The only reason you'd want to surgically implant something is for that feedback where typing things in fingers or fiddling with knobs and such just won't cut it. Replacement eyeballs, limb control, and thought controlled devices are really cool. Or, you know, it's making up for something your body is just failing to do: pacemakers, dialysis, and such.
But for everything else, you want it to be trivially replaceable, upgradeable, and not to fuck around with SURGERY. You want your external brain to be a comfortable 3 cm OUTSIDE of your body where it's convenient to put down, and pick up. You know, in a pocket. Like a phone.
Soooo.... He's a political mover and shaker that can get public funds funneled to his department to give his underlings a kooshier life while they... do whatever it is they do. Presumably they're doing something more important and beneficial to society than those poor shlubs in the psychology department who are still in the drafty WWII-era building.
You know what would justify an "upswing in forturne" for that department? Actually doing some science, graduating students that go onto do impressive things in their field, publishing meaningful papers, and bringing glory to the school for all the awesome shit they do. The bit where the professor gets in the news and you get a swanky building are supposed to come after that, not before.
Any nuclear reactor design "of the future" is going to be a cost-overrun nightmare and an economic boondoggle.
We've got a lot of REALLY smart nuclear engineers that have a lot of great ideas, but they keep on fucking with the damn thing. EACH and every nuclear plant in the USA is it's own special little baby with parts, manuals, and engineers that only every work with just that plant. Each one tried something new, each one is different, each one is a unique little snowflake. And that costs a hell of a lot of money to maintain. And they cost even more when they're trying something new and untested.
France has the most standardized nuclear reactors in the world. And THAT is why they can make cheap power. And, you know, it's not like France only has one design or that the USA rebuilt the wheel every time. France is just more standardized than we are.
Nuclear is a fantastic option. If only we could do it cheaply and safely.
Did you build your house on the top of a hill? High winds rip off your roof. Bottom of the hill? Floods. On the side of the hill? Mudslides. Built on a flat featureless plain? Tornadoes. Did you build a basement to seek shelter in? Heavy rains soak in and ruin everything.
But areas with heavy rains aren't featureless plains, they develop rivers that cut gouges into the earth and make for bluffs. And mudslides only happen when there's extreme soil erosion. If there's going to be flooding at the bottom of the hill there's usually a RIVER there.
All of those are arguments that make sense when the climate isn't schizophrenic. What appears to be "unwise building habits" AFTER the freak weather happens was a perfectly rational thing to do given the local climate. Nobody builds big towers in hurricane country. But what counts as "hurricane country" is changing. They didn't build the sewers of New york to deal with city-wide flooding. They are not prepared for that. They DID build the sewers of New Orleans to deal with city-wide flooding, because it's happening constantly. Changing that sort of infrastructure is expensive and hard. But not having a suitable infrastructure is ludicrously more expensive.
So be careful with how you long about the term "unwise building habits". What was once perfectly wise, now isn't. And buildings last a really long time. Hopefully.
Well yeah, terraforming the planet would be hard, but filling a dome with oxygen is a good step. And yes, it has to be geodesic. Because it looks like the future.
Magnetism, actually. The magnetosphere (all the best names have been taken by old discoveries, btw) keep solar winds from stripping away the atmosphere of a planet. That and, you know, gravity to keep the air stuck to the surface.
1) Why don't you think that human being evolved from primordial goo?
Talk about low odds! Have you even tried to fathom the extreme length and complexity of the chain required for a random collection of proteins to result in the enormously complex body we call human, not to mention the phenomenon of consciousness?
Ok, that an understandable position. One I've heard before. And yes, actually I have contemplated the odds of it all happening the way it did. I'm a software engineer and I've played around extensively with genetic algorithms so I understand what they're talking about when they say a "random mutation" lead to a new species. I've seen that happen. You know, simulated.
First off, you have to understand that it didn't have to happen exactly this way. Humans are not some ultimate design that everything has been working towards. And indeed there are a LOT of other attempts with more rudimentary designs hanging around. And if the slate gets wiped clean in fullscale nuclear war, they'll live on while we die. Whose the fittest now?
So the odds that we came out exactly as we did? Astronomical. The odds that we... say... process oxygen and consume plant matter (given that the early plant life terraformed the planet causing the Cambrian explosion), pretty good. The longest odds, given our current knowledge appears to be odds of amino acids bumping into each other and forming life. I'm talking about abiogenesis. And yeah, that's a damn good question about how that happened. But it's not part of evolution. Evolution is how life changed, not where it came from. And all signs point to life starting out as single-celled organisms about 3.6 billion years ago. Because we have evidence of that.
