the common observation that, unlike ants and bees, humans in groups typically show less intelligence than we do as individuals
That's not even remotely true. Numerous studies have been conducted on individual decision-making vs group decision-making, and the groups almost always outperformed individuals. What is strange is that even if you have a group full of people who have no experience in the subject or real knowledge, they will still perform better, as they sort of bounce ideas off each other and generally weed out the weakest ones simply through common sense or supposition.
When you're talking about corporate decision-making, you're complaining that leaders don't listen to the rest of the group and followers don't listen well to leaders. There are also lots of power issues that come into any decision. That's very different from group decision-making, where the members of the group collectively decide what action to take.
This very phenomenon was part of the reason that so many companies started moving towards flatter hierarchies in the 90s and continue to do so.
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just use 999-99-9999 as the SS# when signing up for AT&T, which allows you to buy a prepaid phone plan? Then you pay $30, get access to the iPhone, have no AT&T contract, and can even use it to make phone calls if the mood ever strikes you. You also don't miss out on the software updates and new features Apple has already said are coming, and someday when someone offer unlocking for $50 you can get that done as well.
It's an extremely standard grade platformer all the way through, with absolutely nothing special about the way it plays that separates it from the rest. Only its presentation really made a big difference.
I tend to agree. Psychonauts is certainly one of my favorite games ever, but it isn't one of the best games of all time. It's simply unusual for a game to be so perfectly executed and pretty much flawless in every way, and then on top of that have so much great character, personality and entertainment. But it didn't really offer any new, exciting game concepts, it simply delivered to an astonishingly high level of polish.
I also hear from friends living in the UK that the healthcare system is sometimes so overburdened that the waiting lists for doctor's appointments run ahead a week or two. Is that true?
LOL, if that's overburdened, sign me up. Here in the USA, if you're not in danger of imminent death, good luck getting an appointment with any doctors covered by your insurance company within several weeks, if at all (many doctors who accept insurance in populous areas are simply not accepting new patients).
If BP and other large energy companies fund this type of research because they know it won't ever be practical
Well, ultimately it's a form of hedging their bets. They get a huge tax writeoff for all the research, which is useful when oil companies are making profits that would make 19th century robber-barons feel guilty, and at the same time grabbing up as many patents and experts as they can in alternative fuels so that -- heaven forbid -- one should be developed that truly replaces their core market, they've at least got a good starting position in the new industry.
The difference here is that the spirit of America fought those who would take away liberty, while hippies do not.
I'm still not even sure what the hell "hippie talking points" are -- the only things Captain America talked about were the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which as I recall were created several centuries before the word "hippie" existed, and there has been quite a lot of blood shed to defend them, including in WW2.
he just listed a bunch of hippie talking points, rather than actually talking about how the law could hurt superheroes, or even mentioning that SHIELD shot at him first.
Yeah, who cares about hippie shit like the Constitution and civil liberties when big issues like who shot first are available? Everyone remembers, of course, that Captain America fought Nazi Germany because they could have inconvenienced super-heroes, it had nothing to do with them threatening liberty and other hippie talking points like that.
Similar patterns have consistently independently arisen, yet these can not be the only patterns that are capable of surviving and reproducing.
*shrug* I think if you have a couple million different species who all have ultimately the same common design limitations and ancestry and similar environmental forces, you'll be able to find a lot of patterns, some of which are real and some of which are purely coincidental. I mean, you could find lots of repeating patterns in a million coin tosses if you looked, and some patterns that are equally likely to occur might never occur in that particular million tosses.
It certainly says nothing about the randomness of mutation or change that DNA or our environment causes some changes to propagate more effectively than others, it could just be fundamental limitations of our DNA structure, or our atmospheric pressure, or a billion other factors. There's no reason that we should expect the same patterns to exist in independent evolutionary trees from other environments.
How would sticking dirty tools in your mouth all the time possibly be a good idea?
There are huge numbers of animals right here on Earth that use mandibles, trunks, snouts, etc as primary manipulative devices. Legs are just for moving around, mouth parts are for lifting, tearing, twisting, etc. It's a pretty logical place to develop dexterity and strength as a survival advantage.
