isn't an appropriate conversation for the workplace
Why not? Because it's not work-related? Or because it's about choosing weapons for their inability to hurt people since all you want is target shooting? Would a conversation about killing real muslims in Iraq or Afghanistan be more suitable?
If your inability to understand speech is so unimaginatively great that you take this as a description of a killing, or as a wish to kill someone, you belong in mental care, not in a government position.
And this, even if joking, is probably not, all things considered, the wisest response.
Why not? Only people who are so retarded that they managed to misinterpret the first conversation will be able to misinterpret this as well. And those people should be locked up in institutions and receive proper psychiatric care.
But he already got fired for talking about how many times you'd have to shoot someone in the face with a.22 to kill them, and then makes light of it to the point where someone got scared again.
No, he got fired for someone misinterpreting what he said (which is ok, his contract specifically allowed him to be fired for any reason, including the boss being an idiot). And then they continue to misinterpret what he says again. Do you think it's wise to continue to misinterpret people?
Do you think the police are monitoring his comic? Someone obviously complained, and it's the police's job to follow up, who then determined he's not actually a threat, according to his own description of the meeting with the detectives.
I believe that Maryland must be a very quiet place, if the police has time to spend on such nonsense.
This assumes that the users are aware of problems with the pagerank, and more or less collectively decide to abandon Google for a better alternative.
Actually, it assumes that users find out that other sites give better search results than google, and then individually decides to go for that competitor, one by one. Note that Google itself didn't rise to power because people found out altavistas algorithms were inferior, and then everyone decided to switch at once.
This may or may not happen, but in other similar situations there is no apparent reason to believe that a large user community goes for quality vs. well-known name.
There is every reason to believe that. It was, if you remember, exactly this mechanism that made google a search-giant.
but it seems silly to me to research hydrogen or whatever scheme Shell and BP (who are completely unbiased research firms) propose rather than leverage existing technology until they provide a real solution.
It's not and either-or kind of thing. While Shell and BP researches whatever they want to do, other researchers working for other (private or governmental) institutions are free to research whatever they want.
Wouldn't it make sense to say that all parking lots should be covered at least partially by solar panels?
In one word: no!
Exactly why you think this makes sense at all, is beyond me, but here are some counterarguments:
Solar panels are not needed for the electric cars to plug in somewhere. What you need is a connection to the electric grid.
Solar panels are not needed for creating shade. What you need is a roof.
Parking spots are not needed for solar panels. What you need is a place with lots of sun and cheap land.
Solar panels is not needed for generating energy from the sun. It's just the most convenient way of doing it on a consumer scale (e.g. for a remote cabin, or a sailing yacht).
Solar panels are not environmentally friendly (yet)
Just because you make a law, doesn't mean solar panels suddenly pop up at every parking stop. Somebody will have to pay for it, and unless "someone" is the government, "someone" will probably take it to court, where the law will be invalidated. Even if "someone" is the government, it is likely that it will be taken to court. At least, nothing will happen. It's a waste of money.
Would it cause to much pollution to make that many panels?
Yes, producing solar panels produces a fair amount of pollution. There are other less polluting ways of harvesting solar energy on a larger scale, such as mirrors reflecting sunlight from a large area into a single very hot spot, which is used to run the equivalent of a steam-engine (in simplified terms). Or indirectly, such as damming up rivers and using turbines (the water was transported up above the dam by the sun)
Are electric cars truly that much more expensive?
At the market today, they are. I looked at buying a used electric car myself, and found that after replacing the batteries (which would be needed soon anyway), I could probably just as well have bought a new normal car. And I would still live with the inconveniences of an electric car (small, slow, can't drive for long, takes long time to charge, needs place to charge, still needs fossil fuels for heater in winter). Electric cars are best used for profiling companies as "environmentally aware", their practical use is still limited, and certainly not competitive.
Or are lobbyists once again trying to ruin our chances of survival so we are nearly forced to keep spending money at their gas/hydrogen/soybean oil stations?
Both the oil companies and environmental organizations keep lobbyists.
Actually a computer genius can do far more than a team of five average engineers. The term has gone out of favour, but there actually exists superprogrammers.
Are you suggesting that too much sun on the tip of your nose, is something that will put strong evolutionary pressure towards darker skin all over the body? I wouldn't waste my time trying to test that theory.
I believe the biting cold combined with wind would bring more evolutionary pressure than a few reflected sun rays (although inuits invented sunglasses a long time ago) . It would be more interesting to investigate whether Inuit facial skin is more resistant to frostbite than e.g. Kenyan facial skin.
