What about something like pandora for DRM free music? That way users could quickly be steered in the direction of music that they are likely to enjoy...
The reason it's hard is because we are doing the impossible, at least if you had asked someone 50, 20, or in some cases even 10 years ago. Solving previously impossible problems requires quite a bit of innovation and novel thinking. But, it's better than it was decades ago, even if it is difficult. What we need to remind people is that even with fast computers, the problems are still difficult to solve.
Also, automating tasks that we used to perform ourselves is also difficult. It's one thing to walk and chew gum, but another thing entirely to precisely describe the mechanics of doing so. (One is very easy, the other requires creating precise models of how things work, a very hard problem).
If you think about it, waging war requires a form of passive obedience from the general population. Most wars are promoted from the top down and require a population that knows how to fall in line. When was the last time you saw grassroots campaign for a war? Given that waging war tends to stifle democracy WITHIN the nations that are waging war, promoting peace would seem to be fostering democratic ideals. So, I think that having a GPL license that does not allow military use makes quite a bit of sense.
Except for the fact that Wine stands for Wine is Not an Emulator, which means that it's a thin compatibility layer which allows windows apps to run on x86 linux. It won't translate x86 system calls to powerPC.
Use your brain. C++ is a very commonly used language. If you can't write an application that is stable, consider another career. The only people I know who criticize a widely used language like c++ are posers and hacks. Think about it, the linux kernel is written in an even lower level language (C), and it's fairly stable. Sorry for the harshness, but I have the displeasure of working with a guy (like you), that complains about having to do serious design, and prefers to write in PERL, becuasue it's easy to use. Designing fast, scalable, stable programs is part of our profession. Either get with the program, or get out. Sorry if I didn't answer your question, but I don't consider it honest.
The last time I did research on this subject, I found the ndiswrapper, which seems to work ok with my linksys 54g pcmcia adapter. Ndiswrapper is open source and works great from my experience.
I agree. In fact, I have a bad feeling about this guy's situation. His whole question reminds me of the time I built a website for a friend of my brother who was launching a dot com in the late 90's. I was in my last year of college at the time, and figured that the experience would be a good thing to add to my resume. I found out the hard way why you never want to work for someone that wants to do things as inexpensively as possible. Not only did they want it done unreasonably cheap ($200), but they also wanted it done unreasonably fast (in a few days). Now, html isn't a problem, but graphic design is not my thing, and while I was willing to learn and do the best I could, they just weren't willing to wait.
In the end they ended up getting what they paid for, and I was so embarrassed by how terrible it was that I never even bothered putting it on my resume. The lesson I learned is first, I may know how to program but I'm not a graphics designer, and second, is that if people aren't willing to pay, send them somewhere else. Let them be someone else's headache.
but I'm just a linux hobbyist and programmer, so take any advice I give with a grain of salt, but here's what I did for my setup at home. To start, you're looking a little over $1000 per TB. And, that's about as cheap as it gets with redudundancy. I have 8 drives in one machine, it's in a RAID 5 config, and I have a hot spare. However, if I were doing this for a mission critical application, I would have it in a RAID 6 configuration with a hot spare, and buy a hot swap cage, which would further add to the costs. Then, I would simply export the RAID 5 volume using ISCSI, and then see if there is a way to RAID all of the ISCSI volumes using a master server. I imagine that if you do it right, you could scale up such a system to a fairly large number of machines. You would probably want something faster than gigabit eithernet, probably 10,000 MB/s connecting everything together, otherwise, things could get a bit congested at the head node.
Where all this could get terribly expensive is in power requirements, it requires less power to run a cage of hard drives than it does to run a network of PC's. I'd imagine that any money you save on hardware, you would spend on your power bill. Either way, your looking at, bare minimum, about $30K to start for 25TB's, and I would add another 10K padding just to be safe, to pay for stuff like UPS (which you want), a high end switch (which you'll also need), cabling, etc. In other words, it's not cheap, and like my parent just said, it will probably be cheaper in the long run to have someone like IBM do it for you. Do you really want to be responsible for 25-1000 TB's of data?
