I followed the link and did a precursory read. There are a few follow ups that might be of interest. The granddaddy of this stuff is Sophistry . The ideas behind Sophistry have roots in the Ionian Enlightenment which also lead to the Ancient Greek concept of the Dialectic method. And so we get Socrates, Plato Aristotle, and, so on to Roman ideas of Rhetoric . This stuff spills into all of Western Philosophy, Law and Politics. You can take this stuff anywhere from William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity to Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. It's a thorny thicket everybody has to find their own way through, but if an issue is contentious, if it's open to public debate then it's open to argument and the tools of argument. Even in business any publicly held corporation is bound to protect it's interests and the interests of it's investors and so we get more rhetoric. If you want sterilized, unambiguous facts then you're demanding a world that ought to be and not one that's messy and alive. Every body has the right to put their best foot forward, if you don't like the foot you can step aside or step on it, but then you might end up with a boot in the ass.
I've run my own business and for too long a period of time I brokered businesses. From my brokering experience I took away a number of lessons, but the outstanding rule of thumb I took away was that, on average, a business that fails and goes into a fire sale mode will realize ~10% on the costs undertaken in setting the business up. Failure is expensive. The costs are at best a tax write off.
Failure is one of the most underrated means to success. Because failure is expensive two key attendant details should be kept in mind. You have to be able to pull the plug and, as time is money, timing is crucial. Good planning in the initial stages of the business should include an exit strategy and the better the ground work done in laying out a business plan the better positioned one would be to pull the plug in a timely fashion. The second aspect seems to be culturally blighted. Failure, whether in school, on the playground, in social affairs or business is stupidly branded as a social stain. We necessarily succeed by learning from our failures and getting it right the next time, but, in order to progress, we need to be able to learn as much as possible from our failures. Going back to the earlier point, the better the business plan going into the venture, the better the lessons that can be taken from failure. Also there are relative gains from a business failure. You can salvage and even enhance resources including things like financing sources and heighten your exposure in a wider community.
Gates has denied ever saying anything like that and I've no memory of his having said any such thing. He did predict hardware would come free with the purchase of an operating system by now. My memory of the whole 640 should be enough for anyone was that it was said by an Intel engineer but I'm too lazy to run it to ground.
Global Problems of Population Growth with Professor Robert Wyman a Yale uni online course speaks extensively to overpopulation. In the context of this thread the overriding message would be that women need most of all to be given control of their own bodies, especially in terms of birth control. In countries where poor education and overpopulation are prevalent problems most women will say they want as many children as possible, or, that children are a gift from God and therefore every child a gift; but, the same women when questioned in a different context wanted fewer children. The much joked about 2.1 children per couple is close to the replacement level for most populations. Giving women control over their own reproduction cycle will bring down population and likely along with it poverty, under nourishment, disease and lack of education. The lectures are very entertaining.
Make sure you've covered all the conventional bases, keep them up to date while swapping in and our aspects of your presentation and presence watching to see if something shows some pop. If you're not big on or strong in variations on themes and like to stick with "just the facts, mam" then fine but keep the facts current and accessible. You've already started on the second tier which is to ask for help from people and forums generally, the more especially where people might be sympathetic and may even participate and spread the word. Take every good idea in this thread and try it out while trying while not being pointedly intrusive in only tangentially related venues. Lastly persevere and try always to capitalise on the convergence of any two or more means of growth and exposure that compliment, or, even conflict with one another because when you do so and make others aware of convergence or conflict you're being open and informative rather than simply self promoting. And if someone "big" and "important" expresses an interest indirectly in something your product can really deliver on don't be afraid to approach them directly and confidently, just don't intrude and start bull shitting. above works for about anything, well works for me anyway. goodluck and never underestimate good timing.