Please explain Iceland and Scandinavia? Same conditions, same food (other than the raw seal meat.) Yet those folks are fairly light skinned, and blond?
Not same conditions. Not same food. I believe clearing up this misunderstanding removes the need for further explanations.
Yeah, you know inuits love to take their heavy clothing off, and let their naked bodies absorb the precious sunshine in out there in the snow at -30 degrees.
So what happened to the folks from Iceland and Scandinavia? These folks eat fish to the wahzoo and some of it is downright disgusting.
Oh, are we? I didn't know that. Like most norwegians, I very rarely eat fish. However, Norwegians fish a lot of fish, which is exported to other countries.
In a historical perspective, it's no different. While many coastal-living norwegians has had fish as an important part of their diet, it has never been like the inuits who practically eat nothing but fish and seal. Farming has probably been even more important. And people would trade, so farmers would get fish, and fishermen would get meat, grains (rye, oat, barley), root vegetables, and other herbs).
Neither must we forget that our teeth isn't necessarily designed for living untill we are 80 years. Humans can reproduce at age 15, which means that at age 30, you can die with a good conscience. If you want to see your grand kids grow up, you can wait until you are 45 to die. Furthermore, the teeth must only be good enough to let you survive, not necessarily to keep you from pain.
I believe a diet consisting mostly of meat, veggies, and water would keep your teeth sufficiently healthy for you to survive until you are 45, even if you don't use a toothbrush.
who think they are entitled to a new piece of music just because it's easily available to download.
And who are you to say they aren't? (Hint: "It's the law", is not a good answer. Laws can and should be changed to reflect the times we are living in. Digital technology is such a change)
Yes. Believe it or not, I actually like the insert booklets and other such packaging, along with the music that is included on the disc.
Habit. You're conditioned to associate the packaging with the enjoyment of owning and being able to listen to a new piece of music. Newer generations that grow up with mp3s will not have this response. Besides, do you enjoy having to rip it to mp3 before you can transfer it to your mp3-player as well?
First of all, it's not "guilt" to pay someone for the work they do.
Or morale. Or ethics. Or whatever.
Just letting you know that you're wrong about the reasons why people buy/don't buy cds anymore.
Most people stop buying CDs because they get older than 30.
From an audiophile point of view, the CD *IS* higher quality than a MP3.
Ooh, you are an audiophile with golden ears (or at least think you are, and have spent your money on it), but you are still unable to read. Please tell me exactly where I claimed mp3 is better than CD, and you will win this argument.
What I was claiming was that the ability for consumers to download information, is going to kill any market for information stored on physical media. I couldn't care less about whether you want SACD-quality audio, or 32 kbit/s mono mp3. Just as I couldn't care less about whether you prefer Classical or "Hits for Kids". No matter how snobbish you feel about buying Classe instead of Sony, it is not going to refute my argument. So please start acting on your reading comprehension skills before you accuse people of saying things they never even thought of.
And by the way; iTunes let you download songs in Apple lossless format. And you already see rips of SACD spreading around at warez-sites and in various filesharing communities.
Wow! Where do you buy your uber-reliable HDs that never fail?
Usually from my local hardware store, but I doubt they are more reliable there than anywhere else.
How do you use your system to recover the document you were working on all week, but then you flubbed a keyboard command and deleted it?
I try to avoid deleting useful stuff. But if it's important enough, I keep more than one copy of it, on disk, on my usb-thumbdrive, on my gmail account, or some combination of them. Note that this is extremely rare, as most of my stuff is either easy to recreate or re-download, or simply not that essential. The accumulated work involved in the management of doing real backups is greater than the accumulated work involved in repairing such "disasters".
How do you get your files back if there was (god-forbid) a fire in your house?
If there was a fire in my house, my files would not be my first priority.
I get the impression you're kind of missing the point of backups.
Nope, like most people using a personal home computer, he simply doesn't have anything important enough on his computer to worry. It's only data. Unless loosing the stuff on it also means you loose your income (or something more important), it's not really essential.
Backups is, for most people, an unnecessary complication. Most people are intelligent enough to keep multiple copies of their masters thesis, even without backup software, and that's about the most important thing normal people keep on their computers. Even then, months of work on a masters thesis can usually be rewritten in a few days from your notes. Companies that need their financial records, customer database, inventory list, etc, have a more pressing need for backups.
