Like many people on Slashdot, I'm an advocate of responsible parenting: know what your children are doing (within bounds of privacy, dependent on the child's maturity), set reasonable boundaries, and take opportunities to discuss things with your children (i.e., make things learning experiences where possible).
Okay smart guy, how is a politician like me going to get re-elected on the nanny vote with a message like that, hmm??? Newsflash: personal responsibility only sells at the polls if you're talking responsibility of people who aren't voting for you! Yeah, you obviously didn't think that one through, did you? That's why I'm a senator and you aint!
(I know I don't need to point this out, but this was a joke)
What if it isn't a bad thing? What if the debris cloud does start some sort of slow chain reaction that knocks out a lot of satellites in orbit and rings earth with debris?
Although it would be expensive to clean up it would definitely put peoples' minds back on space technology if they suddenly couldn't get tv, phone, internet, gps, or other critical services. It could spur development to clean things up, avoid the problem in the future, and get more nations/people/viable technology in space.
Or we could spend a fraction of what it would cost to replace those sattelites on an ad campaign for NASA, have the same revitilization of the space program, and have enough money to pay off maybe 1% of our national debt.
I know they can FEEL endless when you're in them, but suburbs do not actually take up most of the earth's surface. The chances of that happening are fairly low.
all you're going to do is chase the birds away from the ground - where they're unlikely to cause problems - into the air - where they're very likely to cause problems.
Of course, if you scare off the birds BETWEEN FLIGHTS (as I did specify) then you don't have birds on the ground to fly up at those critical times.
TFA talks about at one airport they use blasts not to hit the birds but to scare them away. By your logic, that would be doing nothing but wasting shells and getting the birds up in the air. Either the guy interviewed in the article is about to cause some crashes, or you're not entirely correct.
Dogs would be useful but it'd be a lot more fun if we could get a pterodactyl out there hunting the birds.
And then Mothra to hunt the pterodactyl to prevent THEM from getting sucked into engines, and then Godzilla to in turn keep mothras from taking down planes.
As far as the legitimacy goes, I feel like time will make fools of the critics. The establishment always looks down on new things, the french impressionists were widely mocked because they were doing something new. Clearly those people would feel like idiots today. In the early days of movies, there were undoubtedly people who would have laughed at the suggestion that they could ever be art, and those people also are clearly revealed to be idiots today.
The same thing will happen with videogames. It's already gaining traction. And it will happen faster too. Kids who grow up playing games realize they're not only for kids. As the old stodgy art establishment gets turned over, the new one will be filled with gamers, many of whom get into art because of games.
Likewise, kids who grow up playing videogames realize that their games didn't make them into killers, and will be less likely to buy that crap. I've never bought the argument that violent movies make real life violence because I saw movies like Terminator and Scarface growing up, and made it to adulthood without killing anyone. I played Doom, Marathon, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Carmageddon, and other violent games as a teen too and will never buy that crap about games either.
If nothing else, rest assured that the crowd who looks down on games is rapidly dying out.
Hackneyed garden-variety space-marine alien zombie-fighting crap like Gears of War/Halo/Crysis/Half-Life are fast-food for the mind.
It's odd to me that you worded that the way you did. Hackneyed garden-variety? I haven't played crysis, but those other three at least were very original, Half-life especially redefined FPSes. Final fantasy, on the other hand, is almost to it's 20th iteration. It's been pretty stale at many points.
Why complain about what Bill Gates is saying? The last I saw he wasn't in charge any more.
That evil bastard. I see his plan now
1. Start a company, eventually making it and himself worth billions 2. Semi-retire, put someone else in charge, and defraud the shareholders of the company you built by spending all that money on R&D. 3. ??? 4. Profit... more than he has already, that is.
Brilliant really. The whole making MS thing was just a ploy to waste stockholder's money on R&D.
There is no way one can protect IBM US-based jobs (the inneficient ones) without losing competitivity on the long run to folks like these that work for peanuts.
Someone obviously doesn't work for IBM and thinks his job is safe from being shipped overseas...
The issue is that this ignorant view may be perpetuated in America. I have never heard anyone in Europe utter such crap.
