How about legalizing or decriminalizing those things sold on a black market removing the financial incentives?
Stuff like meth, heroin, difficult-to-trace guns, stolen property, murder-for-hire services? The average street level thugs works longer hours for effectively less than minimum wage anyway, so it's not as if they are going to become perfectly rational citizens when the easy money is cut off.
How about early intervention through more funding for pre-schools in urban areas to provide the structure the kids' parents cannot?
No matter how much you `early-intervention' a student, seeing their neighbors killed in a drive-by or stabbed by a junkie over a pair of shoes is going to fuck them up and cause them to despair and lead them to seek revenge (usually by joining a gang).
Yes, those might be good ideas, but the gangsters have got to fucking go before anything like that can even begin to work. A police force not consisting of bullies, morons, or cowards too scared to get out of their fucking car would go a long way too. How to attack this problem? I do not know. But it doesn't appear that softer methods are working very much. How many more generations can we afford to let be eaten alive before we can bring out the big guns?
stuxnet as an example, could have used a few better exploits.
Why? It seems to have done exactly what it was meant to do. Why use a supercomputer when a TI-82 will work just fine? Save the better stuff for another day.
This post become extremely funny when you read it not assuming that you meant `NSA' in every place where you wrote `TSA'. The TSA couldn't find their own assholes (that can probably be taken literally); if they tried to plug in an ethernet cable they would probably electrocute themselves. Just imagine them trying to run a spying operation.
Unless that is all just a clever ruse to evade suspicion....
At one point I thought that the best thing that the State could do was shut up and wait for people to forget. Just let him go to some shithole and languish in obscurity. But then I realized: by making everything about him personally, elevating him to celebrity status, it deflects almost all attention from the programs that he revealed. It's an amazingly effective political move isn't it! The debate isn't `what do you think about the NSA spying on Americans?', it's `Should we prosecute this guy? Because he is a traitor. And an attention whore. What do you think about him? Did he do the right thing? Let's talk more about him.' Stunningly powerful play by the Obama administration and congress. They kinda stumbled a little at first by attempting to address the concerns with bullshit word-plays, but they quickly went into full damage control mode and changed the discussion completely. If it weren't so shitty and underhanded, I might could respect it.
If that's the best argument that you have, then you're cause is doomed before it even started. Even Thomas Jefferson said that strict observance to the constitution is bad when the country is put in danger. How about finding an argument that won't drive away 99% of the population and make the entire cause look bad?
I've never met anybody who likes Donald Trump, and people only listen to celebrities when they already agree with whatever they are saying; otherwise they are being a stupid asshole attention whore wash-up burnout.
No one cares. No one ever cared. It is the `Civil War', not the `War of Northern Aggression', and it will remain so forever. The North won. Get over it.
You have no understanding on bacteria, vaccination, or statistics. Please do not voice your uninformed opinion ever again.
That said, let me explain it to you: bacteria wants to live. Bacteria will evolve to survive in places where it is not welcome. The bacteria are simple organisms, and don't like to waste space in their DNA on stupid shit just for fun. The presence of vaccines in places that they want to live is usually a problem, but they adapt to it. If the vaccines were not there, there would be no evolutionary pressure to evade the vaccines. Understand? Or do I need to break out the image macros, as stupid memes like `curolation =! causashon' is probably a better learning tool for you.
Billions of years of evolution have forced the human body to be able to withstand an incredibly huge and diverse set of challenges.
And every part would be easily serviceable and replaceable.
Every part is serviceable and replaceable, all 100,000,000,000,000 of them. Additionally, all of those parts can be made out of scrap, in place, without disrupting the function of the system as a whole. (Okay, that's not fair, as the analogous part of a machine would be the atomic level. Maybe I'll agree with you more when I'm less high.)
if I were designing something from scratch without any 'legacy' considerations
Okay, let's lay out the requirements so we can get started on Human2.0:
- Must be serviceable at run time.
- Must be able to consume almost any living thing as fuel (preparation of fuel can be as convoluted of a process as you like).
- Must be capable of manipulating surroundings of almost any physically possible configuration.
- Must be capable of traversing almost any terrain.
- Must be self adjusting.
- Must be self building.
- Must be self contained.
- Cannot rely on factory produced parts to continue existence.
- Must have components to cause necessary action (i.e. reflexes to keep the arm from melting when exposed to a corrosive environment) without conscious intervention.