Barbarism, or, more pointedly barbarians we so named by the ancient Greeks because the language(s) of said barbarians were thought by the Greeks to sound like "bar,bar,bar...". Barbarians and others with even understandable languages were enslaved by the Greeks because they were seen, perhaps perceived is a better word, as Other. Those not members of the tribe and therefore rightly enslaved. "Social barbarism" is a bit of an oxymoron in light of it's xenophobic origins. Norbert Elias did a brilliant job of tracking what power elites termed civility as a means of excluding others from power and resources. Language is highly contextually bound, as are manners. Screaming into your cell to be heard over a live symphonic performance is one thing, screaming into your cell to be heard over a roaring crowd at a football match is another. Disciplining yourself to shut out fleeting annoyances is one thing, appointing yourself the watchdog of social norms is another.
E.O.Wilson wrote an essay in the late 90's suggesting China is the test case for humanity's attempts to find solutions to environmental and population problems. China as a traditional agrarian male dominated culture has moved from a practise of female infanticide to using technology to abort female foetuses. From this practise a sex ratio imbalance has arisen that some see as of little current or historical importance. The nation's one-child policy could leave 24 million bachelors by the year 2020. My own readings in history have taken on views more in line from what has been learnt from the last few decades of research in primatology. Chimpanzee behaviour favouring, figuratively speaking, male oligarchies restricting access to resources maps clearly, in my mind, onto all three, still widely practised, Mediterranean death cult religions promulgating male dominated societies. Based on China's current sex ratio imbalance the questions to be addressed probably can be set in historical, anthropological and primatological contexts.
Personally I suspect China flirted with democracy, but as is nearly always the case, power structures are not given to relinquishing dominion. Recently/. ran a story that the Chinese government replaced the movie "Avatar" with a biography of Confucius. The works of Confucius are only known by way of reconstructions, but his core message seems to have been one of a familia philosophy, strongly patriarchal, and, in that light, like the Christian, Islamic and Judaic cults that I find map well onto Chimpanzee behaviour. The core mandate of such power structures is submission and tradition. I suspect the Chinese government, if not the Chinese people, are moving away from democracy and into a tradition bound version of Confucianism, but at best it's only a superficial reading.
The discussion can go on and deeper but one current salient point should be made. Chinese society is observed to be much more family orientated than our western societies. A recent rampage killing in the international press was reported on as having happened in western societies because the killer was deranged, whereas the Chinese feedback suggested the man went on a killing spree because his family wasn't there to support him. Western society is strongly vested in the rights of the individual, China not nearly so much. If the West and China and, perhaps much of Asia, are to achieve an equilibrium than we're going to have to bridge this core cultural divide from both sides.
I think the title to my post is lifted from a rock song but it suits my needs. First off, as an aside, what fiction isn't speculative?
We have a fairly plastic period of development that ends in a sort of hormonal fixative we call puberty. Puberty is often interwoven with plastic fantastic lovers, and secret penchants to transform into telekinetic vampires and such. For some it's hell for others, like me, it's something to be clung onto long past adolescence. Science fiction, more so fantasy, can cater to pubescent transmogrification, but can also function as a trail breaking exercise for societies. Still the mind, as an American neuroscientist put it, is just the brain doing it's job and it goes about it's job with the same stringent constraints, barring illness, that the rest of a somewhat healthy body does. From almost a preschool age we generally demonstrate the ability to acquire language, even two, three or more languages, at a seemingly unnatural rate. Once the window for acquiring languages closes around the early teens, acquiring even one's native language can be difficult and curtailed.
From the above jumble two quick points tumble free. One is that the plasticity of our minds has constraints, some of those constraints are developmental and thus temporally constrained. The other is that once the most plastic state of our development closes anything we acquire afterward is by dint of rote and reason and, for all that, will probably carry with it the hallmarks of our native environment from early development. We talk with accents and there's reason to think we think with an accent. Further our cultures worldwide tend to be xenophobic and, to my mind, deeply linked to our primate natures. Because of these things we will, as we're doing now, bend technology to our biological and cultural needs much more than technology will ever mysteriously, perchance malevolently transform our brains constraints. Look at what the web is. Isn't Facebook your high school yearbook writ large where you get to play editor and pose and post the stuff that makes you the centre of attention? We're primates, not plastic fantastic lovers, and until technology can transform our basic natures in a way that allows for a functional society, technology will be made to serve our nature.