The european establishment didn't entirely embrace darwin's theories when they first came out, and americans have contributed their part to evolutionary theory since then as well. We had Stephen Jay Gould after all. European nations and America, among many others, have had about the same influence on evolutionary theory. We do have some nuts running around, but they are of little actual consequence.
Side note, nations claiming great scientists as their own (which I am sort of doing here) is pretty funny. In Paris, outside the natural history museum, there is a "Garden of evolution." They honor the french Lamarck, a predesessor of Darwin who came up with inherited traits, with a statue, but I don't recall seeing one of Darwin. Lamarck did contribute greatly, and there are plenty of statues to Darwin and fewer to Lamarck, but it's still pretty funny to me that they honor their own guy (who was slightly off) rather than Darwin (who definitely contributed more than Lamarck).
How many advances in biology and medicine have been delayed because of researchers' fear of these medieval god-botherers getting all up in their beeswax?
Two. Granted, they're pretty big ones, cure for the common cold and cancer, but still, just two.
In all honesty, I think many, many more advances in biology and medicine were blocked due to funding cuts, fiscal conservatism, and long grant applications than religion. This may not have been the case for most of western history, but there has been many more opportunities for breakthroughs in the past century than previously, and I think religion has really lost much of it's ability to stifle science in at least the last 50. The ban on funding for new lines of human embryonic stem cells is a notable exception.
On the contrary, I wonder sometimes if the religious opposition causes us to strengthen our arguments, make us work harder to overcome the theological hurdles, to where our theories are much stronger than before. If memory serves me correct, Darwin held off on publishing his work for quite a while because of matters of faith, although I could be way off on that. I would also guess that refined his theories greatly during that time, that if he had published early on his work might have been largely ignored as trivial. By bundling it up and releasing it as a major work though, you couldn't just ignore it because it was so well explained and thought out. Well, you could, but it required some dogmatic beliefs.
Even the stem cell opposition may ultimately have strengthened the science rather than crippling it. I don't know what exactly led Shinya Yamanaka to discover induced pluripotent stem cells, cell that behave like embryonic stem cells but don't require destruction of an embryo, but one thing driving their development was likely that ESC were so controversial and funding was shaky on them, and ultimately IPS cells might prove much more valuable than ESC.
There are many reasons though not related to the religious reaction to look for IPS cells that may have actually been a factor, and either way, no credit for that should be given to Bush and the other religious fundamentalists. But the religious reaction to ESC appears to have not stopped scientific progress.
I have to point out that I'm no expert in evolutionary biology or stem cell biology, so take all that with a grain of salt, I could be wrong.
I think it's worth pointing out that the only time you would refer to darwin is when you're talking about the history of the theory itself. In molecular biology, for example, you don't talk about darwinian evolution or darwinism, because first of all it doesn't matter, and second Darwin didn't come up with the molecular basis for natural selection, that variations in DNA cause variation in phenotype, which evolution acts on. I think I have heard that refered to as neodarwinian, but my point is that most biologists don't use either term, we just say natural selection.
It's like if you're hitchhiking from St. Louis to Denver, and someone picks you up and tells you they'll take you all the way to Denver, then kicks you out of the car somewhere in Kansas. What, you haven't seen a building or another car for an hour? Tough shit, pal, get out and walk.
I think a better metaphor would be that a neighbor invites you to a party at his house, you're enjoying yourself. Then suddenly he turns off the lights for a minute, complete dark. It's fair, they're his lights and he's paying the bill, but it is annoying, pointless, and he did invite you there in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Like many people on Slashdot, I'm an advocate of responsible parenting: know what your children are doing (within bounds of privacy, dependent on the child's maturity), set reasonable boundaries, and take opportunities to discuss things with your children (i.e., make things learning experiences where possible).
Okay smart guy, how is a politician like me going to get re-elected on the nanny vote with a message like that, hmm??? Newsflash: personal responsibility only sells at the polls if you're talking responsibility of people who aren't voting for you! Yeah, you obviously didn't think that one through, did you? That's why I'm a senator and you aint!
