Yep. There's no reason you can't have a socialist democracy, or a capitalist dictatorship, or like America seems to be becoming, an autocratic capitalist society.
I think the word you're looking for, ma'am, is plutocracy: whoever has the gold makes the rules, and screw everyone else.
Sounds nice, but the human eyes do not have cells that would register UV radiation. Furthermore, why don't "auras" show up in UV sensitive photos?
I don't know about "auras", but the human retina can definitely pick up UV. It's just filtered out by the cornea on the way through. Which explains why everyone gets cataracts after a nuclear holocaust.
There has been talk in the past of meteorites that have supposedly originated from Mars. I find this pretty weird, BUT, if it's true, perhaps meteorites have originated from Earth and perhaps spread life to other bodies in the solar system. This doesn't seem too implausible.
Seems that most of these prodigies are people with autism, which appears to be a degenerative neurological disorder. Now, I am not a neurologist, but it appears that with autism, the brain can become really focussed on one or more particular abilities, often involving astounding feats of memory recall or mathematical tricks, while in other areas the person's abilities are deficient. (seen Rain Man?)
So the question is, in order to simulated or assimilate the focussed abilities that autistic people have, would this have to be induced chemically, surgically, psychologically, or genetically?
Well, chemical means are bound to screw something important up as a side effect, brain surgery is by and large a pretty hit-and-miss affair, and it's a bit early to do genetic brain surgery, and that would possibly be overkill anyway. I reckon training and perhaps some kind of meditation/vizualisation technique would be the way to go.
I want to be a mentat. Now given that we're talking about science fiction becoming science reality, in general, (and becoming marketing hype, in particular), I would like to pose this question to my fellow/. readers who've read Dune:
How possible do you think it would be to train current plain old Homo Sapiens to do what a mentat could do, without having to go through all the suffering and expense of a Butlerian Jihad?
In other words, I want my serial processing to be as fast as my parallel processing. I want to be able to sumbit a problem to my subconscious, and have an answer on the next brain cycle. Just like it already processes millions of bits of information per second from my nerves and doesn't tell the conscious every single bit, it just works out what these things mean and tells my consciousness that instead. Damn handy. Fantastic data compression. Surely something with that much analytical processing power, operating virtually autonomously, can chew up relatively simple mathmatical operations easily. Witness those prodigies who can multiply 100 digit numbers in their heads instantaneously. The potential is there. Now, how to harness it?
Every combination of three letters and digits should have been in there.
That way we could have:
spankfish.mp3
spankfish.jpg
spankfish.fu2
spankfish.b2b
spankfish.sxe
not to mention the obligatory
curl.up.and.die
linux.rox
windoze.sux
goat.sex
burger.fat
clown.fun
nihilism.god
crappy.ads
Oh baby. I'm sure you all want that too.
I wish there were "ads" and "god" TLDs, to give my proxy something to do besides cache and filter -particular- domains.
Now 36^3 isn't that huge a number. 46656. That's not a hell of a lot of TLD's, and certainly within the capacity of any decent server and client software.
ELIMINATE ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY!!!
Freenet and that alternate DNS network are starting to look like a good thing.
So would you say that loosening gun laws in Columbia would lessen the frequency of violent crime there?
Somehow I doubt this. The violence probably stems more from social factors other than people being disgruntled about the gun laws. I also wonder what the most commonly used murder weapons in Columbia are, and how this compares to other areas/states.
Correct me if I am wrong, but apparently, 50k years ago, sea levels were much lower than they are now. Therefore, much of the Indonesian archipelago is reckoned to have been connected by land. The ancestors of the Australian Aboriginals could have walked there most, if not all, of the way from what's now Malaysia.
Perhaps other races at the time did not have the technology to survive crossing vast distances of ocean. People have always been curious, haven't they? Maybe they went off into the ocean and just died before they got anywhere, a lot of the time.
Speaking of ancient races, there must have been a hell of a lot of sea exploration going on before western "civilization" got big, I mean look at all those islands in the Pacific that were not only populated, but FOUND in the first place. Bloody amazing if you ask me. Like Easter Island. In the middle of nowhere. Covered in massive stone heads. Incredible.