Wow, thanks. I was upgrading a box and just stopped long enough to fire off a quick post, and, apparently you were wowed by it. I'm on/. for little other reason than burn off excess mental activity in between working on projects, but now I've the added incentive of knowing I wow people like you. You're most welcome.
I don't know who that heavy hitter was, unless you're referring to Douglas Adams (which would be weird, because he was never wrong about his facts), but whoever it was didn't have much of an idea of the nature and course of the internets,
It may have been Ted Nelson but either way I'm recalling it from a precursory reading ~5 years ago, and, I'm pretty sure it was someone more on the tech end of things. It certainly wasn't Douglas Adams from whom I took the line "thanks for all the fish." I'll see if my subconscious dredges it up and respond more accurately if possible.
One of the heavy hitters that drove the implementation of the net made the comment that social networks and commercial Internet activity made possible the use of the net by researchers and academics at next to little cost. Web 2 and social networking drove me off the net for over three years. It also motivated me to unplug myself from commercial TV. I've never been to Facebook and have only dropped in on Youtube once or twice, but by way of my mp3 player and smart phone backed up by my netbook I've lecture series on every, IMHO, worthwhile discipline given by world leaders in their field. I can drop in and update almost any topic. So although social networking now owns the Internet and I still abhor web 2 and it's hell spawn, I'd like to say "thanks for all the fish".
Thanks, did not know that, although I'd like to know if damage is more likely from a a weapon fired from someone standing next to you, like when two or more people are walking a field bird hunting. I always found the report of a weapon fired by someone nearby was more forceful than from a weapon I fired. My dad once got hold of a 10 gauge goose gun and we took it out for an afternoon, that was an impressive, if niche, weapon. Unfortunately he wouldn't let me fire it because he was afraid the recoil would do permanent damage to my shoulder.
I grew up hunting and fishing. I had to pass what was then the bronze, silver and gold small calibre standards. A 20 gauge over and under and a colt 45 remain my favourite weapons although I no longer own guns or hunt. I'm unaware of any permanent damage to hearing caused by handguns, unless you're specifically speaking to indoor ranges. My hearing tests out excellent and I'd hate to see the carnage and spent rounds my years of hunting and target shooting would amount to.
there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons.
Cut the crap grandpa, it's obvious you ain't been in a library since one of the wheels fell off your walker a decade ago. Libraries now are a cacophonous din emergent from the cross talk between cell phones, online chatter and wailing of ankle bitters jettisoned by their mothers into a free for all day care centre. Librarians caved years ago and carry on loud conversations with all and sundry. I live 3 blocks from Vancouver's main library, I time my foray, plan my entry and exit strategies, and run it like a half back with the game on the line and time running out.
The quality of life and amenities available in the urban core of a world class city make the rat warr..er lifers of the outback look like primitive mammals popping out of gapes in the broken, sparse infrastructure of some small town. But sessions of near total isolation in a wilderness area, well I'm all for that.
Historically and prehistorically we've demonstrated that we have a strong preference for, and, derive much benefit from inhabiting coastal areas. The economic spin-offs in job creation, and knowledge gleaned from the engineering would be considerable and highly portable to the maintenance and development of any large urban area. Lastly the more we learn about and enable our long term habitation of coastal areas, the more we'll learn about our impact on the environment and the costs to ourselves. We can now landscape and engineer high density urban areas that are liveable and interesting but there is a need to cost externalities and recognize emergent economic activity incurred in terms of environmental impact and degradation.