- Must be very fuel efficient.
- Must be producible using only a few cells.
I expect a proposal on my desk by next the year 2613.
What is your definition of species that takes the throne?
No meaningful answer possible, I refuse to respond.
Besides, in terms of survival and reproduction on the planet, we're born more helpless than any other species.
A king without his clothes is just a peasant. Whether or not humans would be the dominate species without technology is irrelevant. We have technology, that is all that matters here (and more importantly: the ability to create new technology to overcome new obstacles).
Besides, in terms of survival and reproduction on the planet, we're born more helpless than any other species
I disagree. It seems to me that the human brain is the most powerful organ that any Earthling has ever been endowed with.
And in terms of probability to survive when dropped onto a random location on the planet we're no match for e.g. sharks
And just what have sharks done to do anything beyond carving out a tiny niche in the food chain? I'm not asking for photographic proof of sharks building a rocket and landing on the moon here, just an example of any sort of coordinated effort to attack humans at large will be fine. Give me the necessary tools and I will have sharks extinct before the end of the decade. Can sharks drive humans extinct? They best they could do is make the beaches dangerous until the harpooners showed up. In the long term after such an attack, we'd train carefully breed dolphins to patrol the coastlines to eliminate rogue, terrorist sharks.
But that may be asking a bit too much of sharks. I'll concede if they so much as find a way to maintain their life functions on land.
There's a reason why sharks have changed much less than other species during the last few hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Yeah, that's the problem with genetic algorithms: they tend to find a local extrema, not the absolutes. That isn't our problem; we have language (written language in particular), and can form organizations that can outlive a single life. That said, failing to change is not a good thing. Changing means adapting to environment; little change over long periods of times can be indicative of reaching an evolutionary dead end. Sharks haven't died out, so that's a good argument that they aren't a dead end, but it isn't a sign that they are the apex either.
Edward, you already invalidating anything you have said before
Oh wow. Does a more model example of ad hominem exist? "You're a prick and I don't like you, so everything you've said is wrong. End of discussion!" Grow up, you're the one being emotional.
If he was sacrificing himself, he would have stayed in the USA after distributing all the documents he'd stolen and proudly stood trial for what he'd done.
Why? You don't have to be stupid to sacrifice yourself. If you witness a mafia boss murder someone, are you going to proudly and boldly testify without asking for witness protection? Believe it or not, given the choice, most people would like to do what they think is right AND not have their life ruined.
Everyone's ire is directed at the US, and it will stay that way regardless of which country, if any, eventually grants him asylum. Ultimately, Snowden's fate is completely irrelevant to the rest of the World, it will only affect the potential whistleblowers who come after him. Setting an example with his case is strictly an internal US affair.
Russian and Chinese political strategists seem to have reached the opposite conclusion.
Control freak moderators on shitty forums decided that years ago. You are supposed to use the search function to find a thread, but then you cannot post in it, as it is locked for going to long without a bump; you cannot start a new thread without being redirected to the old, and having your new thread locked.
It's basically a way to be obsessed with rules and wave your dick around. This is good because it shows how long you've been on the site, and proves that you are a valuable contributor (a very important thing for people with low self-esteem).
You're right. If monkeys, whales, and spiders could work set aside their differences and out an alliance, our rule would seriously be jeopardized. But as it is, I don't see any serious contenders for the throne. In fact, I doubt that there are any other animals that could even remove a forest or create something as useless as a cow, much less change the climate. Bacteria could certainly do it, but it would take them million of years, and we have plenty of time to stop their dastardly plans.
Yup, he's clearly racist because he disagreed with something Obama is doing. Alright, pack it up, we're done here. We've reached the extent of DNS-and-BIND's glorious argument and we can go to bed assured that any criticism of Obama is the same as joining the Klan and burning a cross on the White House lawn.
You're so obsessed with the idea of intelligent design being wrong (which it is) that you look for faults in the body to make your point, then conclude that humans have a terrible anatomy that would never work. And yet, here we are, masters of the entire earth. You are an idiot, and not because of your laptop design.
Wall Street is only a positive sum in the medium to long term. Most `investing' is done on the microsecond length, making it very much a zero sum game.
Once the exchange and brokerage fees are added in, it's probably a negative sum, as the middle men are removing money.
