Companies exist in China that pay you hard dollars for each goodie you harvest in an online game. They then turn around and sell those things for even more dollars to American parents to buy for their kids.
So yeah, the guy probably died so some snot-nosed kid could get his super sword + 5 from his divorced dad for christmas.
In any event, I don't think bag checks are necessarily "extra-judicial search and seizure." If they are mandated, then, sure, we've got a problem. But last time I checked no one was forcing you to fly in an airplane. If you want to avoid airport security, don't go to airports.
That's a silly argument. You might say : If you don't want to be surrounded by cops, don't go outside. If you don't want to be wiretapped, don't use the phone.
So it would be OK today to round up American citizens who were born in Iraq or Iran or Syria or Egypt and forcibly move them to internment camps!? snip to just search people who looked like the terrorists - racial or religious profiling? I think instituting such behavior is a slippery slope.
A slippery slope to what? Everyone's bags getting checked at the airport? At some point, we do have to decide whether protecting minority rights is more important than inconveniencing the majority. If it is just muslim people that cause the problems, then wouldn't it be logical to persecute only them? If you can't stomach persecuting just them, then don't persecute everyone to make yourself feel safe. Just don't do it all, and take some karate or carry a gun.
You need to brush up on your history. Today is hardly the first time the Constitution has been "turned upside down" due to a perceived threat. There are many such cases during any war, but here's a start: the Japanese American Internment. Locking up American citizens because they immigrated from Japan is a far more grievous act than inspecting a purse at an airport.
The difference is, back then, only the Japanese (and some Germans and Italians), were actually interred. Today, everyone is subject to extra-judicial search and seizure.
And let me ask you this: if Germany had invaded Poland using guerrilla
The point is academic. The reality is, the USA was threatened with British spies during the war of 1812, German and Japanese sabotuers in both World Wars, soviet saboteurs during the cold war, all funded by adversaries that were at the time, our equal military match. Yet, it is only today that we have to turn the constitution upside down because of a bunch of panzies afraid of a few semi-literate muzzies trying to blow something up.
You know what? Spare us all the airport aggravation and just get rid of all of this stupid security. If an airplane gets hijacked, passengers should just get up and beat up the people that did it. If the plane is about to hit something, shoot it down. Better a few hundred people die every now and then then to throw away all of our freedoms.
If the muzzies blow up something big, then just do a reprisal bombing on something precious of theirs, like that silly meteorite they worship.
But all of this economic and social cost of security is costing us more billions to GDP than any terrorist act ever would. Sometimes you just got to take your suicide bombing like a man, so the whole of the country can move on.
And let's not forget, they had that whole September 11th thing happen right there in the heart of NYC. Two buildings leveled. 3,000+ dead. Etc., etc.
Poland had that World War II thing. Invaded by Germany. Over one million people killed, including all of the jews and most of the country's intellectual class. Follow that by almost 50 years of stalinist profession. 9/11, to Poland, is just Americans being pussies.
You know, if I'm headed towards a world where a high tech government and its corporate hacks have every moment of my life recorded, can predict what I do before I even do it, and knows exactly what I think, I'm not so sure that an all out war followed by some sort of a theocratic dark ages is really all that bad.
It seems to me that if humanities most learned people are racing to either create more machines that can make us obsolete, or, develop ever more tools that enslave us, that if we're really just not better off with bows and arrows and swords and trebuchets after all. That's not to say that the technology isn't cool, it is. I love my computer, air conditioning and relatively cushy life. But, honestly, the future seems downright gloomy when we start talking about brain scanners, and I wouldn't mind if there was an inquisition simply to whack those men and women that would even dare to research such things, let alone invent such machines.
So wow, the ultimate goal of 500 years of the reformation is to turn us into borg and then replace us with robots that have no flesh to them at all. I'll be on the cameras on every corner. I'll get my chip and my brain scans in order to get a job or even a house. But before that day comes, probably when the dump I'm taking is about to be scanned too, I may just let out one last cheer of rebellion for the Pope who tried Galileo, and say, Galileo, you idiot... ya put us on a road to a worse slavery and darker hell than you could have ever imagined.