Overall this thread is a good read, and it's obvious from the posts the understanding of the principles and circumstances is well informed. I've some economics schooling from undergrad studies and thus a fairly clear understanding of the rebuttal inherent in intel's claim that the FTC wants to turn them into a public utility, but I think those points have been well covered. Instead I'd like to point out that the western capitalist markets have swung deeply into litigious territory and lawsuits are now an everyday tool. There's a 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' attitude that pushes corporations to pursue maximum profits from every possible means. My undergrad level economics courses spoke of the concept of moral suasion. Moral suasion, in Canada, was a means the Bank of Canada had as a means of swaying the banking community to follow Bank of Canada money policies. By perhaps bad analogy, the point I'm trying to make is that the community ethics and principles that are implicit in a concept like moral suasion are now anachronistic. With globalization and gargantuan consumer markets has come business practices that more reflect the difficulties in trying to impart a sense of community or national standards on international corporations that compete across many national boundaries and necessarily develop business strategies and tactics wherein governments are just other pieces on the board. Tied into the new world business strategies and exacerbating the situation is that publicly held corporations are intended to reward their investors with maximal profits. Thus, to a large extent intel's current circumstance just reflects the practices of a world market player. For me the sea change that introduced the new market was kicked off with Big Blue's late 1960 monopoly case because IBM demonstrated that mega corporations have the resources to win legal wars of attrition even against big league governments. The more so because every government was as eager to woo large corporations to invest in their countries as they were to sue them.
1st off i'm not going to cite stuff because i've not got it at hand and any citations would be from audio files. the recent courses i've listened to in biology and, more specifically, evolutionary biology suggest the y chromosome is a shrivelled up little thing fast loosing genes. as a guy i didn't much like hearing that either. there's some evidence in some flatworm species that 'penis fencing' suggests bearing young is an "aggressive act" foisted upon a weaker rival. how that would scale up to other species i couldn't say. there are recent findings that male sperm have complex mechanisms that try to induce the egg to draw down from the female as much developmental resources as possible while the egg has similar mechanisms that will try to limited the amount of resources a fertilised egg can demand of the mother. this seems to suggest that there's not only great complexity in development but that sperm and egg are in competition. it's very complex not yet nearly understood stuff. also a 'faster' rate of evolution isn't necessarily a sign of good things to come or an evolutionary edge. what i term differential evolution, for want of a better term, seems not to have been studied or made available to mere lay people such as myself. by differential evolution i mean what does it mean when a species evolves faster. does it simply mean the species has greater fitness? what are the consequences of 'faster' evolution and can such consequences be considered in anything but out of context, almost trivial generalities?
Prions aren't alive but they are proteins, therefore heat should denature them. The question of kuru was raised in a lecture and a TA suggested the brains were eaten raw, because it was thought proper (high temperature) cooking would denature the prions. No one not even the prof was sure.
Oddly i see it very much the opposite. It's because we know our state and can act to leave the world a better place for those who come after us, and, because we can act humanely and compassionately from choice that we can be more than our nature has endowed us to be. I like the idea of pissing in the abyss while wondering who's gonna win the playoffs, but that's just me.
it's late, i'm over tired and maybe i should have cooked that last brain i ate. anyway i did a reread of Darwin's TOOS and then binged on a buncha evolutionary theory and evo-devo stuff, this over the last 3 years. 1st off evolution theory, at least the mainstream stuff presupposes a genotype (dna) translated into a phenotype like me typing this. so the question should arise as to whether prions have a genotype source that has a transcription mechanism. old school Darwinianism as penned by Darwin drifted toward acquired characteristics a la Lamarck because Darwin didn't have any working knowledge of genetics even tho Mendel had sent him a draft of his work. somewhere over 95% of all species have gone extinct and after all the reading and questions i came away seeing life as a random walk of living crud crusting eons of dead crud. no winners no losers no game no gameplan just stuff that hasn't died yet on top of stuff that has; being slow cooked by a middle aged average sun.