We use pbs at work, and our bladecenter has several hundred processors, which is nice, but you have to share, and sometimes I like to work at home. Unfortunately, working remotely doesn't always work that well, since some of the applications we use to view the finished data are X11 apps that are rendering to large bitmaps, so running them over the net doesn't work that great. So, my solution so far has been to set up my own pipeline at home, and wait a couple of hours when I am testing my code.
At home, I have an athlon 4800+, athlon 3500+, pentium 4 1.8 ghz laptop, mac laptop, and a pentium M laptop. Distributing this work across my network could cut testing time in half. Depending on how easy it was to set up, I was planning on buying a few extra athlon 3500's. Again, not "serious" useage, but the fact that the mosix people are struggling to support 2.6 makes the above article misleading at best.
I just thought I would add, distcc also breaks gdb, which is a pretty big drawback if you ask me (it doesn't produce debug executables properly). However, my guess is that compiling code on a cluster that is set up with MOSIX probably would produce debug executables properly, since gcc would just see it as one big machine, rather than using a distcc front-end.
Thanks, I've been there, done that. Distcc works fairly well, but there was some other stuff I wanted to do in addition to compiling the kernel which I didn't mention. I work in bioinformatics, and quite a bit of the software I write scales nicely across multiple processors, so I wanted to see how well it would run on a mosix cluster. I figured that it could help speed up some of my testing when I am working at home. We already have clusters at work, I was mainly wanting to set it up as a learning experience, and if it sped up some of the multiprocessing tasks that I do, then great.
From everything I've seen, MOSIX is having some issues right now. Unfortunately, MOSIX is one of the easiest, most flexible ways to set up an HPC, and ever since they forked, development has been slow. I did research about 2 months ago to look into setting up a small MOSIX cluster with a few computers. My main goal was to get my feet wet in setting up a cluster using a few desktop and laptop computers. I figured that setting up a cluster with my Athlon 64 x2, Athlon 64 3500+, and a few laptops would speed up compile times by quite a bit. But, it appears that the 2.6 version of MOSIX is still beta and won't support the kernel I need for my Athlon 64 x2 (versions before 2.6.9 don't support powernow with the x2, and also tend to be flaky). So, I have the choice of running a cluster with slower PC's, or waiting for better support. If you look at the year on some of those whitepapers, only one was written this year, and I'd be willing to bet they are describing how to use MOSIX with the 2.4 kernel, not 2.6. I finally gave up on the idea, as running the latest kernel is more important to me.
Iraq is defenseless and small, with a weak, technologically inferior army, China is not, which is why it's not likely that we will go to war with them, especially over IP.
Anyway, to reply seriously to your post. Yes, this COULD happen, but has it, or did it? Sure, the situation in New Orleans was quite chaotic, but did people resort to violence THAT often? It seemed to me that most of the footage of looting was peaceful, albeit chaotic. In all likelihood, the nutcase with the shotgun will look for a house with no one in it before shooting a family and robbing them. There's a reason that the antisocial nutcase gene hasn't caught on, and the reason is that antisocial types usually meet a quick end after doing the thing that you describe (killing a small family).
I also heard a couple of stories of nutcases like the one you describe getting beaten to a pulp for far less than massacering an entire family. There was one story of a guy that raped a twelve year old girl in a bathroom that got strung up. So yeah, someone might do what you said, but chances are that anyone who behaves in such a manner will quickly find themselves hanging from a long rope or getting beaten to a pulp in a way that would make death by shotgun appear to be a pleasant way to go, shotgun or not. The situation you describe could happen, but sounds a bit too contrived to take seriously.
In short, it never ceases to amaze me how humanity devolves during disasters and make a bad situation even worse.
The devolution and degradation of humanity happened long before the riots. It started several hundred years ago when the first slave was taken to America. That's not an excuse for the violence that was inflicted on Reginald Denny, but we should look in the mirror at our own savage behavior, that happens every day when we ignore poverty in our own country, before pointing at the relatively brief amount of "savage" behavior that happens during riots. Quite a bit of their anger is righteous.