Perhaps. I had originally planned to give someone like Kafka or Nabokov as examples, but I thought that that might be too much. Never the less, I maintain that my point was preserved: most only read for the plot and entertainment, as do most adults actually; not to try to gain any insight into it.
Why do you think that universities are arranged into schools and departments around specific expertise? It is so that relevant experts can be gathered together.
For the same reason that governments and companies divide themselves into departments and increasingly finer subdivisions thereof. This does nothing to diminish the fact that the constituent parts work only for the whole any more than the fact that an human can be separated into organs, then into cells, then into atoms does to diminish the fact that a person it is much more than a lump of matter. Forest for the trees, almost literally here.
Undergraduate students go to university to pick up expertise in fairly narrow and specific topic areas. If you want to become a jack of all trades stick to high-school.
That may be why they go there, but that is not why higher education exist. It exist not to educate a person, but to educate people; to have a better society as a whole. The world would be a very shitty place if it was nothing by cubic gray buildings. There can be absolutely no problems with a more well-educated society.
If you want to become a jack of all trades stick to high-school.
A bunch of drone engineers who know only how to operate a slide rule, and with very little expose to creative endeavor more complex and deep than reality TV will not be good engineers. Period. It doesn't matter how much they are pushed, without an enthusiasm to understand the beauty in the world, whatever they make will be crap. *cough*china*cough*.
Besides that, with nothing to ponder but questions about coulombs and diff-eq, burn out will be fast. I go so far as to hypothesis that having the brain operate in a different section a few times a semester will not is not only a good thing, but that being stuck in a little bubble, studying the same thing for 14 hours a day, every day, is actively harmful.
That teaches you the basics, and ideally it should teach critical thought, but it does not and cannot do so on the same level as an education whose goal is not to teach facts, but to expand the mind. High school is for learning basic algebra, that everyone needs to know (even drug dealers had better know how to convert grams to ounces to kilos, etc...). Higher education is supposed to require a truer understanding (though it also fails at this all too often). Sure, any high school student can tell you that Oedipus murdered his father and fucked his mother, but could they give you a better answer as to why he gouged his eyes than `cuz he fukd hiz mom dats gross as shit dude!'?
Slashdot Mirror
If you would turn on caching then that wouldn't be a problem.
How about legalizing or decriminalizing those things sold on a black market removing the financial incentives?
Stuff like meth, heroin, difficult-to-trace guns, stolen property, murder-for-hire services? The average street level thugs works longer hours for effectively less than minimum wage anyway, so it's not as if they are going to become perfectly rational citizens when the easy money is cut off.
How about early intervention through more funding for pre-schools in urban areas to provide the structure the kids' parents cannot?
No matter how much you `early-intervention' a student, seeing their neighbors killed in a drive-by or stabbed by a junkie over a pair of shoes is going to fuck them up and cause them to despair and lead them to seek revenge (usually by joining a gang).
Yes, those might be good ideas, but the gangsters have got to fucking go before anything like that can even begin to work. A police force not consisting of bullies, morons, or cowards too scared to get out of their fucking car would go a long way too. How to attack this problem? I do not know. But it doesn't appear that softer methods are working very much. How many more generations can we afford to let be eaten alive before we can bring out the big guns?
stuxnet as an example, could have used a few better exploits.
Why? It seems to have done exactly what it was meant to do. Why use a supercomputer when a TI-82 will work just fine? Save the better stuff for another day.
This post become extremely funny when you read it not assuming that you meant `NSA' in every place where you wrote `TSA'. The TSA couldn't find their own assholes (that can probably be taken literally); if they tried to plug in an ethernet cable they would probably electrocute themselves. Just imagine them trying to run a spying operation.
Unless that is all just a clever ruse to evade suspicion....
At one point I thought that the best thing that the State could do was shut up and wait for people to forget. Just let him go to some shithole and languish in obscurity. But then I realized: by making everything about him personally, elevating him to celebrity status, it deflects almost all attention from the programs that he revealed. It's an amazingly effective political move isn't it! The debate isn't `what do you think about the NSA spying on Americans?', it's `Should we prosecute this guy? Because he is a traitor. And an attention whore. What do you think about him? Did he do the right thing? Let's talk more about him.' Stunningly powerful play by the Obama administration and congress. They kinda stumbled a little at first by attempting to address the concerns with bullshit word-plays, but they quickly went into full damage control mode and changed the discussion completely. If it weren't so shitty and underhanded, I might could respect it.