Slashdot Mirror
I followed the link and did a precursory read. There are a few follow ups that might be of interest. The granddaddy of this stuff is Sophistry . The ideas behind Sophistry have roots in the Ionian Enlightenment which also lead to the Ancient Greek concept of the Dialectic method. And so we get Socrates, Plato Aristotle, and, so on to Roman ideas of Rhetoric . This stuff spills into all of Western Philosophy, Law and Politics. You can take this stuff anywhere from William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity to Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. It's a thorny thicket everybody has to find their own way through, but if an issue is contentious, if it's open to public debate then it's open to argument and the tools of argument. Even in business any publicly held corporation is bound to protect it's interests and the interests of it's investors and so we get more rhetoric. If you want sterilized, unambiguous facts then you're demanding a world that ought to be and not one that's messy and alive. Every body has the right to put their best foot forward, if you don't like the foot you can step aside or step on it, but then you might end up with a boot in the ass.
I've run my own business and for too long a period of time I brokered businesses. From my brokering experience I took away a number of lessons, but the outstanding rule of thumb I took away was that, on average, a business that fails and goes into a fire sale mode will realize ~10% on the costs undertaken in setting the business up. Failure is expensive. The costs are at best a tax write off.
Failure is one of the most underrated means to success. Because failure is expensive two key attendant details should be kept in mind. You have to be able to pull the plug and, as time is money, timing is crucial. Good planning in the initial stages of the business should include an exit strategy and the better the ground work done in laying out a business plan the better positioned one would be to pull the plug in a timely fashion. The second aspect seems to be culturally blighted. Failure, whether in school, on the playground, in social affairs or business is stupidly branded as a social stain. We necessarily succeed by learning from our failures and getting it right the next time, but, in order to progress, we need to be able to learn as much as possible from our failures. Going back to the earlier point, the better the business plan going into the venture, the better the lessons that can be taken from failure. Also there are relative gains from a business failure. You can salvage and even enhance resources including things like financing sources and heighten your exposure in a wider community.
Gates has denied ever saying anything like that and I've no memory of his having said any such thing. He did predict hardware would come free with the purchase of an operating system by now. My memory of the whole 640 should be enough for anyone was that it was said by an Intel engineer but I'm too lazy to run it to ground.
Global Problems of Population Growth with Professor Robert Wyman a Yale uni online course speaks extensively to overpopulation. In the context of this thread the overriding message would be that women need most of all to be given control of their own bodies, especially in terms of birth control. In countries where poor education and overpopulation are prevalent problems most women will say they want as many children as possible, or, that children are a gift from God and therefore every child a gift; but, the same women when questioned in a different context wanted fewer children. The much joked about 2.1 children per couple is close to the replacement level for most populations. Giving women control over their own reproduction cycle will bring down population and likely along with it poverty, under nourishment, disease and lack of education. The lectures are very entertaining.
Make sure you've covered all the conventional bases, keep them up to date while swapping in and our aspects of your presentation and presence watching to see if something shows some pop. If you're not big on or strong in variations on themes and like to stick with "just the facts, mam" then fine but keep the facts current and accessible. You've already started on the second tier which is to ask for help from people and forums generally, the more especially where people might be sympathetic and may even participate and spread the word. Take every good idea in this thread and try it out while trying while not being pointedly intrusive in only tangentially related venues. Lastly persevere and try always to capitalise on the convergence of any two or more means of growth and exposure that compliment, or, even conflict with one another because when you do so and make others aware of convergence or conflict you're being open and informative rather than simply self promoting. And if someone "big" and "important" expresses an interest indirectly in something your product can really deliver on don't be afraid to approach them directly and confidently, just don't intrude and start bull shitting. above works for about anything, well works for me anyway. goodluck and never underestimate good timing.