Second: Ok, so you think there's a long-shot of that happening. Fair enough. What are the alternatives? How did we get here. Come on. Don't be shy. Lay it out for everyone to see.
2) Do you think there's any compelling evidence to suggest any other alternative than human beings evolving from earlier primates? Could you share?
Oops, you jumped from "evolving from goo" to "evolving from earlier primates." These are wholly different questions.
And could you try this one again? I know it's a different question. You're allowed to give a wholly different answer. That's why it has a #2 next to it. Also, it's kind of a multi-parter. You see, if the best answer for "where did we come from?" is that we descended from primates, then where did primates come from? (Mammals). And then were did mammals come from? and so on and so on.
I mean, come on guy, you kind of dodged that question. Just give it a shot. What's the alternative to us descending from primates? If we didn't... Then why are there so many similarities? And who did all these proto-human skulls belong to?
Remember when everyone thought that humanoid robots where the wave of the future and would be grandpa's maid and take over the job of factory workers? It turns out that humanoid robots are bloody hard, and it's a lot easier to automate the task at hand with more conventional tools and machines that look nothing like people.
1. It is not a fact that human beings evolved from primordial goo. That would be an unsubstantiated assertion based on an extreme extrapolation of limited evidence of small-scale phenomena.
Whoa... whoa. whoawhoawhoa. I think you're starting this whole thing with a mistake. Because, uh... yeah, that is a fact.
1) Why don't you think that human being evolved from primordial goo?
2) Do you think there's any compelling evidence to suggest any other alternative than human beings evolving from earlier primates? Could you share? 2a) Do you have any evidence suggesting primates didn't evolve from earlier mammals? 2b,c,d,etc) (You can see where this is going) Why don't you think that mammals evolved from earlier animals, Eukaryota, etc. Feel free to fill the gaps, I'm skipping over plenty. 2x) Why do other primates look so much like us? Why do we share so much DNA with them? 2y) If this DNA evidence doesn't make sense, why is there such strong DNA similarity between family members? 2z) Why do you think humans are all that much different than other animals?
3) This "extreme extrapolation" does seem like a leap when going from single-celled organisms to humans, but since each of the smallest steps appear to make perfect sense in a long unbroken chain tracing our origins back. And it fits very nicely into the observed tree of life from which everything evolved. It explains why whales have hipbones, why pandas now have thumbs, why horses and donkies can breed, and why birds have raptor legs.
4) "Limited Evidence"!? are you kidding me? I just... I've got to step back and tackle some basics first. 4a) Are you questioning all of evolution or just human evolution? 4a1) [You're questioning human evolution] We've got an awful lot of bones showing a pretty damn gradual change from earlier primates into homo sapiens. I mean, have you googled "human skull evolution"? 4a2) [You're questioning all of evolution] ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
5) "small-scale phenomena". Yeah, you know, other than lenki's 50 year experiment showing e-coli fundamentally evolving new traits. Panda's growing a new digit. Horses and donkeys showing evidence of being on the tail end of splitting into two different species. And land-walking mammals turning into something that looks a lot like a fish (whales and dolphins). You can say that's all too small of a change that doesn't count and you can say that's too big of a change and you can't believe it happened, but you just end up looking like a fool.
And this here is one of the big reasons that "faith" and "reason" seem to be at incompatible. I'm just like you, I don't think they're incompatible, but boy oh boy are you doing your damned best to make it look that way.
Simply put, we DID evolve from goo. A lot like that skuzzy stuff you find on your food when it goes bad. That's established fact. It's the fact of evolution. The theory of evolution details how it happened. To believe otherwise is foolishness. To convince me otherwise would require a DAMN good alternative that somehow explains all the supporting evidence.
It's great that you say you're pro-Reason. But you've got to start being reasonable.
I think you meant to reply to me instead of that guy with the southpark joke of a name. It's ok, technology can be hard, it's why I get paid.
And leads to the need for genocidal behavior.
Whoa dude. Just because we have a number of people out of work that are too old or too stupid to retrain doesn't mean we have to kill them.
To put this simply. Sure you can automate bread making, and produce billions of dollars in bread each day. But that bread is nothing like the bread your mother made for you as a kid.
Uh.... that argument falls apart because the FACTORY machines that we're making are LITERALLY following the same process that the FACTORY WORKERS use to make billions of loaves of bread per whatnot. It's still wonder bread. It's not a creative art. For that you have to pay more to get something like an artisan loaf from a local baker. And OMG does it taste so much better. Especially fresh. But you pay for that. When the starving child wants some bread, but mum can only afford wonder bread, I'll be the first to punch you in the face for trying to guilt me into not making robots which output a cheaper loaf.