If that's the best argument that you have, then you're cause is doomed before it even started. Even Thomas Jefferson said that strict observance to the constitution is bad when the country is put in danger. How about finding an argument that won't drive away 99% of the population and make the entire cause look bad?
I've never met anybody who likes Donald Trump, and people only listen to celebrities when they already agree with whatever they are saying; otherwise they are being a stupid asshole attention whore wash-up burnout.
Okay, I'm sorry.
No one cares. No one ever cared. It is the `Civil War', not the `War of Northern Aggression', and it will remain so forever. The North won. Get over it.
You have no understanding on bacteria, vaccination, or statistics. Please do not voice your uninformed opinion ever again.
That said, let me explain it to you: bacteria wants to live. Bacteria will evolve to survive in places where it is not welcome. The bacteria are simple organisms, and don't like to waste space in their DNA on stupid shit just for fun. The presence of vaccines in places that they want to live is usually a problem, but they adapt to it. If the vaccines were not there, there would be no evolutionary pressure to evade the vaccines. Understand? Or do I need to break out the image macros, as stupid memes like `curolation =! causashon' is probably a better learning tool for you.
And every part would be easily serviceable and replaceable.
Every part is serviceable and replaceable, all 100,000,000,000,000 of them. Additionally, all of those parts can be made out of scrap, in place, without disrupting the function of the system as a whole. (Okay, that's not fair, as the analogous part of a machine would be the atomic level. Maybe I'll agree with you more when I'm less high.)
if I were designing something from scratch without any 'legacy' considerations
Okay, let's lay out the requirements so we can get started on Human2.0:
- Must be serviceable at run time.
- Must be able to consume almost any living thing as fuel (preparation of fuel can be as convoluted of a process as you like).
- Must be capable of manipulating surroundings of almost any physically possible configuration.
- Must be capable of traversing almost any terrain.
- Must be self adjusting.
- Must be self building.
- Must be self contained.
- Cannot rely on factory produced parts to continue existence.
- Must have components to cause necessary action (i.e. reflexes to keep the arm from melting when exposed to a corrosive environment) without conscious intervention.
- Must be very fuel efficient.
- Must be producible using only a few cells.
I expect a proposal on my desk by next the year 2613.
What is your definition of species that takes the throne?
No meaningful answer possible, I refuse to respond.
Besides, in terms of survival and reproduction on the planet, we're born more helpless than any other species.
A king without his clothes is just a peasant. Whether or not humans would be the dominate species without technology is irrelevant. We have technology, that is all that matters here (and more importantly: the ability to create new technology to overcome new obstacles).
Besides, in terms of survival and reproduction on the planet, we're born more helpless than any other species
I disagree. It seems to me that the human brain is the most powerful organ that any Earthling has ever been endowed with.
And in terms of probability to survive when dropped onto a random location on the planet we're no match for e.g. sharks
And just what have sharks done to do anything beyond carving out a tiny niche in the food chain? I'm not asking for photographic proof of sharks building a rocket and landing on the moon here, just an example of any sort of coordinated effort to attack humans at large will be fine. Give me the necessary tools and I will have sharks extinct before the end of the decade. Can sharks drive humans extinct? They best they could do is make the beaches dangerous until the harpooners showed up. In the long term after such an attack, we'd train carefully breed dolphins to patrol the coastlines to eliminate rogue, terrorist sharks.
But that may be asking a bit too much of sharks. I'll concede if they so much as find a way to maintain their life functions on land.
There's a reason why sharks have changed much less than other species during the last few hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Yeah, that's the problem with genetic algorithms: they tend to find a local extrema, not the absolutes. That isn't our problem; we have language (written language in particular), and can form organizations that can outlive a single life. That said, failing to change is not a good thing. Changing means adapting to environment; little change over long periods of times can be indicative of reaching an evolutionary dead end. Sharks haven't died out, so that's a good argument that they aren't a dead end, but it isn't a sign that they are the apex either.
Edward, you already invalidating anything you have said before
Oh wow. Does a more model example of ad hominem exist? "You're a prick and I don't like you, so everything you've said is wrong. End of discussion!" Grow up, you're the one being emotional.
If he was sacrificing himself, he would have stayed in the USA after distributing all the documents he'd stolen and proudly stood trial for what he'd done.