social barbarism
Barbarism, or, more pointedly barbarians we so named by the ancient Greeks because the language(s) of said barbarians were thought by the Greeks to sound like "bar,bar,bar...". Barbarians and others with even understandable languages were enslaved by the Greeks because they were seen, perhaps perceived is a better word, as Other. Those not members of the tribe and therefore rightly enslaved. "Social barbarism" is a bit of an oxymoron in light of it's xenophobic origins. Norbert Elias did a brilliant job of tracking what power elites termed civility as a means of excluding others from power and resources. Language is highly contextually bound, as are manners. Screaming into your cell to be heard over a live symphonic performance is one thing, screaming into your cell to be heard over a roaring crowd at a football match is another. Disciplining yourself to shut out fleeting annoyances is one thing, appointing yourself the watchdog of social norms is another.
E.O.Wilson wrote an essay in the late 90's suggesting China is the test case for humanity's attempts to find solutions to environmental and population problems. China as a traditional agrarian male dominated culture has moved from a practise of female infanticide to using technology to abort female foetuses. From this practise a sex ratio imbalance has arisen that some see as of little current or historical importance. The nation's one-child policy could leave 24 million bachelors by the year 2020. My own readings in history have taken on views more in line from what has been learnt from the last few decades of research in primatology. Chimpanzee behaviour favouring, figuratively speaking, male oligarchies restricting access to resources maps clearly, in my mind, onto all three, still widely practised, Mediterranean death cult religions promulgating male dominated societies. Based on China's current sex ratio imbalance the questions to be addressed probably can be set in historical, anthropological and primatological contexts.
Personally I suspect China flirted with democracy, but as is nearly always the case, power structures are not given to relinquishing dominion. Recently /. ran a story that the Chinese government replaced the movie "Avatar" with a biography of Confucius. The works of Confucius are only known by way of reconstructions, but his core message seems to have been one of a familia philosophy, strongly patriarchal, and, in that light, like the Christian, Islamic and Judaic cults that I find map well onto Chimpanzee behaviour. The core mandate of such power structures is submission and tradition. I suspect the Chinese government, if not the Chinese people, are moving away from democracy and into a tradition bound version of Confucianism, but at best it's only a superficial reading.
The discussion can go on and deeper but one current salient point should be made. Chinese society is observed to be much more family orientated than our western societies. A recent rampage killing in the international press was reported on as having happened in western societies because the killer was deranged, whereas the Chinese feedback suggested the man went on a killing spree because his family wasn't there to support him. Western society is strongly vested in the rights of the individual, China not nearly so much. If the West and China and, perhaps much of Asia, are to achieve an equilibrium than we're going to have to bridge this core cultural divide from both sides.
just my loose change.
We have a fairly plastic period of development that ends in a sort of hormonal fixative we call puberty. Puberty is often interwoven with plastic fantastic lovers, and secret penchants to transform into telekinetic vampires and such. For some it's hell for others, like me, it's something to be clung onto long past adolescence. Science fiction, more so fantasy, can cater to pubescent transmogrification, but can also function as a trail breaking exercise for societies. Still the mind, as an American neuroscientist put it, is just the brain doing it's job and it goes about it's job with the same stringent constraints, barring illness, that the rest of a somewhat healthy body does. From almost a preschool age we generally demonstrate the ability to acquire language, even two, three or more languages, at a seemingly unnatural rate. Once the window for acquiring languages closes around the early teens, acquiring even one's native language can be difficult and curtailed.
From the above jumble two quick points tumble free. One is that the plasticity of our minds has constraints, some of those constraints are developmental and thus temporally constrained. The other is that once the most plastic state of our development closes anything we acquire afterward is by dint of rote and reason and, for all that, will probably carry with it the hallmarks of our native environment from early development. We talk with accents and there's reason to think we think with an accent. Further our cultures worldwide tend to be xenophobic and, to my mind, deeply linked to our primate natures. Because of these things we will, as we're doing now, bend technology to our biological and cultural needs much more than technology will ever mysteriously, perchance malevolently transform our brains constraints. Look at what the web is. Isn't Facebook your high school yearbook writ large where you get to play editor and pose and post the stuff that makes you the centre of attention? We're primates, not plastic fantastic lovers, and until technology can transform our basic natures in a way that allows for a functional society, technology will be made to serve our nature.