Also, fuck you, I grew up on wonder bread. Mum was too busy to spend all that time kneading dough. Until we got a bread machine. And fresh out of the bot, it was DELICIOUS. (Also, at the end of highschool we went on a home-made pretzel kick. Freshness is key. If you could rig up some artillery to deliver loaves straight from the factory, we'd be in heaven.)
Human love and care makes that wine have meaning.
No... no I don't think it does. It's the alcohol which makes up the bulk of the meaning. Plus a little for flavor (which is what you pay for). And better processes (which largely remove human interaction) have made wine extremely more regular and consistent. Back in the day you worried about "a good year". Now every year is a good year.
In the bread example, what GIVES bread it's meaning is the carbohydrates. Plus or minus a few other things, but it's mostly about fueling people. I mean, nutritionally most people really just need to eat less, so all the filler and whatnot they put into wonderbread is arguably a net positive impact... but that's kinda stretching it.
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Yeah dude. I'm actually a big fan of social services, even things like wealth redistribution have their place. When the autobots improve efficiency, who reaps that reward? The industrialist will say that he owns the robot, and invested in it, so he owns the profit. And that's legit when it's risky and new. The (new)workers lay claim to it as they're producing SO MUCH more bread with so little people. And that's also legit, while there's extra profits. (And those groups are expected to struggle back and forth). When it becomes typical, obvious, and simply a part of the technological changes, then those profits need to go to society on the whole. And... arguably... the free market, in whatever capacity it exists, appears to be the best way to balance all those interlocking scales.
And for the displaced workers? Because we're all in this together and we obviously got by just fine with the old system for so long, we can all afford to retrain those who can. For those too old to justify that cost? Well, early retirement and the social safety net. We can most certainly afford it. We are (collectively) ludicrously wealthy. It might not be glamorous, but it'll sustain them. So sorry if shit sucks, but you gambled on an industry that no longer needs you.
I know you may or may not be close the the riffraff that have to subsist on what they can when they can where they can, but there's this thing called "the value menu".
And while this might blow your mind... burgers are a subset of sandwiches. It's true!
Which is one of the reasons that a lot of math nerds are clustering PS4's together to crunch numbers. If the wizards of today can piggyback on the mouth-breathing inarticulate fools wasting their lives trying to live in a fantasy, then all the more power to them.
Ah, Pascal's wager. A lot like the tragedy of the commons, you can bet your ass that a lot of people won't take that wager because it oh so marginally has a chance of benefiting them. Sadly, what the Pascal and the masses who appeal to his wager miss that that there IS an effect by believing in a thing that is most assuredly false.
Let me make that clear:
if you lose, you lose nothing.
That. That part right there is where he messed up. Because that's not how the game is played and you DO lose something if you lose the wager.
It makes you think that these holy books and their charlatans who claim knowledge about the subject might be on to something. It affects your judgement. It affects your worldview and your outlook on life. It makes you think that funerals are for something other than the living's benefit. And most damningly, it affects your kids.
Hey, something it's a force for good. But more and more the material that the question has been married to at the hip, like hating gays, out-breeding your competition, and wearing poly-cotton blend is becoming more detrimental than it is good. And after you divorce the wager from all the cruft of the past, you're left with a pretty empty an hollow thing that, thanks to the evolutionary and sociological forces at play, don't seem to survive for long.
And if I'm wrong I wouldn't want to party with a dude that would cast me down for trying to do some good in the world. So fuck'em.
The Federal reserve has made it so that the only thing dumber than putting your money in a bank is not putting your money in a bank. They basically force everyone to become irresponsible investors or they confiscate your money through inflation.
So buy something.
Inflation makes the dollar worth less. Things cost more. Those two statements are the same thing. If your dollar would buy you a sandwich today, and you're worried about it not being worth enough to buy a sandwich tomorrow, buy the sandwich.
That's the entire idea of investments. You buy portions of things. You then own portions of things rather than owning money.
There's an upper limit of how safe you can play it. One of the safer things you can invest in is, yeah, bonds. But you shouldn't hang on to bonds for too long (I mean, otherwise you might as well play the stock market), and inflation doesn't have that big of an impact over a few years. If it did, crazy shit would be hitting the fan like down in Zimbabwe, or the USA back in the 70's.
First they came for the weavers, but I was not a weaver, and so I said nothing.