What's the point of knowing that the earth revolves around the sun when you might get arrested because you don't like a particular shade of blue and are therefor stastically more likely to commit a crime, and then the scan of your brain because you are pissed off and afraid will be used to prove that you are angry and unsettled and most definitely a criminal.
Just drop the a-bomb already. This future fucking sucks.
This is really for people that want to make a "statement" about being energy independent or supposedly green without having to actually be practically either. You have this 86 lbs thing that costs a ton of money, can't possibly pay for itself, and that's supposed to show how this rosey green future is more efficient.
For the price of 10 PCs, you may as well put a windmill in your back yard and actually get real power....
but you do need to understand electromagnetism to design one.
True, but most people aren't cell phone designers, and cell phone designers don't need to know evolution either. I guess when cell phones start to reproduce and evolve on their own, then you'd need to know evolution, but evolutionary biologists would ultimately get coopted by the more specialized field of cell phone mutation designers, and get screwed again.
I just don't see a reason for this conflict with Guido. Just make a new language, if you want something incompatible, but don't call it Python. Call it Anaconda or something. Or even Garter. Then you can do what you want. If you think you are better than Guido, then get typing, and prove it!
The article talks about wrapping OS calls to any process, and I don't think that's something Windows can really do. Yes, there is a limited hooking facility, but I don't believe there is anything that allows a user app with admin priviledges to effectively create a subsystem on top of a subsystem, which is what this application does. There are root kits that do this sort of thing on a single call, but arranging that is rather laborious. Really, the Windows kernel just isn't accessed with a single syscall...
The thing is, you could have some universal "privacy" right... but, not all cultures agree with them. And, honestly, I'm not even sure, for myself, what rights to privacy people really have. I'm toying with the idea, in my head, that the internet would be better if it could be enforced that there were no anonymous messages at all, its just, I don't think it practically can....
Nothing you say is fundamentally wrong - it just mashes up the concepts too much.
It's human nature. Science is human discipline. It teaches us, informs us. It's not just about the learning of fact and the development of new technology. The whole of its activity has value. I wrote another troll - what if you got rid of all the names of scientists and just published a book of facts?
The answer is, science would be less. Yes, you could do some things perhaps more if we called "avogadro's number" the "atoms in a molar constant", but, that cheats us of the whole story of Avogadro. What sort of a man was he? What sort of a man are you? Similarly, what would F=m(a) or, taking a simple integral be, without visions of Newton sulking bitterly in his compound, alternatively working on one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time in science, while at the same time frustrated that he cannot turn lead into gold!
To some extent, these men "wrestle with God", by peering into the secrets of the universe, as much as did characters in the bible or other ancient books of famous people. These are all stories about ourselves, reflect upon our character, and, it is, ultimately the sort of stuff that deeply satisfies the human soul in ways that mere facts cannot.
From these men, we learn the most useful and timeless of all human lessons:
a) persistence is a virtue. You have to work to achieve great things. b) you need to learn about your subject matter c) don't limit your approaches and horizons. d) don't be afraid to think, to invent new tools, to break things up into steps along the way. Newton invested a few years working on inventing calculus, to invent gravity. e) don't be afraid to go down your own path, if you can prove that you are right. There's the ghost of galileo, muttering under his breath as he signed the edict of milan, "but why do the planets move..."
Emotion is why we do everything, including science.
What's the point of being a scientist, if you are not curious? Curiosity can drive a man to learn things - a sense of wonder and appreciation of a discovery and the satisfaction of knowleged gained keeps him doing it.
If there was no emotion, there would be no point.
For science to work, and to be accepted, you just have to sell curiosity. You should probably also push vocational arts, as well, as, at the end of the day, scientists are people that do things with their hands - and these days, a lot of people don't. People look at the Einstein just writing out formulas, and those are good, but there's a great many scientists out there with telescopes, shovels, bags, screwdrivers, magnets, chemicals and all sorts of things - making stuff, combining and ripping apart pieces of the world to see how it ticks.