Most of the unsuccessful changes die before they are even born -- usually at the stage of being a few cells. The fossil record is not a record of all mutations, it's a record of a small subset of what were the most successful changes, ones that produced millions and billions of offspring so that one could be in just the right time and place to be fossilized. The odds of a genetic failure ever being preserved are astronomically low because the failures are almost by definition unique.
We are "humanoid" because it's an efficient shape to have.
No, we're humanoid because it was a successful enough shape for US to have in this environment, given the limited biological building blocks we had available to us due to the many evolutionary choices that had been made in the billions of years before us.
For example, there's no real practical reason to expect that an intelligent tool-using species from a completely different evolutionary origin should have arms. A mouth with enough dexterity would be more efficient, but we wound up getting arms since we descended from 4-limbed creatures and found the front two useful for swinging and climbing through trees.
You sound like the type of person that thinks that evolution is random. Evolution is actually the opposite of that.
Well, mutation is random. Survival of those mutations is not. But the idea that primate forms are "ideal" simply because we happened to be the result of evolution ignores that while we survived, the individual physical traits chosen from were random. There were probably far superior (but equally random) options that just never happened to pop up in the right place at the right time.
First of all, Apple does not make "good hardware,"...their competitors should have access to the iPod/iPhone interface specs. Why do people only seem to complain when a company in a monopoly position doesn't release technical information?
First of all, your opinion doesn't matter where the issue of hardware quality is concerned. Actual reliability surveys indicate that Apple does, in fact, make some of the best consumer computer hardware. I don't think anyone is shocked that even the most reliable hardware in the consumer industry isn't perfect or that they sometimes screw up big time. Overall, you still have a greater likelihood of getting good hardware from Apple than you do from most any other consumer computer vendor.
There's nothing particularly secret about the iPod interface, lots of third-party companies have devices and software that interface with the iPod. I don't know where you got the idea that Apple was keeping it a secret, it sounds like you don't really know what you're talking about and simply want to bitch about Apple for some reason.
And yes, people complain mostly about monopolies being anticompetitive because monopolies are not subject to the same economic pressures as other competitors. There are all sorts of things companies can do that become illegal and immoral when done by a monopoly. This is not news or unfair, it's a basic principle of economic competition. Apple does all sorts of things that would be illegal if they were a monopoly, and it is in fact many of those things that prevent many people from buying Apple systems -- hence, the market provides pressure on Apple as it is intended, there's no reason to worry about it because the market "punishes" Apple for those choices in a way that the a monopoly simply cannot be "punished".
If we had nationalized medicine, we still wouldn't have "the equivalent quality of oversight" by your standards.
I never said we would. I said that having inspectors following around doctors and nurses would be the only way to accomplish equivalent oversight to what we have in food and construction. I don't think it's very practical or cost-efficient, but people always bring up food and construction in discussions about healthcare to defend the notion that even essential life services can be run by the free market with no troubles whatsoever.
I just don't think people who make such arguments have any notion of just how much oversight happens in those industries. It's certainly nothing like licensing physicians or examining random samples of patient data after the fact.
Food and housing are for-profit enterprises--they're just better managed.
And by "better managed", you presumably know that there are government inspectors verifying all important work at every stage and making sure it is up to code (literally and figuratively). If you think it'll be more cost-effective to have every hospital pay to have a government supervisor follow around every single nurse and doctor in the country, that's an interesting economic argument. It's certainly the only way that you would have the equivalent quality of oversight in medicine that food processing and construction have.
congress makes laws, not the president...in case anyone forgot. sure, he can veto
Literally true, but when Congress and the White House are held by the same party, the President is generally the one who begins any significant initiatives, since he is the "standard bearer" of the party. Many of the major laws passed in the last 7 years have been written entirely by White House staff and then handed off to a sponsor in Congress. Presumably if a democratic presidential candidate wins, that will mean the democrats have at least held congress if not built an even more significant majority, so Edwards' opinion on legislative matters is hardly irrelevant.
That's great, but by cutting ourselves off from them we aren't doing anything to harm the government, all we're doing is preventing the people of Cuba from interacting with Americans, growing closer to us, understanding us, and becoming economically dependent on us. We give the government a convenient scapegoat for all the ills of their own making -- whenever people are upset, they can just blame it on the embargo. We would be their largest trading partner and income source overnight if we opened up, but they would never be more than a drop in the bucket to us.