Then they came for the factory line workers, but I was in charge of programming the robots that took over that job so I said a whole lot of things about how to do it better. As I was paid a middle-class rate to automate a mind-numbingly boring job and remove the rote monotony of life freeing up a human soul to go do important things, I didn't feel particularly bad about doing it either. We're making the world a better place.
And then they came for the programmers, and I laughed in their face as they tried to make yet another super-high level languages that didn't suck or need dedicated programmers. And I laughed at their graphical programming interfaces made for the unskilled masses. And I laughed at all those companies that offshored development to poorly trained foreigners. And I laughed as they came back complaining that the highly skilled foreigners were demanding to be paid.
And then there was no one to speak out for me except the scientists, technophiles, engineers, and mathematicians who had decent jobs. Plus the artists, politicians, and managers that we apparently can have an unlimited number of without perfecting the industry. It's as if people found new things to do after farming was industrialized.
So for all you neo-Luddites out there, piss off and go find a loom to smash.
This would essentially be my response. Users should most certainly not have to struggle to get anything done. It should "just work". That's the goal for good software targeting the masses. Software that specifically targets developers though? I want it to be useful and powerful to help me get shit done.
There's a reason that Photoshop, AutoCAD, Blender, and programming tools are simply a bitch to use. Because people use them every day and no learning curve is too hard for a dedicated professional. Anything that shaves off seconds of a task is a vital improvement to the tool. Any new features adds to the tool. Making it easy to use runs counter-purpose to that inherent complexity. Not that simplicity is bad, but it's less important.
Also on that list is MVS. It's one hell of a beast of a machine, and you know what? I didn't really man up and learn how to use it back in college. It was a text editor and a compile button for a long time. And that turned out to be a good plan because Microsoft keeps fucking changing everything on a regular basis. I learned how to use gcc, gdb, valgrind, makefiles, my text editor of choice, and it's served me really well for the past decade.
3) Linux really, really needs a Visual Studio. The reason why Visual Debugger is so great is largely because of the rest of Visual Studio. No, Eclipse doesn't count.
Man up and learn how to use GDB. It's not that hard. And makefiles are your friend.
I dunno about the specific developers at Ubutnu, but the reason that Ubuntu exists, other than being pissed at Debian's long release cycle, is because everyone was really sick and tired of the fragmentation that user-grade Linux distros were presenting. "What distro should I use?" isn't a question you want newbies to have to ask. "Well that depends on what distro you're using" isn't a response that I should have to give to my grandmother running Linux for the first time. Ubuntu have a nice solid STANDARD platform and interface for non-techy users to become familiar with.
So of course they decided to switch everyone to Unity. Fuckers.
She has a duty to the shareholders of Yahoo to do what is best for them.
Which can mean virtually anything.
"To stand strong on the merits of an open, free, and unoppressed Internet, which is the foundation upon which our entire company is built and the cornerstone of all the value behind the property of our shareholders, we cannot possibly abide by the illegal and unconstitutional demands of the NSA. "
"So we don't have the feds kick in our doors and tear up our charter annulling our shareholder's wealth, we're sucking the cock of the NSA".
"To increase our corporate coffers and maximize dividends (Do we even give out dividends?) I have fired all of our employees, sold all equipment, land, rights, and properties. This is in their best interest, we are literally giving our shareholders more money."
"To secure long-term goals we're taking all of our company funds and sinking it into research and development to create some kick-ass new things that will lure customers and revenue in the future. We do this for our shareholders as they will reap the benefit of owning a portion of that future revenue. It's an investment, right?"
"To maximize our competitiveness, I'm increasing the bonuses to our executive staff. Without these bonuses, we will lose our guiding force in these perilous economically troubling times. This is ultimately for the shareholders. We don't want their investments to be steered off a cliff, now do we?"
"I'm the CEO, if I want to spend the money on hookers and blow, I'll damn well spend it on hookers and blow. Don't like it? Fire me. I keep the damn company from swirling the drain in hard times and I keep it growing in good times. That's what you pay me for. Now piss off and let me steer the boat."
Come on dude, "doing what's best for the shareholders" is such a meaningless term that it's laughable.
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The only reason you'd want to surgically implant something is for that feedback where typing things in fingers or fiddling with knobs and such just won't cut it. Replacement eyeballs, limb control, and thought controlled devices are really cool. Or, you know, it's making up for something your body is just failing to do: pacemakers, dialysis, and such.
But for everything else, you want it to be trivially replaceable, upgradeable, and not to fuck around with SURGERY. You want your external brain to be a comfortable 3 cm OUTSIDE of your body where it's convenient to put down, and pick up. You know, in a pocket. Like a phone.