Wow, interesting story.
Wow, thanks. I was upgrading a box and just stopped long enough to fire off a quick post, and, apparently you were wowed by it. I'm on /. for little other reason than burn off excess mental activity in between working on projects, but now I've the added incentive of knowing I wow people like you. You're most welcome.
I don't know who that heavy hitter was, unless you're referring to Douglas Adams (which would be weird, because he was never wrong about his facts), but whoever it was didn't have much of an idea of the nature and course of the internets,
It may have been Ted Nelson but either way I'm recalling it from a precursory reading ~5 years ago, and, I'm pretty sure it was someone more on the tech end of things. It certainly wasn't Douglas Adams from whom I took the line "thanks for all the fish." I'll see if my subconscious dredges it up and respond more accurately if possible.
hooking up with people via those social networking sites and having sex with other people.
I'd tell you but one, it's private, two, I like to keep it private, and, three, given the nature of your post you're not likely to believe me anyway.
One of the heavy hitters that drove the implementation of the net made the comment that social networks and commercial Internet activity made possible the use of the net by researchers and academics at next to little cost. Web 2 and social networking drove me off the net for over three years. It also motivated me to unplug myself from commercial TV. I've never been to Facebook and have only dropped in on Youtube once or twice, but by way of my mp3 player and smart phone backed up by my netbook I've lecture series on every, IMHO, worthwhile discipline given by world leaders in their field. I can drop in and update almost any topic. So although social networking now owns the Internet and I still abhor web 2 and it's hell spawn, I'd like to say "thanks for all the fish".
Depends does he like you or not?
Well common sense dictates some care be taken in choosing your hunting partners.
cheers
I grew up hunting and fishing. I had to pass what was then the bronze, silver and gold small calibre standards. A 20 gauge over and under and a colt 45 remain my favourite weapons although I no longer own guns or hunt. I'm unaware of any permanent damage to hearing caused by handguns, unless you're specifically speaking to indoor ranges. My hearing tests out excellent and I'd hate to see the carnage and spent rounds my years of hunting and target shooting would amount to.
thanks for the fan mail. it's good to know you're paying attention and you're afraid, good for me and good for you.
there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons.
Cut the crap grandpa, it's obvious you ain't been in a library since one of the wheels fell off your walker a decade ago. Libraries now are a cacophonous din emergent from the cross talk between cell phones, online chatter and wailing of ankle bitters jettisoned by their mothers into a free for all day care centre. Librarians caved years ago and carry on loud conversations with all and sundry. I live 3 blocks from Vancouver's main library, I time my foray, plan my entry and exit strategies, and run it like a half back with the game on the line and time running out.
in a rat warr..err
The quality of life and amenities available in the urban core of a world class city make the rat warr..er lifers of the outback look like primitive mammals popping out of gapes in the broken, sparse infrastructure of some small town. But sessions of near total isolation in a wilderness area, well I'm all for that.
Historically and prehistorically we've demonstrated that we have a strong preference for, and, derive much benefit from inhabiting coastal areas. The economic spin-offs in job creation, and knowledge gleaned from the engineering would be considerable and highly portable to the maintenance and development of any large urban area. Lastly the more we learn about and enable our long term habitation of coastal areas, the more we'll learn about our impact on the environment and the costs to ourselves. We can now landscape and engineer high density urban areas that are liveable and interesting but there is a need to cost externalities and recognize emergent economic activity incurred in terms of environmental impact and degradation.