All that would happen is that Cuba would find it increasingly more profitable to discard the vestiges of communism and totalitarianism and embrace Capitalism and republican democracy. Look how hard China has to work to try and take advantage of the modern world without opening the floodgates, and then realize that they're the only country on Earth that would even have a shred of a chance of standing up to a foreign economic and cultural tidal wave.
It's like saying that the casinos have no right to prevent me from cheating.
Cheating at a casino is illegal, not a violation of the casino's terms of service. A Casino can kick you out for any reason they like, it's private property. But they can't deprive you of your legal property (whether winnings or personal belongings) just because they kicked you out.
The only remaining legal question is whether "virtual" property is owned by the service provider or the gamer. You agree with the Terms of Service, but I suspect courts will eventually rule otherwise. Simply too much economic value is going online and will continue to do so for the legal system (and legislature) to ignore it all.
The Soviet Union was a real enemy and their nuclear missiles were real weapons.
Well, of course. Nobody is arguing about what we should have done 40 years ago (at least in this thread). But Cuba presents no threat to us in any way now, and is only an "enemy" in the most meaningless philosophical use of the word. Our embargo today in 2007 serves no real purpose -- we have no reason to believe it will change their government, while we do have reason to believe the elimination will benefit both our societies and eventually encourage them to draw closer to us socially, politically and economically.
Really, what does the US have that Cuba could possibly want?
Tourists.
Tourism is already one of the biggest parts of the Cuban economy, and that's from people who fly thousands of miles from Canada, Europe and beyond. The entire Caribbean basically exists off of tourism, and Cuba would be a gigantic new affordable destination only a few hours from every major American airport. If anyone should be lobbying to keep the embargo in place, it should be all the Caribbean countries that would lose American tourists because they're just a little bit farther.
Because I worked in medical research for a decade and Cuban biotech is famous internationally? It's not like this stuff is some big secret or groundless claim by the government, the researchers present at medical conferences around the world (just not in the US), and host important biotech conferences in Cuba (which of course our own researchers can't go to and learn at, which benefits us in no way whatsoever). They do clinical trials in Canada and Europe and Latin America, the same as American companies do when they want to introduce drugs to new regions.
The most famous development was a dirt-cheap Meningitis B vaccine, but since then they've developed inexpensive vaccines and treatments for Pneumonia, Influenza, and even some cancers. Fortunately American companies have convinced the government that we need access to some of these drugs, so a few decades after their development we're able to save some lives that otherwise would have been lost due to our embargo.
I hate to break it to you that you're the one who clearly has a knee-jerk propaganda reflex that assumes any government we dislike must therefore rule over a backwater country filled with cave-dwellers dressed in loincloths and banging two sticks together to make fire.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not even remotely true. Numerous studies have been conducted on individual decision-making vs group decision-making, and the groups almost always outperformed individuals. What is strange is that even if you have a group full of people who have no experience in the subject or real knowledge, they will still perform better, as they sort of bounce ideas off each other and generally weed out the weakest ones simply through common sense or supposition.
When you're talking about corporate decision-making, you're complaining that leaders don't listen to the rest of the group and followers don't listen well to leaders. There are also lots of power issues that come into any decision. That's very different from group decision-making, where the members of the group collectively decide what action to take.
This very phenomenon was part of the reason that so many companies started moving towards flatter hierarchies in the 90s and continue to do so.
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just use 999-99-9999 as the SS# when signing up for AT&T, which allows you to buy a prepaid phone plan? Then you pay $30, get access to the iPhone, have no AT&T contract, and can even use it to make phone calls if the mood ever strikes you. You also don't miss out on the software updates and new features Apple has already said are coming, and someday when someone offer unlocking for $50 you can get that done as well.
I tend to agree. Psychonauts is certainly one of my favorite games ever, but it isn't one of the best games of all time. It's simply unusual for a game to be so perfectly executed and pretty much flawless in every way, and then on top of that have so much great character, personality and entertainment. But it didn't really offer any new, exciting game concepts, it simply delivered to an astonishingly high level of polish.
LOL, if that's overburdened, sign me up. Here in the USA, if you're not in danger of imminent death, good luck getting an appointment with any doctors covered by your insurance company within several weeks, if at all (many doctors who accept insurance in populous areas are simply not accepting new patients).