I'm confused here. Are there still people who pays for music on physical media? That's so 1990s!
No need to read the article. Like any physical medium that purely exists to give the impression that you are buying it instead of the information stored on it, CDs as are dying. It's just so much more convenient to download it directly to your computer and mp3-player. Of course this process can (and probably will) take time. But claiming otherwise is to deny reality. The only people buying music on CDs today are doing it either out of guilt, habit, fear of new technology, or lack of knowledge. This isn't going to continue forever.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like God? If so, I hope I'm not surprising you by mentioning that this idea is something most humans have thought about for many millennia, at least as long as we have written records, and probably as long as there have been humans.
Our position in history right now (or since the scientific revolution) is unique, exactly because it allows us to ignore superstition, and focus on things that exist, instead of having to rely upon wishful thinking.
By taking an introductory math course at a university, you can understand infinity too. "Never" is a slight exaggeration here.
This stems from one of those hard-to-kill modern myths that says that "we are only using 10% of our brains". Aside from the fact that this myth is wrong (and even if it was right, it would be misleading, as not every circuit in a pentium processor is active during every point of every computation either), extending it to "human capacity" doesn't make it more correct.
If you want to use 100% of human capacity, start by running a marathon while teaching yourself a new language, solving math puzzles, juggling three balls (in each hand), humming to a tune you compose at the moment, keeping in touch with your friends through your cell-phone, jerking yourself off, fighting off an infection you deliberately introduced to yourself, restoring some tissue damage from a few small knife-wounds, and eating spoiled food. I'm sure you aren't using 100% of your capacity even then, but it's at least more like it than when you're writing nonsense on slashdot.
He was wrong. I'm quite sure he didn't predict the Russian revolution in 1917, or the first and second world war, which led to the cold war. His prediction was mostly based on Russia being a big country, USA rising to become a big country, and therefore, eventually, rivals. In the mean time, just about anything could have happened. That events eventually played out to make this particular prediction true for a few decades, is pure coincidence.
People who have amnesia. People who would like to record every waking moment but not have to deal with turning the recording on and off. People in law-enforcement. People who need to document fraud and/or abuse by other people, but can't necessarily predict when the interesting bits happen. Students who like to review one of their classes. Perverts who like to sell their sex-experiences on the Internet. Journalists who don't like taking notes. Anyone who have trouble remembering names, or directions, or whatever. In short, just about anyone, I guess.
Sure. The idea is that if it's no hassle to record stuff, why not just record it all. The device could be embedded in your wrist-watch and/or cellphone, which most people carry around anyway. Or it could be an implant. If you don't need to access it, you won't waste any time accessing it, and the additional weight you have to carry is less than the extra weight you already carry because you forgot to cut your toenails.
I know I feel that way, but I'm not sure everyone feels that way. But even if you do feel that way (like I do), that doesn't remove the usefulness of such a device. Nobody is forcing you to review your angst-ridden teenage depression all the time. But if you need to remember something, you could.
Why is that wasteful? Storage is cheap. Micro-managing it is wasteful, because it costs more money and time than not managing it at all. Besides, you may end up some day wanting to see how much time you waste inspecting older memories. In short, you could just as well argue that everyone should use letters of maximum 2mm height, and no paragraph breaks or whitespace, when handwriting, since otherwise you would waste ink and paper. The world just doesn't work that way.
I'm not really that curious. But ok, let's look at the link: Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene regulation that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). When a cell undergoes such an epigenetic change, it is the phenotype of the cell that is affected.
I must ask, exactly what is it that is so hard about this? Ok, it uses terms that the reader may not be familiar with, but, and it's a big "but", all those terms have hyperlinks to their own articles. I'm a far cry from a cell biologist, but I could understand what epigenetics is within 15 seconds of viewing the article using only the background knowledge I had from biology in high school. If you lack almost any kind of useful background knowledge, I would expect at most half an hour would be needed. Which, in my eye, is fair. If you don't want to put in some effort in trying to understand a technical subject for which you lack almost any kind of useful background knowledge, you have no right to complain.
Ok, to me they read the same. I think you must work on your reading skills. Wikipedia is intended to be an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias have always strived to be brief and precise. If you want hand holding and a textbook approach, you seem to already have found it, so I'm not sure why you're complaining.
Ok, let's look at wikipedia again. The second sentence reads: Mitochondria are sometimes described as "cellular power plants," because they churn out energy for the cell [snip]. This is the kind of language you would find in childrens books. I agree that there were other bits that were more technical, but if this isn't enough to put you on the right track, nothing is.