There are still pockets of slavery in the South today and the racist tradition is alive and well. Sure, technically they're free, but poverty and social roles still enforces behavior that is very similar in functionality to slavery. My Mom was raised by a black woman. I met her a few times, and she still lives on property owned by my Mom's family (as far as I know, I try not to think of the situation). When I was growing up, my mom referred to her as grandma any time she would speak of her. She was paid a weekly stipend and lived in servant's quarters. My grandparents weren't rich, certainly not well-off enough to pay someone a decent wage. But, this type of arrangement was common, because after slavery was abolished, many black people fell into familiar roles of servant and laborer, and never managed to climb out of them. She is still alive, and while technically free, the woman has never owned anything of any significance in her entire life. I grew up in Missouri (my mom's family lives in Georgia), far enough away from the south to gain perspective on how strange the situation was, and only met her twice (my Mom was estranged from her family a large part of my childhood), but I can't help but think that this strange situation is a common thing. When she talks to anyone white, she calls them Mr. or Ms., to this day. I saw her 3 years ago at my grandfather's funeral, and I was 28, and she was around 90, and she referred to me as Mr. Jon! What year are we in?
So, it's pretty easy (for me) to understand the anger that black people feel, in light of the fact that there are still some who are living the life of modern day slaves. Note that this isn't the kind of legacy that people talk about, and I would like to believe that only having visited my Mom's family in GA twice in my 31 years absolves me of responsibility, but does it? How exactly do I pay her for what she has lost, 90 years of lost opportunity?
This is part of the problem, is that racism is an embarrassing legacy for whites, so it often is not talked about. This is the first time I've written about this part of my family legacy, and I hesitated, even though I am pseudo-anonymous, but stories like these need to be told more often, so that people understand what is really going on. It's similar to the story of the teenage girl that is raped and has an abortion. As compelling of a case as it makes for abortion, the story is not told, often because people are embarrassed and ashamed. So, the injustice remains hidden.
Ok, I understand your fear, and we're not that far apart in that respect. I think things could get much worse in the near future (near meaning the next century or two). And no, I don't have much faith in corporations or the system. It needs to be replaced. In fact, it's not that I have faith in the system, it's that I think the system is horribly hard on most people, especially the 40 million poor people in the US (living at or below povery level). I think if anything, they have huge selective pressures to battle against. So, for every person that's able to afford proper medical treatment, there is another American, 37% of the population if I remember correctly, who can't even afford health insurance. That, and we're really talking about recent history, the past 100 years, which is very small evolutionarily speaking. Also, I think the people that are getting the kind of medical care you speak of, that allows them to "cheat" evolution, are a small fraction of the population. And, we're enormously successful as a species, so, even if there is some disaster, chances are that there are quite a few people who have what it takes to survive it.
The real reason that I like to argue against those that "worry" about evolution, is that evolution is a mechanism to explain speciation and biological diversity, and I really think that we should concern ourselves with how to care for human beings (not that these things are mutually exclusive, but it often seems to me that those who worry about evolution have a callous attitude towards those who are less fortunate). I think that we are going to go in one of two directions. We will either descend into chaos, in which case, people who worry about evolution won't have to worry anymore. Or, we will keep progressing and eventually learn how to manipulate our genetic code, in which case, again, we won't have to worry about evolution. I think that as long as we don't blow ourselves up, we'll be able to manipulate our genome in a short period of timee.
I would still say that intelligence helps in reproductive success, and that whatever other traits we might be losing, we will keep getting smarter for quite some time. As long as we keep getting smarter, the other traits will eventually become moot. As far as other traits go, well, that was a losing battle the first day our ancestors discovered that fire and animal clothing was a better way to keep warm than waiting for evolution to grow fur.
That makes you quite different than most people who have wealth. Just keep in mind, that poor people aren't "stupid". While I may have said that in an abrasive manner earlier, it might save your life if you ditch some of your classist misconcenptions. If you are saying the things you said out loud earlier on a forum, there is no doubt that you are broadcasting it when you are out and about. Keep in mind that you might offend one of the "stupid" people unintentionally.
P.S. While your story is somewhat inspiring, it's interesting that I have a hard time telling the difference between someone born with a silver spoon in their mouth, at least online. I guess you are implying that everyone you grew up with was lazy, or genetically inferior in some way?