I let my two year old son take apart things, even if it breaks them, just because, I think it is that emotion of play, curiosity, that drives imagination more than anything else. This did have the effect of causing alterations to my dual Opteron... cest la guerre!
The problem with international standards for privacy is that some cultures have to give up the privacy rights, and right now, it is too early to attempt an international solution until we know locally what we want our rights to be.
We Americans might decry European standards and European "bureacracy", but they are Europe's to define. Similarly, whatever consensus we come to about privacy in the USA is our consensus. Until Europeans and Americans nail down what their rights and standards are, it makes little sense to try and adopt an international framework.
In the grand scheme of things, science makes the claim that a single cause has a single effect, and that simply isn't true. The idea of isolating a variable exists only through an act of ignorance itself. So yeah, homeoapathy is a bunch of crap, but let's not forget that real science too has to depend on ignorance of a sort to succeed.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It's going away now because we banned CFC's. Didn't read any advice about that in the Bible BTW.
No, but you did get a cultural tradition that said that we should wait and genuinely understand things before we rushed them into production. Instead, we got a bunch of scientists saying that people are completely ignorant for being opposed to air conditioners and other CFC uses, and loh, it turned out that those who opposed the adoption on that technology, long derided as ignorant and superstitious, WERE RIGHT.
The same could be said for ANY other technology that we have.
So really, the question, is, do we continue to listen to all the scientists who call us ignorant for not rushing into the next new thing, or, do we instead stop and listen to those people who you call backwards and superstitious and yet, seem to have been right all along about unintended consequences.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It's going away now because we banned CFC's. Didn't read any advice about that in the Bible BTW.
Do you listen to the radio at all, or is that too obsolete for you. Local radio in any major city is riddled with ads about people making miracle recoveries for going to a particular hospital.
I also am not aware of any science that says you can't give dangerous drugs to your grandmother, or eat peanuts on the plane.
Vioxx was great for arthritis, and now its yanked, and many airlines don't serve peanuts any more because there is a 1 in a billion chance that the peanut dust will get into the air and whack someone with peanut allergies. Sure, we know that we can save a man's life now, but, the rest of can't eat peanuts on a plane any more.
Let's imagine that you're driving on a road, it's dark, night-time, raining, and someone has kindly put up a sign that says "Bridge Out".
Yeah, let's imagine that. Exactly. The question that you seem to forget to ask, again and again, is, why the hell are you driving at night in the rain anyway!!!!!
Hate to break it to you dumbass, but the reason Europe became successful has little or nothing to do with the church (which had been dominant in Europe for 1100 hundred years before Europe boomed), and almost EVERYTHING to do with the scientific method.
Actually, it was christianity that took a bunch of disconnected tribes and welded them into a single cultural identity. Without that, you can't have civilization, and you don't have the economic means to have a scientific class.
Do educate yourself and read about how Europe circa 600AD was really just a bunch of wildly disconnected tribes. Then, contrast that to the Europe circa 1300AD and was effectively a collection of much larger and better organized NATIONS. That DARK AGES era, ruled by religion, effectively laid the ground work for an organized scientific method.
I think the real problem with science is that it is doing exactly what we asked of it. It used to be that you'd put up a Phd hoop for people to jump through so that, at the end, they have earned the right to spend a lifetime of contemplative study. Science requires as much imagination as it does raw fact. But instead, we've turned science into the industry of mere knowledge gathering, and its supposed to be much more than that.
We hold these people hostage, waving funding over their heads, saying, "produce facts, produce facts, produce facts...", and what we've got is a torrent of trivia without giving ourselves as a people the time to assemble it and understand it. And, now, the thing is, since we are learning so much, we're really only taking partial pictures and rushing them off to public policy before things are thought through sufficiently.
There is more to exploring the universe than writing scores of papers like tasty cakes. I'd rather see 1/10th of the papers produced today, and would support public paid tenure to do so, if I saw more papers being produced with as much insight as
"On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"
Thank you. I'm not hear to say that science is intrinsically evil... it's not. I love science and scientists, I really do. It's like, I'm supposed to be doing this paper for work about integrating insurance systems and I find myself instead sketching out a design for an implementation of a small galaxy simulator simply because, well, its interesting and I'm overwhelmed by curiosity.