Besides, encyclopedias were never intended to be textbooks. If you really have no idea what mitochondria are, and no background knowledge that helps you understand the terse language of an encyclopedia article, maybe you should look at a biology textbook instead. You know, at school, when they teach biology, they don't use encyclopedias. Textbooks are what they use for teaching people stuff. Encyclopedias should instead be classified as reference works.
Sorry, but that's your problem. You can either click on the link, and learn what it means, or you can ignore it for now, and still get a pretty good understanding. It's "[strange word] mechanics for gases and liquids".
I agree that this is a good idea. I fail to see why every article should be for dummies, though...
Good. If they don't even understand the subject, I don't want them editing the article.
That some companies unwisely decided to poison the CD-medium with copy-"protection" as well, didn't make a dent of difference. Since the music industry failed to reinvent themselves to changing times, they die. They could have made themselves filthy rich if they had started early on with a subscription service, or something like that. But they chose the route of DRM, lawyers, and plain old idiocy. And like any business not paying attention to the world around them, they are slowly dying as a result.
No. If you want the "literal" meaning, it's exactly what the romans meant. To reduce by 10%, or in more direct terms: to randomly kill every tenth person. Such as when a new general was to take over some troops that didn't necessarily be fanatically devoted to him, he would start by decimating the troops to make sure they were obedient to him from now on... (and yeah, this worked most of the time, although today the technique is generally frown upon, as it is considered to be of questionable ethical judgement)
The point the grandparent was making was that (a) decimate now means something else, and usually more drastic than it mean to the Romans (b) the music industry isn't decimated in this new sense
Yeah, but why did the feds need to investigate anything beyond the actual web-comic? I mean, for any sane, normal person, it would be obvious that the person complaining needs to make his case a bit stronger. At least before the feds should start wasting taxpayer money on it. This should have been forgotten away in a closet (or wastebasket) the moment it came in.
More like an Idiocracy.
You think so? Try talking about your dick to a female coworker then?
Why not? Because it's not work-related? Or because it's about choosing weapons for their inability to hurt people since all you want is target shooting? Would a conversation about killing real muslims in Iraq or Afghanistan be more suitable?
If your inability to understand speech is so unimaginatively great that you take this as a description of a killing, or as a wish to kill someone, you belong in mental care, not in a government position.
Why not? Only people who are so retarded that they managed to misinterpret the first conversation will be able to misinterpret this as well. And those people should be locked up in institutions and receive proper psychiatric care.
No, he got fired for someone misinterpreting what he said (which is ok, his contract specifically allowed him to be fired for any reason, including the boss being an idiot). And then they continue to misinterpret what he says again. Do you think it's wise to continue to misinterpret people?
I believe that Maryland must be a very quiet place, if the police has time to spend on such nonsense.
Actually, it assumes that users find out that other sites give better search results than google, and then individually decides to go for that competitor, one by one. Note that Google itself didn't rise to power because people found out altavistas algorithms were inferior, and then everyone decided to switch at once.
There is every reason to believe that. It was, if you remember, exactly this mechanism that made google a search-giant.
It's not and either-or kind of thing. While Shell and BP researches whatever they want to do, other researchers working for other (private or governmental) institutions are free to research whatever they want.
In one word: no!
Exactly why you think this makes sense at all, is beyond me, but here are some counterarguments:
Yes, producing solar panels produces a fair amount of pollution. There are other less polluting ways of harvesting solar energy on a larger scale, such as mirrors reflecting sunlight from a large area into a single very hot spot, which is used to run the equivalent of a steam-engine (in simplified terms). Or indirectly, such as damming up rivers and using turbines (the water was transported up above the dam by the sun)
At the market today, they are. I looked at buying a used electric car myself, and found that after replacing the batteries (which would be needed soon anyway), I could probably just as well have bought a new normal car. And I would still live with the inconveniences of an electric car (small, slow, can't drive for long, takes long time to charge, needs place to charge, still needs fossil fuels for heater in winter). Electric cars are best used for profiling companies as "environmentally aware", their practical use is still limited, and certainly not competitive.
Both the oil companies and environmental organizations keep lobbyists.
Actually a computer genius can do far more than a team of five average engineers. The term has gone out of favour, but there actually exists superprogrammers.
Nope, but there is tea!