People that get worked up over evolution "stopping" are showing, quite obviously, that they think the system is perfectly fair. What you are really saying is that poor people are reproducing more, and it bothers you, because you think that wealth is a sign of intelligence. Therefore, if wealthy people reproduce less, we are "dumbing down". I can see a few holes in this premise, one of them being that wealthy people are more intelligent. In fact, I think the fact that the kinds of people who are wealthy are reproducing at a slower rate is a good thing. Capitalism might be selecting for these kinds of people, but at least evolution has enough sense to pass them by. I'm really not so sure I would consider the perfect capitalist is the person who I would want us to evolve into.
I'd love to see a guy like you walk over into the bad area of town and get made a fool out of by the "stupid people". You wouldn't stand a chance. Seriously, do you even walk outside? Or do you only hang out with other overpriveledged snobs?
Oh, and as far as welfare goes, it's 2% of the US population, which is far less than the current unemployment rate. Or maybe you are saying that Americans are more intelligent than other, more socialist, countries? right... Try getting your facts from someone other than Rush.
I'm not so sure that "highly educated" is a sign of intelligence. It's pretty synonymous with "highly trained monkey" if you ask me. I don't think we're even close to having stupidity selected for as a desirable trait. The fact that there are highly educated people who believe that stupid people reproduce more often is further evidence that there is still stupidity that needs to be eliminated.
I would say that probably the trait most selected for in current US society is the ability to sell things, whether it's an idea, or a bullshit story. This would seem to require the ability to compartmentalize and maintain a set of (possibly conflicting) facts. In spite of slashdot bias to the contrary, being a good liar would seem to require intelligence. And yes, I think that this even applies to the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. It would seem to me that the guy with a sharper brain is going to be better at attracting the opposite sex. Granted we're not talking about rocket science, but it's a form of intelligence none the less.
If losing means agreeing that Bush is incompetent, then call me a loser. I would say that both markets and republicans should be replaced. The reality is that the entire system failed. Shouting , "Every man for himself!", which is the free market mantra, is obviously not an evacuation plan. However, turning things over to the market will ensure that this will be the way everthing is dealt with. The Bush government is presenting us with a false choice, a lose-lose proposition, which involves either choosing him or choosing the markets. I would choose neither. My solution is: 1. Get rid of Bush and the neocons. 2. Get rid of capitalism and replace it with something like participatory economics.
BTW, by "privately owned" are you referring to buildings that the state financed, like the superdome?
Yes, and it's really difficult to tell where the boardroom ends and government begins. They're all in it together, so blaming one and promoting the other is somewhat naive. But, that hasn't kept people from replying to me in support of private industry, when my whole point was that the ENTIRE SYSTEM failed. To promote private industry would be just as naive as re-electing Bush for a third term if it were possible.
The reason government is taking the fall so easily is because they really don't care, their primary paycheck is coming from private industry, so what do they care if they get booted out of office? The PR machine that drives our political process will just groom another John Kerry or George Bush to keep the whole thing rolling.
Slashdot Mirror
What about something like pandora for DRM free music? That way users could quickly be steered in the direction of music that they are likely to enjoy...
The reason it's hard is because we are doing the impossible, at least if you had asked someone 50, 20, or in some cases even 10 years ago. Solving previously impossible problems requires quite a bit of innovation and novel thinking. But, it's better than it was decades ago, even if it is difficult. What we need to remind people is that even with fast computers, the problems are still difficult to solve.
Also, automating tasks that we used to perform ourselves is also difficult. It's one thing to walk and chew gum, but another thing entirely to precisely describe the mechanics of doing so. (One is very easy, the other requires creating precise models of how things work, a very hard problem).
If you think about it, waging war requires a form of passive obedience from the general population. Most wars are promoted from the top down and require a population that knows how to fall in line. When was the last time you saw grassroots campaign for a war? Given that waging war tends to stifle democracy WITHIN the nations that are waging war, promoting peace would seem to be fostering democratic ideals. So, I think that having a GPL license that does not allow military use makes quite a bit of sense.
Except for the fact that Wine stands for Wine is Not an Emulator, which means that it's a thin compatibility layer which allows windows apps to run on x86 linux. It won't translate x86 system calls to powerPC.