Its a fact, places with higher percentages of gun ownership have less crime.. PERIOD. Dont buy into all this "tightening gun laws saves lives".
Its total bullshit.
Extraordinary statements require extraordinary proof, and I would love to see you prove that, considering that the USA has more people in prison than any other country in the world outside of Russia. This place is paradise for
criminals.
If they took our guns away that would be one step closer to making this country a police state (this country being US)
How would you like the only people who have guns to be the "police", and the "criminals"? Of course your a criminal for owning a gun of they were totally outlawed.
Gun ownership is very restricted in Australia. I think that for the most part, people are glad that gun-toting lunatics cannot get their hands on ballistic weaponry. Gun ownership is what perpetuates your society of fear in America, IMO.
Imagine living in a place where you didn't have to worry that someone might have a gun. That the worst they could do is beat you up, maybe. You'd certainly have less worry about being dead.
Now a person like you would typically answer with something like "well if _I_ have a gun too, then I am safe". And we end up with situations like the US/Russian arms race and a whole lot of dick-waving bullshit. No thanks. I can live without it.
For all the blithering that goes on, trying to equate gun ownership and freedom, none of the gun-toting trolls on slashdot can adequately explain what gives them the freedom to kill a man. You don't have that freedom. You have laws against that. You don't need guns to get rid of a sucky government in a democracy either.
This is an interesting point, but you seem to be forgetting that for the vast majority of human existence, parents have generally had more than one child. Usually at least two or three. Refactor that into the calculation, it ought to bring the numbers down significatly. Say for the 30 generation example, assuming only that each pair of parents produced 3 offspring. 3 children with two distinct parents. Let's call that 1 child with 2/3 of a distinct parent. Going back over time with the same rate compouding, you get the picture.
Although, yes, it's probably reasonable to assume that we are all related in some way. Although I wonder about couples who cannot have children - perhaps in some cases their DNA is just different enough to have a chance of not being able to create a human embryo.
Do we have species differentiation going on within the homo sapiens clan? We must, surely, or at least the very beginnings of it.
It's ludicrous to think that we couldn't be
evolving, after all, we're still shagging and
mutating, and what else do you need for evolution
to occur?
Also, you can't really leave the non-human element out of this. There is evidence around that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalis mated on numerous occasions.
Imagine the soap opera potential in that. (chuckle)
You know, the best application I can think of for one of these suckers is backup.
I just wish somebody would invent similar capacity RAM: fast, cheap, huge, and persistent. Then we wouldn't NEED hard disks.
OS/400, despite having a butt-ugly user interface, is an interesting system in the
way that it handles, for example, user spaces, but in particular, memory. It treats memory and disk as just a big bunch of memory (AFAIK).
Man, I want that big, persistent bunch of ram.
100 gigs ought to do. Hard disks suck.
You know, it strikes me that what would be really nice would be if artists could just break their rotten contracts, and set up their web sites with all sorts of info, but importantly, links to other artists that they like. This will allow music consumers to discover artists that they hadn't heard of, and possibly like. This alone would take care of the promotion of artists, I think, along with word of mouth and other electronic forms of discussion. Artists works would be promoted in proportion to their merit. A meritocracy, if you will.
Most important though, is making sure artists can be paid for their efforts. Obviously we want to do this with a digital medium. I think the best way is for artists to provide entire free songs for listeners to try out, and samples from songs that require a payment to download.
Service beureaus could be set up which collect over-the-Net payment on behalf of the artists in return for allowing download of a song which requires payment. These beureaus would have to compete to serve artists, so it would be in the interest of artists to pick a beaureau that takes the tiniest slice of the cost of each song possible. Make a song $0.50 or something. Forward 95% to the artist, maybe 5% to the beaureau to cover the operating costs of their web site.
Either that or use Paypal or that tipping site so that people can pay what they think a song is worth.
This seems fair to me. It can't be that hard to implement.
Christians should stop trying to be like Christians and start trying to be more like Christ himself, who seemed like a pretty decent guy. He certainly didn't advocate killing anyone because they beleived different.
I am committed to the First Amendment principles of religious freedom, tolerance, and diversity. Whether Mormon, Methodist, Jewish, or Muslim, Americans should be able to participate in their constitutional free exercise of religion.