I agree that MS missed the boat on internet completely.
I remember surfing with OS/2 2.0 using, I think, NCSA Mosaic, or maybe even some IBM browser, and I thought it was wonderful, all before Windows 95 ever hit the market.
And I remember too, the whole Microsoft change in direction. They were all about Cairo and PC Centric computing and Sun and Company and the Unix people said, no, the network is the thing.
The public understands science all too well.
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If science was a car, people would never buy it. The basic fact of science is that, even though we learn a bunch of new things, and have ten thousand new ideas a day to better humanity, probably only one in a million of those new ideas actually WILL, so, as a risk management thing goes, you genuinely are better off ignoring most scientific breakthroughs - even if there is overwhelming evidence that the breakthrough is beneficial. Cell phones and plastic bottles suddenly come to mind.
But its more than that. Science as a brand is in trouble and on a many levels.
The public exposure to science is, in these days, filled with a bunch of bad news. It used to be that science would make peoples lives better, and now, the more we know, the worse our lives promise to get. Every time a scientist gets up on TV, its to say that we're screwing up the planet, we have to have less, use less, in essence, roll back a pretty good chunk of our wealth really, just to "share" with the emergent third world, and that sucks.
Every time a scientist gets on TV, you hear about wonder drugs that kill some small amount of people, so your grandmother can't get them, how you can't smoke, can't drink, can't even eat peanuts on the plane anymore. It's like, science used to be about human promise, and it's really, any more, just nickel and diming us into a life of total misery. Then, to top it all off, some scientist comes out with a supposed cure for cancer, but you can't afford it anyway, because, the truth is, the gov't and the insurance companies know that the country can't afford to spend 1 million bucks per citizen and medical costs and have a solvent nation.
Accompanying all of that doom and gloom is a remarkable lack of constitency and clarity. You get scientists that say claiming that there will be more hurricanes than ever for a year, and none show up. You have the government taking recommendations of scientists saying that people should eat cheese and peanut better one year and then the next year, eat celery and whole grains. Now, scientists claim to have your kids interests at heart, and all of a sudden we have the absurd primary school educational disasters of the 1980s, becuase, oops, we didn't learn until last year that boys brains really ARE wired differently from little girls brains, sorry, folks, that an entire generation of men got screwed despite the best intentions of the scientists in that field.
Now, compare all of that to a preacher, who reads out from the bible. He's not hawking a perfect system, but it is a system that has been field proven, and, at least in the context of christianity, coupled with some technology, that actually elevated europeans from the dark ages into world domination. You'd have big families, spread out, dominate. That's good stuff, and at the end of the day, you've got the promise of a woopass god that will smite your enemies when you die and shower you with goodies. That's cool.
What's science giving us instead, a life that sucks, a death that's permanent, and a universe that will wink out of existence in 100 billion years, or some other grizly fate. Even the existence of man is utterly pointless in the long run.
So yeah, while it may be factual and consitent and the religious types live in a fantasy land, it is a fantasy that gets your more goodies if you can win it, and finally,
Y o u d o n ' t n e e d t o b e l i e v e i n e v o l u t i o n t o u s e a c e l l p h o n e...
When the dust all settles, its really no surprise. Science offers a shitty deal, and religion offers a good one, so only an idiot would really choose science, and so more and more people don't!
You know, its funny, but, OSS people, and the academic world in general, since they work for peanuts, if not free, are really big into having their names attached to things that they did.
I wonder how much of a troll it would be, if one were to make a math book that took out all the names of all the people, renamed everything based on descriptive terminology, and just made some part of science a faceless API, like so much a Windows SDK reference or C# help.
The market decided on Windows, partly from features and partly with a bit of brute force applied against vendors that would have chosen otherwise. But, had OS/2 or Mac or Amiga won, there would still have arisen a TCP/IP stack, then HTTP, a browser, and still a Google....