Use your brain. C++ is a very commonly used language. If you can't write an application that is stable, consider another career. The only people I know who criticize a widely used language like c++ are posers and hacks. Think about it, the linux kernel is written in an even lower level language (C), and it's fairly stable. Sorry for the harshness, but I have the displeasure of working with a guy (like you), that complains about having to do serious design, and prefers to write in PERL, becuasue it's easy to use. Designing fast, scalable, stable programs is part of our profession. Either get with the program, or get out. Sorry if I didn't answer your question, but I don't consider it honest.
The last time I did research on this subject, I found the ndiswrapper, which seems to work ok with my linksys 54g pcmcia adapter. Ndiswrapper is open source and works great from my experience.
I agree. In fact, I have a bad feeling about this guy's situation. His whole question reminds me of the time I built a website for a friend of my brother who was launching a dot com in the late 90's. I was in my last year of college at the time, and figured that the experience would be a good thing to add to my resume. I found out the hard way why you never want to work for someone that wants to do things as inexpensively as possible. Not only did they want it done unreasonably cheap ($200), but they also wanted it done unreasonably fast (in a few days). Now, html isn't a problem, but graphic design is not my thing, and while I was willing to learn and do the best I could, they just weren't willing to wait.
In the end they ended up getting what they paid for, and I was so embarrassed by how terrible it was that I never even bothered putting it on my resume. The lesson I learned is first, I may know how to program but I'm not a graphics designer, and second, is that if people aren't willing to pay, send them somewhere else. Let them be someone else's headache.
but I'm just a linux hobbyist and programmer, so take any advice I give with a grain of salt, but here's what I did for my setup at home. To start, you're looking a little over $1000 per TB. And, that's about as cheap as it gets with redudundancy. I have 8 drives in one machine, it's in a RAID 5 config, and I have a hot spare. However, if I were doing this for a mission critical application, I would have it in a RAID 6 configuration with a hot spare, and buy a hot swap cage, which would further add to the costs. Then, I would simply export the RAID 5 volume using ISCSI, and then see if there is a way to RAID all of the ISCSI volumes using a master server. I imagine that if you do it right, you could scale up such a system to a fairly large number of machines. You would probably want something faster than gigabit eithernet, probably 10,000 MB/s connecting everything together, otherwise, things could get a bit congested at the head node.
Where all this could get terribly expensive is in power requirements, it requires less power to run a cage of hard drives than it does to run a network of PC's. I'd imagine that any money you save on hardware, you would spend on your power bill. Either way, your looking at, bare minimum, about $30K to start for 25TB's, and I would add another 10K padding just to be safe, to pay for stuff like UPS (which you want), a high end switch (which you'll also need), cabling, etc. In other words, it's not cheap, and like my parent just said, it will probably be cheaper in the long run to have someone like IBM do it for you. Do you really want to be responsible for 25-1000 TB's of data?
I expect it to work.
We use pbs at work, and our bladecenter has several hundred processors, which is nice, but you have to share, and sometimes I like to work at home. Unfortunately, working remotely doesn't always work that well, since some of the applications we use to view the finished data are X11 apps that are rendering to large bitmaps, so running them over the net doesn't work that great. So, my solution so far has been to set up my own pipeline at home, and wait a couple of hours when I am testing my code.
At home, I have an athlon 4800+, athlon 3500+, pentium 4 1.8 ghz laptop, mac laptop, and a pentium M laptop. Distributing this work across my network could cut testing time in half. Depending on how easy it was to set up, I was planning on buying a few extra athlon 3500's. Again, not "serious" useage, but the fact that the mosix people are struggling to support 2.6 makes the above article misleading at best.
I just thought I would add, distcc also breaks gdb, which is a pretty big drawback if you ask me (it doesn't produce debug executables properly). However, my guess is that compiling code on a cluster that is set up with MOSIX probably would produce debug executables properly, since gcc would just see it as one big machine, rather than using a distcc front-end.
Thanks, I've been there, done that. Distcc works fairly well, but there was some other stuff I wanted to do in addition to compiling the kernel which I didn't mention. I work in bioinformatics, and quite a bit of the software I write scales nicely across multiple processors, so I wanted to see how well it would run on a mosix cluster. I figured that it could help speed up some of my testing when I am working at home. We already have clusters at work, I was mainly wanting to set it up as a learning experience, and if it sped up some of the multiprocessing tasks that I do, then great.