Let's have a show of hands. Is your religion Government Approved?
God, if Bush's response here wasn't a canned one, I'll eat a month-old donut.
Do you honestly expect either Gore or Bush to know what slashdot is...
Oh come on, you're talking about the man who invented the Internet. I speak not for this Bush character - he sounds like a bullshit generator.
I wonder how many of these guys actually know what soil erosion is.
That quantum physicist guy sounds OK - at least he's got a more broad-minded approach to things rather than being an obsessive-compulsive economics freak.
Most people don't want to know how something works. They want to know how to use it.
Couldn't agree more. But technical support and system administration folks aren't most people. How many companies expect their employees to fix their own computers when they screw up. "Call the help desk."
If the user can use the system, and the sysadmin can use his brain when something goes wrong, then there is no problem. The operating system is irrelevant as long as Joe User can do his job.
Yeah, and I love that fact that Windows variants have thousands of unexplainable, undocumented behaviours. Just makes my life peachy. I'd like to see what MS calls unstable...
The whole field of Quantum Computing is a mathematical abstraction (fine, as any pure math is, as long as you don't try to claim that's how the real world works). Its vital connection with the real world is based on a highly dubious (even outright absurd, according to some physicists, including Einstein) conjecture about entangled quantum states (roughly, a special kind of "mystical" non-local correlation among events) which was actually never confirmed experimentally. And without that quantum entanglement the whole field is an excercise in pure abstract math with no bearing on reality.
You could be saying the same thing about aeroplanes.
Research and experimentation are rarely a waste of effort, whether to prove or disprove, because we have to find out. The skeptics said we would never build aircraft, split the atom, travel safely in railway carriages, go to the moon, etc etc etc.
I think it is far better to err on the side of curiousity, than to just sit around never asking any questions. History proves this irrefutably. We learn from our successes. We sometimes learn from our mistakes too. It is worth the effort.
So let these guys go and discover what they can! Let the engineers make it work! Just like the early experiments with aircraft, there will be hundreds of failures before someone gets it right, and when and if it happens, all those who made the effort will be vindicated.
Judging by this definition, earth's moon should be considered a planet. It is easily massive enough, and it has greater gravitational attraction to the sun than it does to the earth.
A planet which shares the same orbit as the earth, sure, but still a planet.
Eh? What kind of crack are you on? If Luna had more gravitational attration to Sol than Terra, then please explain why it hasn't gone zooming off towards Sol! Also, I think you'll find that Luna really does orbit Terra. The Luna/Terra subsystem orbits Sol. It is inaccurate to describe Luna's orbit as purely around Sol.
It would be interesting to trace Luna's path around Sol, though... I wonder if it would be one of those Lissajous [sp?] figure things, perhaps something like (assuming circular orbits).
Rts=radius of Terra's orbit about Sol
Rlt=radius of Luna's orbit about Terra
Dls=distance of Luna to Sol
n=number of times Luna orbits Terra in the time it takes Terra to orbit Sol once (13)
t=0..1 fraction of how far we are thru Terra's orbit
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine those spammers running with Boba Fett on their ass!
Woo hoo!
--
I think the word you're looking for, ma'am, is plutocracy: whoever has the gold makes the rules, and screw everyone else.
--
I don't know about "auras", but the human retina can definitely pick up UV. It's just filtered out by the cornea on the way through. Which explains why everyone gets cataracts after a nuclear holocaust.
--
What do y'all reckon?
--
The man is not qualified to make decisions regarding this matter. In fact, most ten-year olds have more net nous than this guy. Get him out, I say.
--
So the question is, in order to simulated or assimilate the focussed abilities that autistic people have, would this have to be induced chemically, surgically, psychologically, or genetically?
Well, chemical means are bound to screw something important up as a side effect, brain surgery is by and large a pretty hit-and-miss affair, and it's a bit early to do genetic brain surgery, and that would possibly be overkill anyway. I reckon training and perhaps some kind of meditation/vizualisation technique would be the way to go.