Soooo.... He's a political mover and shaker that can get public funds funneled to his department to give his underlings a kooshier life while they... do whatever it is they do. Presumably they're doing something more important and beneficial to society than those poor shlubs in the psychology department who are still in the drafty WWII-era building.
You know what would justify an "upswing in forturne" for that department? Actually doing some science, graduating students that go onto do impressive things in their field, publishing meaningful papers, and bringing glory to the school for all the awesome shit they do. The bit where the professor gets in the news and you get a swanky building are supposed to come after that, not before.
Any nuclear reactor design "of the future" is going to be a cost-overrun nightmare and an economic boondoggle.
We've got a lot of REALLY smart nuclear engineers that have a lot of great ideas, but they keep on fucking with the damn thing. EACH and every nuclear plant in the USA is it's own special little baby with parts, manuals, and engineers that only every work with just that plant. Each one tried something new, each one is different, each one is a unique little snowflake. And that costs a hell of a lot of money to maintain. And they cost even more when they're trying something new and untested.
France has the most standardized nuclear reactors in the world. And THAT is why they can make cheap power. And, you know, it's not like France only has one design or that the USA rebuilt the wheel every time. France is just more standardized than we are.
Nuclear is a fantastic option. If only we could do it cheaply and safely.
unwise building habits.
Did you build your house on the top of a hill? High winds rip off your roof.
Bottom of the hill? Floods.
On the side of the hill? Mudslides.
Built on a flat featureless plain? Tornadoes.
Did you build a basement to seek shelter in? Heavy rains soak in and ruin everything.
But areas with heavy rains aren't featureless plains, they develop rivers that cut gouges into the earth and make for bluffs. And mudslides only happen when there's extreme soil erosion. If there's going to be flooding at the bottom of the hill there's usually a RIVER there.
All of those are arguments that make sense when the climate isn't schizophrenic. What appears to be "unwise building habits" AFTER the freak weather happens was a perfectly rational thing to do given the local climate. Nobody builds big towers in hurricane country. But what counts as "hurricane country" is changing. They didn't build the sewers of New york to deal with city-wide flooding. They are not prepared for that. They DID build the sewers of New Orleans to deal with city-wide flooding, because it's happening constantly. Changing that sort of infrastructure is expensive and hard. But not having a suitable infrastructure is ludicrously more expensive.
So be careful with how you long about the term "unwise building habits". What was once perfectly wise, now isn't. And buildings last a really long time. Hopefully.
Well yeah, terraforming the planet would be hard, but filling a dome with oxygen is a good step. And yes, it has to be geodesic. Because it looks like the future.
Magnetism, actually. The magnetosphere (all the best names have been taken by old discoveries, btw) keep solar winds from stripping away the atmosphere of a planet. That and, you know, gravity to keep the air stuck to the surface.
1) Why don't you think that human being evolved from primordial goo?
Talk about low odds! Have you even tried to fathom the extreme length and complexity of the chain required for a random collection of proteins to result in the enormously complex body we call human, not to mention the phenomenon of consciousness?
Ok, that an understandable position. One I've heard before. And yes, actually I have contemplated the odds of it all happening the way it did. I'm a software engineer and I've played around extensively with genetic algorithms so I understand what they're talking about when they say a "random mutation" lead to a new species. I've seen that happen. You know, simulated.
First off, you have to understand that it didn't have to happen exactly this way. Humans are not some ultimate design that everything has been working towards. And indeed there are a LOT of other attempts with more rudimentary designs hanging around. And if the slate gets wiped clean in fullscale nuclear war, they'll live on while we die. Whose the fittest now?
So the odds that we came out exactly as we did? Astronomical. The odds that we... say... process oxygen and consume plant matter (given that the early plant life terraformed the planet causing the Cambrian explosion), pretty good. The longest odds, given our current knowledge appears to be odds of amino acids bumping into each other and forming life. I'm talking about abiogenesis. And yeah, that's a damn good question about how that happened. But it's not part of evolution. Evolution is how life changed, not where it came from. And all signs point to life starting out as single-celled organisms about 3.6 billion years ago. Because we have evidence of that.
Second: Ok, so you think there's a long-shot of that happening. Fair enough. What are the alternatives? How did we get here. Come on. Don't be shy. Lay it out for everyone to see.
2) Do you think there's any compelling evidence to suggest any other alternative than human beings evolving from earlier primates? Could you share?