Why? You don't have to be stupid to sacrifice yourself. If you witness a mafia boss murder someone, are you going to proudly and boldly testify without asking for witness protection? Believe it or not, given the choice, most people would like to do what they think is right AND not have their life ruined.
Everyone's ire is directed at the US, and it will stay that way regardless of which country, if any, eventually grants him asylum. Ultimately, Snowden's fate is completely irrelevant to the rest of the World, it will only affect the potential whistleblowers who come after him. Setting an example with his case is strictly an internal US affair.
Russian and Chinese political strategists seem to have reached the opposite conclusion.
Control freak moderators on shitty forums decided that years ago. You are supposed to use the search function to find a thread, but then you cannot post in it, as it is locked for going to long without a bump; you cannot start a new thread without being redirected to the old, and having your new thread locked.
It's basically a way to be obsessed with rules and wave your dick around. This is good because it shows how long you've been on the site, and proves that you are a valuable contributor (a very important thing for people with low self-esteem).
You're right. If monkeys, whales, and spiders could work set aside their differences and out an alliance, our rule would seriously be jeopardized. But as it is, I don't see any serious contenders for the throne. In fact, I doubt that there are any other animals that could even remove a forest or create something as useless as a cow, much less change the climate. Bacteria could certainly do it, but it would take them million of years, and we have plenty of time to stop their dastardly plans.
Yup, he's clearly racist because he disagreed with something Obama is doing. Alright, pack it up, we're done here. We've reached the extent of DNS-and-BIND's glorious argument and we can go to bed assured that any criticism of Obama is the same as joining the Klan and burning a cross on the White House lawn.
You're so obsessed with the idea of intelligent design being wrong (which it is) that you look for faults in the body to make your point, then conclude that humans have a terrible anatomy that would never work. And yet, here we are, masters of the entire earth. You are an idiot, and not because of your laptop design.
Wall Street is only a positive sum in the medium to long term. Most `investing' is done on the microsecond length, making it very much a zero sum game.
Once the exchange and brokerage fees are added in, it's probably a negative sum, as the middle men are removing money.
When you're $100k in debt with only a degree in Women's Studies to show for it.
Why don't you use google to do some research instead of asking a million basic questions about something you know nothing about?
Perhaps. I had originally planned to give someone like Kafka or Nabokov as examples, but I thought that that might be too much. Never the less, I maintain that my point was preserved: most only read for the plot and entertainment, as do most adults actually; not to try to gain any insight into it.
Why do you think that universities are arranged into schools and departments around specific expertise? It is so that relevant experts can be gathered together.
For the same reason that governments and companies divide themselves into departments and increasingly finer subdivisions thereof. This does nothing to diminish the fact that the constituent parts work only for the whole any more than the fact that an human can be separated into organs, then into cells, then into atoms does to diminish the fact that a person it is much more than a lump of matter. Forest for the trees, almost literally here.
Undergraduate students go to university to pick up expertise in fairly narrow and specific topic areas. If you want to become a jack of all trades stick to high-school.
That may be why they go there, but that is not why higher education exist. It exist not to educate a person, but to educate people; to have a better society as a whole. The world would be a very shitty place if it was nothing by cubic gray buildings. There can be absolutely no problems with a more well-educated society.
If you want to become a jack of all trades stick to high-school.
A bunch of drone engineers who know only how to operate a slide rule, and with very little expose to creative endeavor more complex and deep than reality TV will not be good engineers. Period. It doesn't matter how much they are pushed, without an enthusiasm to understand the beauty in the world, whatever they make will be crap. *cough*china*cough*.
Besides that, with nothing to ponder but questions about coulombs and diff-eq, burn out will be fast. I go so far as to hypothesis that having the brain operate in a different section a few times a semester will not is not only a good thing, but that being stuck in a little bubble, studying the same thing for 14 hours a day, every day, is actively harmful.
That teaches you the basics, and ideally it should teach critical thought, but it does not and cannot do so on the same level as an education whose goal is not to teach facts, but to expand the mind. High school is for learning basic algebra, that everyone needs to know (even drug dealers had better know how to convert grams to ounces to kilos, etc...). Higher education is supposed to require a truer understanding (though it also fails at this all too often). Sure, any high school student can tell you that Oedipus murdered his father and fucked his mother, but could they give you a better answer as to why he gouged his eyes than `cuz he fukd hiz mom dats gross as shit dude!'?