Slashdot Mirror
Companies exist in China that pay you hard dollars for each goodie you harvest in an online game. They then turn around and sell those things for even more dollars to American parents to buy for their kids.
So yeah, the guy probably died so some snot-nosed kid could get his super sword + 5 from his divorced dad for christmas.
In any event, I don't think bag checks are necessarily "extra-judicial search and seizure." If they are mandated, then, sure, we've got a problem. But last time I checked no one was forcing you to fly in an airplane. If you want to avoid airport security, don't go to airports.
That's a silly argument. You might say : If you don't want to be surrounded by cops, don't go outside. If you don't want to be wiretapped, don't use the phone.
So it would be OK today to round up American citizens who were born in Iraq or Iran or Syria or Egypt and forcibly move them to internment camps!? snip to just search people who looked like the terrorists - racial or religious profiling? I think instituting such behavior is a slippery slope.
A slippery slope to what? Everyone's bags getting checked at the airport? At some point, we do have to decide whether protecting minority rights is more important than inconveniencing the majority. If it is just muslim people that cause the problems, then wouldn't it be logical to persecute only them? If you can't stomach persecuting just them, then don't persecute everyone to make yourself feel safe. Just don't do it all, and take some karate or carry a gun.
You need to brush up on your history. Today is hardly the first time the Constitution has been "turned upside down" due to a perceived threat. There are many such cases during any war, but here's a start: the Japanese American Internment. Locking up American citizens because they immigrated from Japan is a far more grievous act than inspecting a purse at an airport.
The difference is, back then, only the Japanese (and some Germans and Italians), were actually interred. Today, everyone is subject to extra-judicial search and seizure.
And let me ask you this: if Germany had invaded Poland using guerrilla
The point is academic. The reality is, the USA was threatened with British spies during the war of 1812, German and Japanese sabotuers in both World Wars, soviet saboteurs during the cold war, all funded by adversaries that were at the time, our equal military match. Yet, it is only today that we have to turn the constitution upside down because of a bunch of panzies afraid of a few semi-literate muzzies trying to blow something up.
You know what? Spare us all the airport aggravation and just get rid of all of this stupid security. If an airplane gets hijacked, passengers should just get up and beat up the people that did it. If the plane is about to hit something, shoot it down. Better a few hundred people die every now and then then to throw away all of our freedoms.
If the muzzies blow up something big, then just do a reprisal bombing on something precious of theirs, like that silly meteorite they worship.
But all of this economic and social cost of security is costing us more billions to GDP than any terrorist act ever would. Sometimes you just got to take your suicide bombing like a man, so the whole of the country can move on.
Do your duty, and quit whining!
And let's not forget, they had that whole September 11th thing happen right there in the heart of NYC. Two buildings leveled. 3,000+ dead. Etc., etc.
Poland had that World War II thing. Invaded by Germany. Over one million people killed, including all of the jews and most of the country's intellectual class. Follow that by almost 50 years of stalinist profession. 9/11, to Poland, is just Americans being pussies.
You know, if I'm headed towards a world where a high tech government and its corporate hacks have every moment of my life recorded, can predict what I do before I even do it, and knows exactly what I think, I'm not so sure that an all out war followed by some sort of a theocratic dark ages is really all that bad.
It seems to me that if humanities most learned people are racing to either create more machines that can make us obsolete, or, develop ever more tools that enslave us, that if we're really just not better off with bows and arrows and swords and trebuchets after all. That's not to say that the technology isn't cool, it is. I love my computer, air conditioning and relatively cushy life. But, honestly, the future seems downright gloomy when we start talking about brain scanners, and I wouldn't mind if there was an inquisition simply to whack those men and women that would even dare to research such things, let alone invent such machines.
So wow, the ultimate goal of 500 years of the reformation is to turn us into borg and then replace us with robots that have no flesh to them at all. I'll be on the cameras on every corner. I'll get my chip and my brain scans in order to get a job or even a house. But before that day comes, probably when the dump I'm taking is about to be scanned too, I may just let out one last cheer of rebellion for the Pope who tried Galileo, and say, Galileo, you idiot... ya put us on a road to a worse slavery and darker hell than you could have ever imagined.