(I know I don't need to point this out, but this was a joke)
Those of us who are worried about our kids' online gaming, and who also happen to be colorblind, are glad to hear it.
What if it isn't a bad thing? What if the debris cloud does start some sort of slow chain reaction that knocks out a lot of satellites in orbit and rings earth with debris?
Although it would be expensive to clean up it would definitely put peoples' minds back on space technology if they suddenly couldn't get tv, phone, internet, gps, or other critical services. It could spur development to clean things up, avoid the problem in the future, and get more nations/people/viable technology in space.
Or we could spend a fraction of what it would cost to replace those sattelites on an ad campaign for NASA, have the same revitilization of the space program, and have enough money to pay off maybe 1% of our national debt.
Um, if you RTFA, this WAS in Russian [Soviet] space
In "Soviet" Russia, glasnost and perestroika never happened?
I know they can FEEL endless when you're in them, but suburbs do not actually take up most of the earth's surface. The chances of that happening are fairly low.
Wait, so someone actually RTFA... from IDLE... AND a headline on /. was wrong?!?
I'm 3 types of confused/shocked
Again I have to wonder how your theory answers the fact that TFA uses scare tactics.
all you're going to do is chase the birds away from the ground - where they're unlikely to cause problems - into the air - where they're very likely to cause problems.
Of course, if you scare off the birds BETWEEN FLIGHTS (as I did specify) then you don't have birds on the ground to fly up at those critical times.
TFA talks about at one airport they use blasts not to hit the birds but to scare them away. By your logic, that would be doing nothing but wasting shells and getting the birds up in the air. Either the guy interviewed in the article is about to cause some crashes, or you're not entirely correct.
See, the simpsons quote I was expecting was "We are currently experiencing some godzilla-related turbulence" from when the Simpsons go to Japan.
Topix.com would be obliged to hand over 178 blank sheets of paper?
Dogs would be useful but it'd be a lot more fun if we could get a pterodactyl out there hunting the birds.
And then Mothra to hunt the pterodactyl to prevent THEM from getting sucked into engines, and then Godzilla to in turn keep mothras from taking down planes.
I prefer to bully the bird union leaders, and threaten to hire bird scabs in the event of a strike.
Another low tech approach I've heard of: dogs. They chase the birds away. In between takeoffs and landings of course.
As far as the legitimacy goes, I feel like time will make fools of the critics. The establishment always looks down on new things, the french impressionists were widely mocked because they were doing something new. Clearly those people would feel like idiots today. In the early days of movies, there were undoubtedly people who would have laughed at the suggestion that they could ever be art, and those people also are clearly revealed to be idiots today.
The same thing will happen with videogames. It's already gaining traction. And it will happen faster too. Kids who grow up playing games realize they're not only for kids. As the old stodgy art establishment gets turned over, the new one will be filled with gamers, many of whom get into art because of games.
Likewise, kids who grow up playing videogames realize that their games didn't make them into killers, and will be less likely to buy that crap. I've never bought the argument that violent movies make real life violence because I saw movies like Terminator and Scarface growing up, and made it to adulthood without killing anyone. I played Doom, Marathon, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Carmageddon, and other violent games as a teen too and will never buy that crap about games either.
If nothing else, rest assured that the crowd who looks down on games is rapidly dying out.
Hackneyed garden-variety space-marine alien zombie-fighting crap like Gears of War/Halo/Crysis/Half-Life are fast-food for the mind.
It's odd to me that you worded that the way you did. Hackneyed garden-variety? I haven't played crysis, but those other three at least were very original, Half-life especially redefined FPSes. Final fantasy, on the other hand, is almost to it's 20th iteration. It's been pretty stale at many points.
Why complain about what Bill Gates is saying? The last I saw he wasn't in charge any more.
That evil bastard. I see his plan now
1. Start a company, eventually making it and himself worth billions
2. Semi-retire, put someone else in charge, and defraud the shareholders of the company you built by spending all that money on R&D.
3. ???
4. Profit... more than he has already, that is.
Brilliant really. The whole making MS thing was just a ploy to waste stockholder's money on R&D.