Well, ultimately it's a form of hedging their bets. They get a huge tax writeoff for all the research, which is useful when oil companies are making profits that would make 19th century robber-barons feel guilty, and at the same time grabbing up as many patents and experts as they can in alternative fuels so that -- heaven forbid -- one should be developed that truly replaces their core market, they've at least got a good starting position in the new industry.
I'm still not even sure what the hell "hippie talking points" are -- the only things Captain America talked about were the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which as I recall were created several centuries before the word "hippie" existed, and there has been quite a lot of blood shed to defend them, including in WW2.
WTF does that have to do with anything?
Yeah, who cares about hippie shit like the Constitution and civil liberties when big issues like who shot first are available? Everyone remembers, of course, that Captain America fought Nazi Germany because they could have inconvenienced super-heroes, it had nothing to do with them threatening liberty and other hippie talking points like that.
No, it means they voted to hold a trial. It's essentially the same thing as being indicted by a grand jury, it's nothing like a conviction.
*shrug* I think if you have a couple million different species who all have ultimately the same common design limitations and ancestry and similar environmental forces, you'll be able to find a lot of patterns, some of which are real and some of which are purely coincidental. I mean, you could find lots of repeating patterns in a million coin tosses if you looked, and some patterns that are equally likely to occur might never occur in that particular million tosses.
It certainly says nothing about the randomness of mutation or change that DNA or our environment causes some changes to propagate more effectively than others, it could just be fundamental limitations of our DNA structure, or our atmospheric pressure, or a billion other factors. There's no reason that we should expect the same patterns to exist in independent evolutionary trees from other environments.
There are huge numbers of animals right here on Earth that use mandibles, trunks, snouts, etc as primary manipulative devices. Legs are just for moving around, mouth parts are for lifting, tearing, twisting, etc. It's a pretty logical place to develop dexterity and strength as a survival advantage.
Most of the unsuccessful changes die before they are even born -- usually at the stage of being a few cells. The fossil record is not a record of all mutations, it's a record of a small subset of what were the most successful changes, ones that produced millions and billions of offspring so that one could be in just the right time and place to be fossilized. The odds of a genetic failure ever being preserved are astronomically low because the failures are almost by definition unique.
No, we're humanoid because it was a successful enough shape for US to have in this environment, given the limited biological building blocks we had available to us due to the many evolutionary choices that had been made in the billions of years before us.
For example, there's no real practical reason to expect that an intelligent tool-using species from a completely different evolutionary origin should have arms. A mouth with enough dexterity would be more efficient, but we wound up getting arms since we descended from 4-limbed creatures and found the front two useful for swinging and climbing through trees.
Well, mutation is random. Survival of those mutations is not. But the idea that primate forms are "ideal" simply because we happened to be the result of evolution ignores that while we survived, the individual physical traits chosen from were random. There were probably far superior (but equally random) options that just never happened to pop up in the right place at the right time.
First of all, your opinion doesn't matter where the issue of hardware quality is concerned. Actual reliability surveys indicate that Apple does, in fact, make some of the best consumer computer hardware. I don't think anyone is shocked that even the most reliable hardware in the consumer industry isn't perfect or that they sometimes screw up big time. Overall, you still have a greater likelihood of getting good hardware from Apple than you do from most any other consumer computer vendor.
There's nothing particularly secret about the iPod interface, lots of third-party companies have devices and software that interface with the iPod. I don't know where you got the idea that Apple was keeping it a secret, it sounds like you don't really know what you're talking about and simply want to bitch about Apple for some reason.
And yes, people complain mostly about monopolies being anticompetitive because monopolies are not subject to the same economic pressures as other competitors. There are all sorts of things companies can do that become illegal and immoral when done by a monopoly. This is not news or unfair, it's a basic principle of economic competition. Apple does all sorts of things that would be illegal if they were a monopoly, and it is in fact many of those things that prevent many people from buying Apple systems -- hence, the market provides pressure on Apple as it is intended, there's no reason to worry about it because the market "punishes" Apple for those choices in a way that the a monopoly simply cannot be "punished".
I never said we would. I said that having inspectors following around doctors and nurses would be the only way to accomplish equivalent oversight to what we have in food and construction. I don't think it's very practical or cost-efficient, but people always bring up food and construction in discussions about healthcare to defend the notion that even essential life services can be run by the free market with no troubles whatsoever.