--
I want to be a mentat. Now given that we're talking about science fiction becoming science reality, in general, (and becoming marketing hype, in particular), I would like to pose this question to my fellow /. readers who've read Dune:
How possible do you think it would be to train current plain old Homo Sapiens to do what a mentat could do, without having to go through all the suffering and expense of a Butlerian Jihad?
In other words, I want my serial processing to be as fast as my parallel processing. I want to be able to sumbit a problem to my subconscious, and have an answer on the next brain cycle. Just like it already processes millions of bits of information per second from my nerves and doesn't tell the conscious every single bit, it just works out what these things mean and tells my consciousness that instead. Damn handy. Fantastic data compression. Surely something with that much analytical processing power, operating virtually autonomously, can chew up relatively simple mathmatical operations easily. Witness those prodigies who can multiply 100 digit numbers in their heads instantaneously. The potential is there. Now, how to harness it?
--
And how, dare I ask, does one accomplish that?
Damn it would be nice if some of those peering clients indicated if a file had Variable Bit Rate encoding, any fixed rate sucks rocks.
--
Every combination of three letters and digits should have been in there. That way we could have:
- spankfish.mp3
- spankfish.jpg
- spankfish.fu2
- spankfish.b2b
- spankfish.sxe
not to mention the obligatory- curl.up.and.die
- linux.rox
- windoze.sux
- goat.sex
- burger.fat
- clown.fun
- nihilism.god
- crappy.ads
Oh baby. I'm sure you all want that too. I wish there were "ads" and "god" TLDs, to give my proxy something to do besides cache and filter -particular- domains. Now 36^3 isn't that huge a number. 46656. That's not a hell of a lot of TLD's, and certainly within the capacity of any decent server and client software.ELIMINATE ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY!!!
Freenet and that alternate DNS network are starting to look like a good thing.
--
Somehow I doubt this. The violence probably stems more from social factors other than people being disgruntled about the gun laws. I also wonder what the most commonly used murder weapons in Columbia are, and how this compares to other areas/states.
--
Perhaps other races at the time did not have the technology to survive crossing vast distances of ocean. People have always been curious, haven't they? Maybe they went off into the ocean and just died before they got anywhere, a lot of the time.
Speaking of ancient races, there must have been a hell of a lot of sea exploration going on before western "civilization" got big, I mean look at all those islands in the Pacific that were not only populated, but FOUND in the first place. Bloody amazing if you ask me. Like Easter Island. In the middle of nowhere. Covered in massive stone heads. Incredible.
--
Extraordinary statements require extraordinary proof, and I would love to see you prove that, considering that the USA has more people in prison than any other country in the world outside of Russia. This place is paradise for criminals.
If they took our guns away that would be one step closer to making this country a police state (this country being US)
How would you like the only people who have guns to be the "police", and the "criminals"? Of course your a criminal for owning a gun of they were totally outlawed.
Gun ownership is very restricted in Australia. I think that for the most part, people are glad that gun-toting lunatics cannot get their hands on ballistic weaponry. Gun ownership is what perpetuates your society of fear in America, IMO.
Imagine living in a place where you didn't have to worry that someone might have a gun. That the worst they could do is beat you up, maybe. You'd certainly have less worry about being dead.
Now a person like you would typically answer with something like "well if _I_ have a gun too, then I am safe". And we end up with situations like the US/Russian arms race and a whole lot of dick-waving bullshit. No thanks. I can live without it.
For all the blithering that goes on, trying to equate gun ownership and freedom, none of the gun-toting trolls on slashdot can adequately explain what gives them the freedom to kill a man. You don't have that freedom. You have laws against that. You don't need guns to get rid of a sucky government in a democracy either.
You can live in more freedom without guns.
--
Although, yes, it's probably reasonable to assume that we are all related in some way. Although I wonder about couples who cannot have children - perhaps in some cases their DNA is just different enough to have a chance of not being able to create a human embryo.
Do we have species differentiation going on within the homo sapiens clan? We must, surely, or at least the very beginnings of it. It's ludicrous to think that we couldn't be evolving, after all, we're still shagging and mutating, and what else do you need for evolution to occur?
Also, you can't really leave the non-human element out of this. There is evidence around that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalis mated on numerous occasions.