There is no way one can protect IBM US-based jobs (the inneficient ones) without losing competitivity on the long run to folks like these that work for peanuts.
Someone obviously doesn't work for IBM and thinks his job is safe from being shipped overseas...
No! That's just wasting the precious bottled air!
The issue is that this ignorant view may be perpetuated in America. I have never heard anyone in Europe utter such crap.
The european establishment didn't entirely embrace darwin's theories when they first came out, and americans have contributed their part to evolutionary theory since then as well. We had Stephen Jay Gould after all. European nations and America, among many others, have had about the same influence on evolutionary theory. We do have some nuts running around, but they are of little actual consequence.
Side note, nations claiming great scientists as their own (which I am sort of doing here) is pretty funny. In Paris, outside the natural history museum, there is a "Garden of evolution." They honor the french Lamarck, a predesessor of Darwin who came up with inherited traits, with a statue, but I don't recall seeing one of Darwin. Lamarck did contribute greatly, and there are plenty of statues to Darwin and fewer to Lamarck, but it's still pretty funny to me that they honor their own guy (who was slightly off) rather than Darwin (who definitely contributed more than Lamarck).
How many advances in biology and medicine have been delayed because of researchers' fear of these medieval god-botherers getting all up in their beeswax?
Two. Granted, they're pretty big ones, cure for the common cold and cancer, but still, just two.
In all honesty, I think many, many more advances in biology and medicine were blocked due to funding cuts, fiscal conservatism, and long grant applications than religion. This may not have been the case for most of western history, but there has been many more opportunities for breakthroughs in the past century than previously, and I think religion has really lost much of it's ability to stifle science in at least the last 50. The ban on funding for new lines of human embryonic stem cells is a notable exception.
On the contrary, I wonder sometimes if the religious opposition causes us to strengthen our arguments, make us work harder to overcome the theological hurdles, to where our theories are much stronger than before. If memory serves me correct, Darwin held off on publishing his work for quite a while because of matters of faith, although I could be way off on that. I would also guess that refined his theories greatly during that time, that if he had published early on his work might have been largely ignored as trivial. By bundling it up and releasing it as a major work though, you couldn't just ignore it because it was so well explained and thought out. Well, you could, but it required some dogmatic beliefs.
Even the stem cell opposition may ultimately have strengthened the science rather than crippling it. I don't know what exactly led Shinya Yamanaka to discover induced pluripotent stem cells, cell that behave like embryonic stem cells but don't require destruction of an embryo, but one thing driving their development was likely that ESC were so controversial and funding was shaky on them, and ultimately IPS cells might prove much more valuable than ESC.
There are many reasons though not related to the religious reaction to look for IPS cells that may have actually been a factor, and either way, no credit for that should be given to Bush and the other religious fundamentalists. But the religious reaction to ESC appears to have not stopped scientific progress.
I have to point out that I'm no expert in evolutionary biology or stem cell biology, so take all that with a grain of salt, I could be wrong.
I think it's worth pointing out that the only time you would refer to darwin is when you're talking about the history of the theory itself. In molecular biology, for example, you don't talk about darwinian evolution or darwinism, because first of all it doesn't matter, and second Darwin didn't come up with the molecular basis for natural selection, that variations in DNA cause variation in phenotype, which evolution acts on. I think I have heard that refered to as neodarwinian, but my point is that most biologists don't use either term, we just say natural selection.
Not entirely sure what your point was, since this is a prime example of getting what you pay for.
That "not using anything free" strictly speaking means not breathing. Just a joke.
Was it maybe a feedback loop of that very thing that caused the slashdotting?
It's like if you're hitchhiking from St. Louis to Denver, and someone picks you up and tells you they'll take you all the way to Denver, then kicks you out of the car somewhere in Kansas. What, you haven't seen a building or another car for an hour? Tough shit, pal, get out and walk.
I think a better metaphor would be that a neighbor invites you to a party at his house, you're enjoying yourself. Then suddenly he turns off the lights for a minute, complete dark. It's fair, they're his lights and he's paying the bill, but it is annoying, pointless, and he did invite you there in the first place.
Or don't ever use something free
EVER? Uh... where can I buy some bottled air then?