What's the point of knowing that the earth revolves around the sun when you might get arrested because you don't like a particular shade of blue and are therefor stastically more likely to commit a crime, and then the scan of your brain because you are pissed off and afraid will be used to prove that you are angry and unsettled and most definitely a criminal.
Just drop the a-bomb already. This future fucking sucks.
This is really for people that want to make a "statement" about being energy independent or supposedly green without having to actually be practically either. You have this 86 lbs thing that costs a ton of money, can't possibly pay for itself, and that's supposed to show how this rosey green future is more efficient.
For the price of 10 PCs, you may as well put a windmill in your back yard and actually get real power....
but you do need to understand electromagnetism to design one.
True, but most people aren't cell phone designers, and cell phone designers don't need to know evolution either. I guess when cell phones start to reproduce and evolve on their own, then you'd need to know evolution, but evolutionary biologists would ultimately get coopted by the more specialized field of cell phone mutation designers, and get screwed again.
I just don't see a reason for this conflict with Guido. Just make a new language, if you want something incompatible, but don't call it Python. Call it Anaconda or something. Or even Garter. Then you can do what you want. If you think you are better than Guido, then get typing, and prove it!
The article talks about wrapping OS calls to any process, and I don't think that's something Windows can really do. Yes, there is a limited hooking facility, but I don't believe there is anything that allows a user app with admin priviledges to effectively create a subsystem on top of a subsystem, which is what this application does. There are root kits that do this sort of thing on a single call, but arranging that is rather laborious. Really, the Windows kernel just isn't accessed with a single syscall...
The thing is, you could have some universal "privacy" right... but, not all cultures agree with them. And, honestly, I'm not even sure, for myself, what rights to privacy people really have. I'm toying with the idea, in my head, that the internet would be better if it could be enforced that there were no anonymous messages at all, its just, I don't think it practically can....
Nothing you say is fundamentally wrong - it just mashes up the concepts too much.
It's human nature. Science is human discipline. It teaches us, informs us. It's not just about the learning of fact and the development of new technology. The whole of its activity has value. I wrote another troll - what if you got rid of all the names of scientists and just published a book of facts?
The answer is, science would be less. Yes, you could do some things perhaps more if we called "avogadro's number" the "atoms in a molar constant", but, that cheats us of the whole story of Avogadro. What sort of a man was he? What sort of a man are you? Similarly, what would F=m(a) or, taking a simple integral be, without visions of Newton sulking bitterly in his compound, alternatively working on one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time in science, while at the same time frustrated that he cannot turn lead into gold!
To some extent, these men "wrestle with God", by peering into the secrets of the universe, as much as did characters in the bible or other ancient books of famous people. These are all stories about ourselves, reflect upon our character, and, it is, ultimately the sort of stuff that deeply satisfies the human soul in ways that mere facts cannot.
From these men, we learn the most useful and timeless of all human lessons:
a) persistence is a virtue. You have to work to achieve great things.
b) you need to learn about your subject matter
c) don't limit your approaches and horizons.
d) don't be afraid to think, to invent new tools, to break things up into steps along the way. Newton invested a few years working on inventing calculus, to invent gravity.
e) don't be afraid to go down your own path, if you can prove that you are right. There's the ghost of galileo, muttering under his breath as he signed the edict of milan, "but why do the planets move..."
Emotion is why we do everything, including science.
What's the point of being a scientist, if you are not curious? Curiosity can drive a man to learn things - a sense of wonder and appreciation of a discovery and the satisfaction of knowleged gained keeps him doing it.
If there was no emotion, there would be no point.
For science to work, and to be accepted, you just have to sell curiosity. You should probably also push vocational arts, as well, as, at the end of the day, scientists are people that do things with their hands - and these days, a lot of people don't. People look at the Einstein just writing out formulas, and those are good, but there's a great many scientists out there with telescopes, shovels, bags, screwdrivers, magnets, chemicals and all sorts of things - making stuff, combining and ripping apart pieces of the world to see how it ticks.