Oops, you jumped from "evolving from goo" to "evolving from earlier primates." These are wholly different questions.
And could you try this one again? I know it's a different question. You're allowed to give a wholly different answer. That's why it has a #2 next to it. Also, it's kind of a multi-parter. You see, if the best answer for "where did we come from?" is that we descended from primates, then where did primates come from? (Mammals). And then were did mammals come from? and so on and so on.
I mean, come on guy, you kind of dodged that question. Just give it a shot. What's the alternative to us descending from primates? If we didn't... Then why are there so many similarities? And who did all these proto-human skulls belong to?
Cop robots? You mean like speeding cameras?
Remember when everyone thought that humanoid robots where the wave of the future and would be grandpa's maid and take over the job of factory workers? It turns out that humanoid robots are bloody hard, and it's a lot easier to automate the task at hand with more conventional tools and machines that look nothing like people.
1. It is not a fact that human beings evolved from primordial goo. That would be an unsubstantiated assertion based on an extreme extrapolation of limited evidence of small-scale phenomena.
Whoa... whoa. whoawhoawhoa. I think you're starting this whole thing with a mistake. Because, uh... yeah, that is a fact.
1) Why don't you think that human being evolved from primordial goo?
2) Do you think there's any compelling evidence to suggest any other alternative than human beings evolving from earlier primates? Could you share?
2a) Do you have any evidence suggesting primates didn't evolve from earlier mammals?
2b,c,d,etc) (You can see where this is going) Why don't you think that mammals evolved from earlier animals, Eukaryota, etc. Feel free to fill the gaps, I'm skipping over plenty.
2x) Why do other primates look so much like us? Why do we share so much DNA with them?
2y) If this DNA evidence doesn't make sense, why is there such strong DNA similarity between family members?
2z) Why do you think humans are all that much different than other animals?
3) This "extreme extrapolation" does seem like a leap when going from single-celled organisms to humans, but since each of the smallest steps appear to make perfect sense in a long unbroken chain tracing our origins back. And it fits very nicely into the observed tree of life from which everything evolved. It explains why whales have hipbones, why pandas now have thumbs, why horses and donkies can breed, and why birds have raptor legs.
4) "Limited Evidence"!? are you kidding me? I just... I've got to step back and tackle some basics first.
4a) Are you questioning all of evolution or just human evolution?
4a1) [You're questioning human evolution] We've got an awful lot of bones showing a pretty damn gradual change from earlier primates into homo sapiens. I mean, have you googled "human skull evolution"?
4a2) [You're questioning all of evolution] ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
5) "small-scale phenomena". Yeah, you know, other than lenki's 50 year experiment showing e-coli fundamentally evolving new traits. Panda's growing a new digit. Horses and donkeys showing evidence of being on the tail end of splitting into two different species. And land-walking mammals turning into something that looks a lot like a fish (whales and dolphins). You can say that's all too small of a change that doesn't count and you can say that's too big of a change and you can't believe it happened, but you just end up looking like a fool.
And this here is one of the big reasons that "faith" and "reason" seem to be at incompatible. I'm just like you, I don't think they're incompatible, but boy oh boy are you doing your damned best to make it look that way.
Simply put, we DID evolve from goo. A lot like that skuzzy stuff you find on your food when it goes bad. That's established fact. It's the fact of evolution. The theory of evolution details how it happened. To believe otherwise is foolishness. To convince me otherwise would require a DAMN good alternative that somehow explains all the supporting evidence.
It's great that you say you're pro-Reason. But you've got to start being reasonable.
I think you meant to reply to me instead of that guy with the southpark joke of a name. It's ok, technology can be hard, it's why I get paid.
And leads to the need for genocidal behavior.
Whoa dude. Just because we have a number of people out of work that are too old or too stupid to retrain doesn't mean we have to kill them.
To put this simply. Sure you can automate bread making, and produce billions of dollars in bread each day.
But that bread is nothing like the bread your mother made for you as a kid.
Uh.... that argument falls apart because the FACTORY machines that we're making are LITERALLY following the same process that the FACTORY WORKERS use to make billions of loaves of bread per whatnot. It's still wonder bread. It's not a creative art. For that you have to pay more to get something like an artisan loaf from a local baker. And OMG does it taste so much better. Especially fresh. But you pay for that. When the starving child wants some bread, but mum can only afford wonder bread, I'll be the first to punch you in the face for trying to guilt me into not making robots which output a cheaper loaf.