Overall this thread is a good read, and it's obvious from the posts the understanding of the principles and circumstances is well informed. I've some economics schooling from undergrad studies and thus a fairly clear understanding of the rebuttal inherent in intel's claim that the FTC wants to turn them into a public utility, but I think those points have been well covered. Instead I'd like to point out that the western capitalist markets have swung deeply into litigious territory and lawsuits are now an everyday tool. There's a 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' attitude that pushes corporations to pursue maximum profits from every possible means. My undergrad level economics courses spoke of the concept of moral suasion. Moral suasion, in Canada, was a means the Bank of Canada had as a means of swaying the banking community to follow Bank of Canada money policies. By perhaps bad analogy, the point I'm trying to make is that the community ethics and principles that are implicit in a concept like moral suasion are now anachronistic. With globalization and gargantuan consumer markets has come business practices that more reflect the difficulties in trying to impart a sense of community or national standards on international corporations that compete across many national boundaries and necessarily develop business strategies and tactics wherein governments are just other pieces on the board. Tied into the new world business strategies and exacerbating the situation is that publicly held corporations are intended to reward their investors with maximal profits. Thus, to a large extent intel's current circumstance just reflects the practices of a world market player. For me the sea change that introduced the new market was kicked off with Big Blue's late 1960 monopoly case because IBM demonstrated that mega corporations have the resources to win legal wars of attrition even against big league governments. The more so because every government was as eager to woo large corporations to invest in their countries as they were to sue them.
I get the idea that you misunderstood a whole lot of what they said in your biology class.
i get the idea you're an asshole troll, funny how those little prejudices play out.
1st off i'm not going to cite stuff because i've not got it at hand and any citations would be from audio files. the recent courses i've listened to in biology and, more specifically, evolutionary biology suggest the y chromosome is a shrivelled up little thing fast loosing genes. as a guy i didn't much like hearing that either. there's some evidence in some flatworm species that 'penis fencing' suggests bearing young is an "aggressive act" foisted upon a weaker rival. how that would scale up to other species i couldn't say. there are recent findings that male sperm have complex mechanisms that try to induce the egg to draw down from the female as much developmental resources as possible while the egg has similar mechanisms that will try to limited the amount of resources a fertilised egg can demand of the mother. this seems to suggest that there's not only great complexity in development but that sperm and egg are in competition. it's very complex not yet nearly understood stuff. also a 'faster' rate of evolution isn't necessarily a sign of good things to come or an evolutionary edge. what i term differential evolution, for want of a better term, seems not to have been studied or made available to mere lay people such as myself. by differential evolution i mean what does it mean when a species evolves faster. does it simply mean the species has greater fitness? what are the consequences of 'faster' evolution and can such consequences be considered in anything but out of context, almost trivial generalities?
Prions aren't alive but they are proteins, therefore heat should denature them. The question of kuru was raised in a lecture and a TA suggested the brains were eaten raw, because it was thought proper (high temperature) cooking would denature the prions. No one not even the prof was sure.
Oddly i see it very much the opposite. It's because we know our state and can act to leave the world a better place for those who come after us, and, because we can act humanely and compassionately from choice that we can be more than our nature has endowed us to be. I like the idea of pissing in the abyss while wondering who's gonna win the playoffs, but that's just me.
it's late, i'm over tired and maybe i should have cooked that last brain i ate. anyway i did a reread of Darwin's TOOS and then binged on a buncha evolutionary theory and evo-devo stuff, this over the last 3 years. 1st off evolution theory, at least the mainstream stuff presupposes a genotype (dna) translated into a phenotype like me typing this. so the question should arise as to whether prions have a genotype source that has a transcription mechanism. old school Darwinianism as penned by Darwin drifted toward acquired characteristics a la Lamarck because Darwin didn't have any working knowledge of genetics even tho Mendel had sent him a draft of his work. somewhere over 95% of all species have gone extinct and after all the reading and questions i came away seeing life as a random walk of living crud crusting eons of dead crud. no winners no losers no game no gameplan just stuff that hasn't died yet on top of stuff that has; being slow cooked by a middle aged average sun.