Are you suggesting that too much sun on the tip of your nose, is something that will put strong evolutionary pressure towards darker skin all over the body? I wouldn't waste my time trying to test that theory.
I believe the biting cold combined with wind would bring more evolutionary pressure than a few reflected sun rays (although inuits invented sunglasses a long time ago) . It would be more interesting to investigate whether Inuit facial skin is more resistant to frostbite than e.g. Kenyan facial skin.
Not same conditions. Not same food. I believe clearing up this misunderstanding removes the need for further explanations.
Yeah, you know inuits love to take their heavy clothing off, and let their naked bodies absorb the precious sunshine in out there in the snow at -30 degrees.
Oh, are we? I didn't know that. Like most norwegians, I very rarely eat fish. However, Norwegians fish a lot of fish, which is exported to other countries.
In a historical perspective, it's no different. While many coastal-living norwegians has had fish as an important part of their diet, it has never been like the inuits who practically eat nothing but fish and seal. Farming has probably been even more important. And people would trade, so farmers would get fish, and fishermen would get meat, grains (rye, oat, barley), root vegetables, and other herbs).
Neither must we forget that our teeth isn't necessarily designed for living untill we are 80 years. Humans can reproduce at age 15, which means that at age 30, you can die with a good conscience. If you want to see your grand kids grow up, you can wait until you are 45 to die. Furthermore, the teeth must only be good enough to let you survive, not necessarily to keep you from pain.
I believe a diet consisting mostly of meat, veggies, and water would keep your teeth sufficiently healthy for you to survive until you are 45, even if you don't use a toothbrush.
I explain it by saying that cavemen probably ate fruit, while dogs typically don't. Do you have any further questions?
You are not the first to have said something similar. Here is an earlier one
And who are you to say they aren't? (Hint: "It's the law", is not a good answer. Laws can and should be changed to reflect the times we are living in. Digital technology is such a change)
Habit. You're conditioned to associate the packaging with the enjoyment of owning and being able to listen to a new piece of music. Newer generations that grow up with mp3s will not have this response. Besides, do you enjoy having to rip it to mp3 before you can transfer it to your mp3-player as well?
Or morale. Or ethics. Or whatever.
Most people stop buying CDs because they get older than 30.
Ooh, you are an audiophile with golden ears (or at least think you are, and have spent your money on it), but you are still unable to read. Please tell me exactly where I claimed mp3 is better than CD, and you will win this argument.
What I was claiming was that the ability for consumers to download information, is going to kill any market for information stored on physical media. I couldn't care less about whether you want SACD-quality audio, or 32 kbit/s mono mp3. Just as I couldn't care less about whether you prefer Classical or "Hits for Kids". No matter how snobbish you feel about buying Classe instead of Sony, it is not going to refute my argument. So please start acting on your reading comprehension skills before you accuse people of saying things they never even thought of.
And by the way; iTunes let you download songs in Apple lossless format. And you already see rips of SACD spreading around at warez-sites and in various filesharing communities.
Usually from my local hardware store, but I doubt they are more reliable there than anywhere else.
I try to avoid deleting useful stuff. But if it's important enough, I keep more than one copy of it, on disk, on my usb-thumbdrive, on my gmail account, or some combination of them. Note that this is extremely rare, as most of my stuff is either easy to recreate or re-download, or simply not that essential. The accumulated work involved in the management of doing real backups is greater than the accumulated work involved in repairing such "disasters".
If there was a fire in my house, my files would not be my first priority.
Nope, like most people using a personal home computer, he simply doesn't have anything important enough on his computer to worry. It's only data. Unless loosing the stuff on it also means you loose your income (or something more important), it's not really essential.
Backups is, for most people, an unnecessary complication. Most people are intelligent enough to keep multiple copies of their masters thesis, even without backup software, and that's about the most important thing normal people keep on their computers. Even then, months of work on a masters thesis can usually be rewritten in a few days from your notes. Companies that need their financial records, customer database, inventory list, etc, have a more pressing need for backups.
I'm confused here. Are there still people who pays for music on physical media? That's so 1990s!
No need to read the article. Like any physical medium that purely exists to give the impression that you are buying it instead of the information stored on it, CDs as are dying. It's just so much more convenient to download it directly to your computer and mp3-player. Of course this process can (and probably will) take time. But claiming otherwise is to deny reality. The only people buying music on CDs today are doing it either out of guilt, habit, fear of new technology, or lack of knowledge. This isn't going to continue forever.