I let my two year old son take apart things, even if it breaks them, just because, I think it is that emotion of play, curiosity, that drives imagination more than anything else. This did have the effect of causing alterations to my dual Opteron... cest la guerre!
The problem with international standards for privacy is that some cultures have to give up the privacy rights, and right now, it is too early to attempt an international solution until we know locally what we want our rights to be.
We Americans might decry European standards and European "bureacracy", but they are Europe's to define. Similarly, whatever consensus we come to about privacy in the USA is our consensus. Until Europeans and Americans nail down what their rights and standards are, it makes little sense to try and adopt an international framework.
In the grand scheme of things, science makes the claim that a single cause has a single effect, and that simply isn't true. The idea of isolating a variable exists only through an act of ignorance itself. So yeah, homeoapathy is a bunch of crap, but let's not forget that real science too has to depend on ignorance of a sort to succeed.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It's going away now because we banned CFC's. Didn't read any advice about that in the Bible BTW.
No, but you did get a cultural tradition that said that we should wait and genuinely understand things before we rushed them into production. Instead, we got a bunch of scientists saying that people are completely ignorant for being opposed to air conditioners and other CFC uses, and loh, it turned out that those who opposed the adoption on that technology, long derided as ignorant and superstitious, WERE RIGHT.
The same could be said for ANY other technology that we have.
So really, the question, is, do we continue to listen to all the scientists who call us ignorant for not rushing into the next new thing, or, do we instead stop and listen to those people who you call backwards and superstitious and yet, seem to have been right all along about unintended consequences.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It's going away now because we banned CFC's. Didn't read any advice about that in the Bible BTW.
Do you listen to the radio at all, or is that too obsolete for you. Local radio in any major city is riddled with ads about people making miracle recoveries for going to a particular hospital.
I also am not aware of any science that says you can't give dangerous drugs to your grandmother, or eat peanuts on the plane.
Vioxx was great for arthritis, and now its yanked, and many airlines don't serve peanuts any more because there is a 1 in a billion chance that the peanut dust will get into the air and whack someone with peanut allergies. Sure, we know that we can save a man's life now, but, the rest of can't eat peanuts on a plane any more.
Let's imagine that you're driving on a road, it's dark, night-time, raining, and someone has kindly put up a sign that says "Bridge Out".
Yeah, let's imagine that. Exactly. The question that you seem to forget to ask, again and again, is, why the hell are you driving at night in the rain anyway!!!!!
Hate to break it to you dumbass, but the reason Europe became successful has little or nothing to do with the church (which had been dominant in Europe for 1100 hundred years before Europe boomed), and almost EVERYTHING to do with the scientific method.
Actually, it was christianity that took a bunch of disconnected tribes and welded them into a single cultural identity. Without that, you can't have civilization, and you don't have the economic means to have a scientific class.
Do educate yourself and read about how Europe circa 600AD was really just a bunch of wildly disconnected tribes. Then, contrast that to the Europe circa 1300AD and was effectively a collection of much larger and better organized NATIONS. That DARK AGES era, ruled by religion, effectively laid the ground work for an organized scientific method.
I'm not saying you don't need to have facts. I'm saying you need to have more than facts.
I think the real problem with science is that it is doing exactly what we asked of it. It used to be that you'd put up a Phd hoop for people to jump through so that, at the end, they have earned the right to spend a lifetime of contemplative study. Science requires as much imagination as it does raw fact. But instead, we've turned science into the industry of mere knowledge gathering, and its supposed to be much more than that.
We hold these people hostage, waving funding over their heads, saying, "produce facts, produce facts, produce facts...", and what we've got is a torrent of trivia without giving ourselves as a people the time to assemble it and understand it. And, now, the thing is, since we are learning so much, we're really only taking partial pictures and rushing them off to public policy before things are thought through sufficiently.
There is more to exploring the universe than writing scores of papers like tasty cakes. I'd rather see 1/10th of the papers produced today, and would support public paid tenure to do so, if I saw more papers being produced with as much insight as
"On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"
Thank you. I'm not hear to say that science is intrinsically evil... it's not. I love science and scientists, I really do. It's like, I'm supposed to be doing this paper for work about integrating insurance systems and I find myself instead sketching out a design for an implementation of a small galaxy simulator simply because, well, its interesting and I'm overwhelmed by curiosity.