Imagine the soap opera potential in that. (chuckle)
--
Both those sites need rego. That truly sucks.
--
I just wish somebody would invent similar capacity RAM: fast, cheap, huge, and persistent. Then we wouldn't NEED hard disks.
OS/400, despite having a butt-ugly user interface, is an interesting system in the way that it handles, for example, user spaces, but in particular, memory. It treats memory and disk as just a big bunch of memory (AFAIK).
Man, I want that big, persistent bunch of ram. 100 gigs ought to do. Hard disks suck.
--
Does it really work?
Doesn't the MPEG stream need a header or something?
--
Most important though, is making sure artists can be paid for their efforts. Obviously we want to do this with a digital medium. I think the best way is for artists to provide entire free songs for listeners to try out, and samples from songs that require a payment to download.
Service beureaus could be set up which collect over-the-Net payment on behalf of the artists in return for allowing download of a song which requires payment. These beureaus would have to compete to serve artists, so it would be in the interest of artists to pick a beaureau that takes the tiniest slice of the cost of each song possible. Make a song $0.50 or something. Forward 95% to the artist, maybe 5% to the beaureau to cover the operating costs of their web site.
Either that or use Paypal or that tipping site so that people can pay what they think a song is worth.
This seems fair to me. It can't be that hard to implement.
--
Christians should stop trying to be like Christians and start trying to be more like Christ himself, who seemed like a pretty decent guy. He certainly didn't advocate killing anyone because they beleived different.
--
And god-damn it, he didn't even mention the The Church Of Euthanasia, which has got to be the funniest religion ever...
--
Let's have a show of hands. Is your religion Government Approved?
God, if Bush's response here wasn't a canned one, I'll eat a month-old donut.
--
Oh come on, you're talking about the man who invented the Internet. I speak not for this Bush character - he sounds like a bullshit generator.
I wonder how many of these guys actually know what soil erosion is.
That quantum physicist guy sounds OK - at least he's got a more broad-minded approach to things rather than being an obsessive-compulsive economics freak.
--
Couldn't agree more. But technical support and system administration folks aren't most people. How many companies expect their employees to fix their own computers when they screw up. "Call the help desk."
If the user can use the system, and the sysadmin can use his brain when something goes wrong, then there is no problem. The operating system is irrelevant as long as Joe User can do his job.
Yeah, and I love that fact that Windows variants have thousands of unexplainable, undocumented behaviours. Just makes my life peachy. I'd like to see what MS calls unstable...
--
I beleive that would be one P. T. Barnum, most likely, or perhaps Oscar Wilde.
You remember of course Mr Barnum of the famous Barnum and Bailey Circus.
--
You could be saying the same thing about aeroplanes.
Research and experimentation are rarely a waste of effort, whether to prove or disprove, because we have to find out. The skeptics said we would never build aircraft, split the atom, travel safely in railway carriages, go to the moon, etc etc etc.
I think it is far better to err on the side of curiousity, than to just sit around never asking any questions. History proves this irrefutably. We learn from our successes. We sometimes learn from our mistakes too. It is worth the effort.
So let these guys go and discover what they can! Let the engineers make it work! Just like the early experiments with aircraft, there will be hundreds of failures before someone gets it right, and when and if it happens, all those who made the effort will be vindicated.
--
A planet which shares the same orbit as the earth, sure, but still a planet.
Eh? What kind of crack are you on? If Luna had more gravitational attration to Sol than Terra, then please explain why it hasn't gone zooming off towards Sol! Also, I think you'll find that Luna really does orbit Terra. The Luna/Terra subsystem orbits Sol. It is inaccurate to describe Luna's orbit as purely around Sol.
It would be interesting to trace Luna's path around Sol, though... I wonder if it would be one of those Lissajous [sp?] figure things, perhaps something like (assuming circular orbits).
Rts=radius of Terra's orbit about Sol
Rlt=radius of Luna's orbit about Terra
Dls=distance of Luna to Sol
n=number of times Luna orbits Terra in the time it takes Terra to orbit Sol once (13)
t=0..1 fraction of how far we are thru Terra's orbit
Dls= Rts + Rlt * sin(2*pi*t*n)
Graph that sucker on a polar chart
--