I just don't think people who make such arguments have any notion of just how much oversight happens in those industries. It's certainly nothing like licensing physicians or examining random samples of patient data after the fact.
Hey. I'm just impressed you used the contraction rather than the possessive!
And by "better managed", you presumably know that there are government inspectors verifying all important work at every stage and making sure it is up to code (literally and figuratively). If you think it'll be more cost-effective to have every hospital pay to have a government supervisor follow around every single nurse and doctor in the country, that's an interesting economic argument. It's certainly the only way that you would have the equivalent quality of oversight in medicine that food processing and construction have.
Literally true, but when Congress and the White House are held by the same party, the President is generally the one who begins any significant initiatives, since he is the "standard bearer" of the party. Many of the major laws passed in the last 7 years have been written entirely by White House staff and then handed off to a sponsor in Congress. Presumably if a democratic presidential candidate wins, that will mean the democrats have at least held congress if not built an even more significant majority, so Edwards' opinion on legislative matters is hardly irrelevant.
That's great, but by cutting ourselves off from them we aren't doing anything to harm the government, all we're doing is preventing the people of Cuba from interacting with Americans, growing closer to us, understanding us, and becoming economically dependent on us. We give the government a convenient scapegoat for all the ills of their own making -- whenever people are upset, they can just blame it on the embargo. We would be their largest trading partner and income source overnight if we opened up, but they would never be more than a drop in the bucket to us.
All that would happen is that Cuba would find it increasingly more profitable to discard the vestiges of communism and totalitarianism and embrace Capitalism and republican democracy. Look how hard China has to work to try and take advantage of the modern world without opening the floodgates, and then realize that they're the only country on Earth that would even have a shred of a chance of standing up to a foreign economic and cultural tidal wave.
I never said Cuba was a thousand miles away.
Cheating at a casino is illegal, not a violation of the casino's terms of service. A Casino can kick you out for any reason they like, it's private property. But they can't deprive you of your legal property (whether winnings or personal belongings) just because they kicked you out.
The only remaining legal question is whether "virtual" property is owned by the service provider or the gamer. You agree with the Terms of Service, but I suspect courts will eventually rule otherwise. Simply too much economic value is going online and will continue to do so for the legal system (and legislature) to ignore it all.
Well, of course. Nobody is arguing about what we should have done 40 years ago (at least in this thread). But Cuba presents no threat to us in any way now, and is only an "enemy" in the most meaningless philosophical use of the word. Our embargo today in 2007 serves no real purpose -- we have no reason to believe it will change their government, while we do have reason to believe the elimination will benefit both our societies and eventually encourage them to draw closer to us socially, politically and economically.
You don't have to take anyone's word for it, just google "Cuba Biotech", Cuba Hepatitis B, etc. Heck, call up GlaxoSmithkline and ask them.
Tourists.
Tourism is already one of the biggest parts of the Cuban economy, and that's from people who fly thousands of miles from Canada, Europe and beyond. The entire Caribbean basically exists off of tourism, and Cuba would be a gigantic new affordable destination only a few hours from every major American airport. If anyone should be lobbying to keep the embargo in place, it should be all the Caribbean countries that would lose American tourists because they're just a little bit farther.
Because I worked in medical research for a decade and Cuban biotech is famous internationally? It's not like this stuff is some big secret or groundless claim by the government, the researchers present at medical conferences around the world (just not in the US), and host important biotech conferences in Cuba (which of course our own researchers can't go to and learn at, which benefits us in no way whatsoever). They do clinical trials in Canada and Europe and Latin America, the same as American companies do when they want to introduce drugs to new regions.
The most famous development was a dirt-cheap Meningitis B vaccine, but since then they've developed inexpensive vaccines and treatments for Pneumonia, Influenza, and even some cancers. Fortunately American companies have convinced the government that we need access to some of these drugs, so a few decades after their development we're able to save some lives that otherwise would have been lost due to our embargo.
I hate to break it to you that you're the one who clearly has a knee-jerk propaganda reflex that assumes any government we dislike must therefore rule over a backwater country filled with cave-dwellers dressed in loincloths and banging two sticks together to make fire.