Also, fuck you, I grew up on wonder bread. Mum was too busy to spend all that time kneading dough. Until we got a bread machine. And fresh out of the bot, it was DELICIOUS. (Also, at the end of highschool we went on a home-made pretzel kick. Freshness is key. If you could rig up some artillery to deliver loaves straight from the factory, we'd be in heaven.)
Human love and care makes that wine have meaning.
No... no I don't think it does. It's the alcohol which makes up the bulk of the meaning. Plus a little for flavor (which is what you pay for). And better processes (which largely remove human interaction) have made wine extremely more regular and consistent. Back in the day you worried about "a good year". Now every year is a good year.
In the bread example, what GIVES bread it's meaning is the carbohydrates. Plus or minus a few other things, but it's mostly about fueling people. I mean, nutritionally most people really just need to eat less, so all the filler and whatnot they put into wonderbread is arguably a net positive impact... but that's kinda stretching it.
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Yeah dude. I'm actually a big fan of social services, even things like wealth redistribution have their place. When the autobots improve efficiency, who reaps that reward? The industrialist will say that he owns the robot, and invested in it, so he owns the profit. And that's legit when it's risky and new. The (new)workers lay claim to it as they're producing SO MUCH more bread with so little people. And that's also legit, while there's extra profits. (And those groups are expected to struggle back and forth). When it becomes typical, obvious, and simply a part of the technological changes, then those profits need to go to society on the whole. And... arguably... the free market, in whatever capacity it exists, appears to be the best way to balance all those interlocking scales.
And for the displaced workers? Because we're all in this together and we obviously got by just fine with the old system for so long, we can all afford to retrain those who can. For those too old to justify that cost? Well, early retirement and the social safety net. We can most certainly afford it. We are (collectively) ludicrously wealthy. It might not be glamorous, but it'll sustain them. So sorry if shit sucks, but you gambled on an industry that no longer needs you.
I know you may or may not be close the the riffraff that have to subsist on what they can when they can where they can, but there's this thing called "the value menu".
And while this might blow your mind... burgers are a subset of sandwiches. It's true!
Sadly, the answer is still: "Not much".
In fact I borrowed money to buy ___________. Which is extra smart if ____________
Whoooooa there dude, and you're complaining about the dollar not being a safe investment?
That's basically the gist of:
They basically force everyone to become irresponsible investors or they confiscate your money through inflation.
Which is one of the reasons that a lot of math nerds are clustering PS4's together to crunch numbers.
If the wizards of today can piggyback on the mouth-breathing inarticulate fools wasting their lives trying to live in a fantasy, then all the more power to them.
Uh, is this oblig or not?
Ah, Pascal's wager. A lot like the tragedy of the commons, you can bet your ass that a lot of people won't take that wager because it oh so marginally has a chance of benefiting them. Sadly, what the Pascal and the masses who appeal to his wager miss that that there IS an effect by believing in a thing that is most assuredly false.
Let me make that clear:
if you lose, you lose nothing.
That. That part right there is where he messed up. Because that's not how the game is played and you DO lose something if you lose the wager.
It makes you think that these holy books and their charlatans who claim knowledge about the subject might be on to something. It affects your judgement. It affects your worldview and your outlook on life. It makes you think that funerals are for something other than the living's benefit. And most damningly, it affects your kids.
Hey, something it's a force for good. But more and more the material that the question has been married to at the hip, like hating gays, out-breeding your competition, and wearing poly-cotton blend is becoming more detrimental than it is good. And after you divorce the wager from all the cruft of the past, you're left with a pretty empty an hollow thing that, thanks to the evolutionary and sociological forces at play, don't seem to survive for long.
And if I'm wrong I wouldn't want to party with a dude that would cast me down for trying to do some good in the world. So fuck'em.
The soul is a metaphor, not a physical object. So it exists, the way any other metaphor exists.
Correct. I.E. It doesn't, except as a story for the weak-minded who can't handle the truth.
The Federal reserve has made it so that the only thing dumber than putting your money in a bank is not putting your money in a bank. They basically force everyone to become irresponsible investors or they confiscate your money through inflation.
So buy something.
Inflation makes the dollar worth less. Things cost more. Those two statements are the same thing. If your dollar would buy you a sandwich today, and you're worried about it not being worth enough to buy a sandwich tomorrow, buy the sandwich.
That's the entire idea of investments. You buy portions of things. You then own portions of things rather than owning money.
There's an upper limit of how safe you can play it. One of the safer things you can invest in is, yeah, bonds. But you shouldn't hang on to bonds for too long (I mean, otherwise you might as well play the stock market), and inflation doesn't have that big of an impact over a few years. If it did, crazy shit would be hitting the fan like down in Zimbabwe, or the USA back in the 70's.