I agree that MS missed the boat on internet completely.
I remember surfing with OS/2 2.0 using, I think, NCSA Mosaic, or maybe even some IBM browser, and I thought it was wonderful, all before Windows 95 ever hit the market.
And I remember too, the whole Microsoft change in direction. They were all about Cairo and PC Centric computing and Sun and Company and the Unix people said, no, the network is the thing.
If science was a car, people would never buy it. The basic fact of science is that, even though we learn a bunch of new things, and have ten thousand new ideas a day to better humanity, probably only one in a million of those new ideas actually WILL, so, as a risk management thing goes, you genuinely are better off ignoring most scientific breakthroughs - even if there is overwhelming evidence that the breakthrough is beneficial. Cell phones and plastic bottles suddenly come to mind.
But its more than that. Science as a brand is in trouble and on a many levels.
The public exposure to science is, in these days, filled with a bunch of bad news. It used to be that science would make peoples lives better, and now, the more we know, the worse our lives promise to get. Every time a scientist gets up on TV, its to say that we're screwing up the planet, we have to have less, use less, in essence, roll back a pretty good chunk of our wealth really, just to "share" with the emergent third world, and that sucks.
Every time a scientist gets on TV, you hear about wonder drugs that kill some small amount of people, so your grandmother can't get them, how you can't smoke, can't drink, can't even eat peanuts on the plane anymore. It's like, science used to be about human promise, and it's really, any more, just nickel and diming us into a life of total misery. Then, to top it all off, some scientist comes out with a supposed cure for cancer, but you can't afford it anyway, because, the truth is, the gov't and the insurance companies know that the country can't afford to spend 1 million bucks per citizen and medical costs and have a solvent nation.
Accompanying all of that doom and gloom is a remarkable lack of constitency and clarity. You get scientists that say claiming that there will be more hurricanes than ever for a year, and none show up. You have the government taking recommendations of scientists saying that people should eat cheese and peanut better one year and then the next year, eat celery and whole grains. Now, scientists claim to have your kids interests at heart, and all of a sudden we have the absurd primary school educational disasters of the 1980s, becuase, oops, we didn't learn until last year that boys brains really ARE wired differently from little girls brains, sorry, folks, that an entire generation of men got screwed despite the best intentions of the scientists in that field.
Now, compare all of that to a preacher, who reads out from the bible. He's not hawking a perfect system, but it is a system that has been field proven, and, at least in the context of christianity, coupled with some technology, that actually elevated europeans from the dark ages into world domination. You'd have big families, spread out, dominate. That's good stuff, and at the end of the day, you've got the promise of a woopass god that will smite your enemies when you die and shower you with goodies. That's cool.
What's science giving us instead, a life that sucks, a death that's permanent, and a universe that will wink out of existence in 100 billion years, or some other grizly fate. Even the existence of man is utterly pointless in the long run.
So yeah, while it may be factual and consitent and the religious types live in a fantasy land, it is a fantasy that gets your more goodies if you can win it, and finally,
Y o u d o n ' t n e e d t o b e l i e v e i n e v o l u t i o n t o
u s e a c e l l p h o n e...
When the dust all settles, its really no surprise. Science offers a shitty deal, and religion offers a good one, so only an idiot would really choose science, and so more and more people don't!
You know, its funny, but, OSS people, and the academic world in general, since they work for peanuts, if not free, are really big into having their names attached to things that they did.
I wonder how much of a troll it would be, if one were to make a math book that took out all the names of all the people, renamed everything based on descriptive terminology, and just made some part of science a faceless API, like so much a Windows SDK reference or C# help.
The market decided on Windows, partly from features and partly with a bit of brute force applied against vendors that would have chosen otherwise. But, had OS/2 or Mac or Amiga won, there would still have arisen a TCP/IP stack, then HTTP, a browser, and still a Google....
Why is he getting a patent ... for something the government funded!