At what point can we end the delusion that fiat currencies are worth anything at all?
Probably when I can't buy a sandwich for a dollar.
Until then, it seems to work pretty well.
Said by someone with life savings.
First they came for the weavers, but I was not a weaver, and so I said nothing.
Then they came for the factory line workers, but I was in charge of programming the robots that took over that job so I said a whole lot of things about how to do it better. As I was paid a middle-class rate to automate a mind-numbingly boring job and remove the rote monotony of life freeing up a human soul to go do important things, I didn't feel particularly bad about doing it either. We're making the world a better place.
And then they came for the programmers, and I laughed in their face as they tried to make yet another super-high level languages that didn't suck or need dedicated programmers. And I laughed at their graphical programming interfaces made for the unskilled masses. And I laughed at all those companies that offshored development to poorly trained foreigners. And I laughed as they came back complaining that the highly skilled foreigners were demanding to be paid.
And then there was no one to speak out for me except the scientists, technophiles, engineers, and mathematicians who had decent jobs. Plus the artists, politicians, and managers that we apparently can have an unlimited number of without perfecting the industry. It's as if people found new things to do after farming was industrialized.
So for all you neo-Luddites out there, piss off and go find a loom to smash.
This would essentially be my response. Users should most certainly not have to struggle to get anything done. It should "just work". That's the goal for good software targeting the masses. Software that specifically targets developers though? I want it to be useful and powerful to help me get shit done.
There's a reason that Photoshop, AutoCAD, Blender, and programming tools are simply a bitch to use. Because people use them every day and no learning curve is too hard for a dedicated professional. Anything that shaves off seconds of a task is a vital improvement to the tool. Any new features adds to the tool. Making it easy to use runs counter-purpose to that inherent complexity. Not that simplicity is bad, but it's less important.
Also on that list is MVS. It's one hell of a beast of a machine, and you know what? I didn't really man up and learn how to use it back in college. It was a text editor and a compile button for a long time. And that turned out to be a good plan because Microsoft keeps fucking changing everything on a regular basis. I learned how to use gcc, gdb, valgrind, makefiles, my text editor of choice, and it's served me really well for the past decade.
3) Linux really, really needs a Visual Studio. The reason why Visual Debugger is so great is largely because of the rest of Visual Studio. No, Eclipse doesn't count.
Man up and learn how to use GDB. It's not that hard. And makefiles are your friend.
I dunno about the specific developers at Ubutnu, but the reason that Ubuntu exists, other than being pissed at Debian's long release cycle, is because everyone was really sick and tired of the fragmentation that user-grade Linux distros were presenting. "What distro should I use?" isn't a question you want newbies to have to ask. "Well that depends on what distro you're using" isn't a response that I should have to give to my grandmother running Linux for the first time. Ubuntu have a nice solid STANDARD platform and interface for non-techy users to become familiar with.
So of course they decided to switch everyone to Unity. Fuckers.
Damn straight he's learning assembly! If it was good enough for me, it'll be good enough for my son!
She has a duty to the shareholders of Yahoo to do what is best for them.
Which can mean virtually anything.
"To stand strong on the merits of an open, free, and unoppressed Internet, which is the foundation upon which our entire company is built and the cornerstone of all the value behind the property of our shareholders, we cannot possibly abide by the illegal and unconstitutional demands of the NSA. "
"So we don't have the feds kick in our doors and tear up our charter annulling our shareholder's wealth, we're sucking the cock of the NSA".
"To increase our corporate coffers and maximize dividends (Do we even give out dividends?) I have fired all of our employees, sold all equipment, land, rights, and properties. This is in their best interest, we are literally giving our shareholders more money."
"To secure long-term goals we're taking all of our company funds and sinking it into research and development to create some kick-ass new things that will lure customers and revenue in the future. We do this for our shareholders as they will reap the benefit of owning a portion of that future revenue. It's an investment, right?"
"To maximize our competitiveness, I'm increasing the bonuses to our executive staff. Without these bonuses, we will lose our guiding force in these perilous economically troubling times. This is ultimately for the shareholders. We don't want their investments to be steered off a cliff, now do we?"
"I'm the CEO, if I want to spend the money on hookers and blow, I'll damn well spend it on hookers and blow. Don't like it? Fire me. I keep the damn company from swirling the drain in hard times and I keep it growing in good times. That's what you pay me for. Now piss off and let me steer the boat."
Come on dude, "doing what's best for the shareholders" is such a meaningless term that it's laughable.