From everything I've seen, MOSIX is having some issues right now. Unfortunately, MOSIX is one of the easiest, most flexible ways to set up an HPC, and ever since they forked, development has been slow. I did research about 2 months ago to look into setting up a small MOSIX cluster with a few computers. My main goal was to get my feet wet in setting up a cluster using a few desktop and laptop computers. I figured that setting up a cluster with my Athlon 64 x2, Athlon 64 3500+, and a few laptops would speed up compile times by quite a bit. But, it appears that the 2.6 version of MOSIX is still beta and won't support the kernel I need for my Athlon 64 x2 (versions before 2.6.9 don't support powernow with the x2, and also tend to be flaky). So, I have the choice of running a cluster with slower PC's, or waiting for better support. If you look at the year on some of those whitepapers, only one was written this year, and I'd be willing to bet they are describing how to use MOSIX with the 2.4 kernel, not 2.6. I finally gave up on the idea, as running the latest kernel is more important to me.
Iraq is defenseless and small, with a weak, technologically inferior army, China is not, which is why it's not likely that we will go to war with them, especially over IP.
Anyway, to reply seriously to your post. Yes, this COULD happen, but has it, or did it? Sure, the situation in New Orleans was quite chaotic, but did people resort to violence THAT often? It seemed to me that most of the footage of looting was peaceful, albeit chaotic. In all likelihood, the nutcase with the shotgun will look for a house with no one in it before shooting a family and robbing them. There's a reason that the antisocial nutcase gene hasn't caught on, and the reason is that antisocial types usually meet a quick end after doing the thing that you describe (killing a small family).
I also heard a couple of stories of nutcases like the one you describe getting beaten to a pulp for far less than massacering an entire family. There was one story of a guy that raped a twelve year old girl in a bathroom that got strung up. So yeah, someone might do what you said, but chances are that anyone who behaves in such a manner will quickly find themselves hanging from a long rope or getting beaten to a pulp in a way that would make death by shotgun appear to be a pleasant way to go, shotgun or not. The situation you describe could happen, but sounds a bit too contrived to take seriously.
I suppose, or they could both just go stock up at the local walmart...
The devolution and degradation of humanity happened long before the riots. It started several hundred years ago when the first slave was taken to America. That's not an excuse for the violence that was inflicted on Reginald Denny, but we should look in the mirror at our own savage behavior, that happens every day when we ignore poverty in our own country, before pointing at the relatively brief amount of "savage" behavior that happens during riots. Quite a bit of their anger is righteous.
There are still pockets of slavery in the South today and the racist tradition is alive and well. Sure, technically they're free, but poverty and social roles still enforces behavior that is very similar in functionality to slavery. My Mom was raised by a black woman. I met her a few times, and she still lives on property owned by my Mom's family (as far as I know, I try not to think of the situation). When I was growing up, my mom referred to her as grandma any time she would speak of her. She was paid a weekly stipend and lived in servant's quarters. My grandparents weren't rich, certainly not well-off enough to pay someone a decent wage. But, this type of arrangement was common, because after slavery was abolished, many black people fell into familiar roles of servant and laborer, and never managed to climb out of them. She is still alive, and while technically free, the woman has never owned anything of any significance in her entire life. I grew up in Missouri (my mom's family lives in Georgia), far enough away from the south to gain perspective on how strange the situation was, and only met her twice (my Mom was estranged from her family a large part of my childhood), but I can't help but think that this strange situation is a common thing. When she talks to anyone white, she calls them Mr. or Ms., to this day. I saw her 3 years ago at my grandfather's funeral, and I was 28, and she was around 90, and she referred to me as Mr. Jon! What year are we in?
So, it's pretty easy (for me) to understand the anger that black people feel, in light of the fact that there are still some who are living the life of modern day slaves. Note that this isn't the kind of legacy that people talk about, and I would like to believe that only having visited my Mom's family in GA twice in my 31 years absolves me of responsibility, but does it? How exactly do I pay her for what she has lost, 90 years of lost opportunity?
This is part of the problem, is that racism is an embarrassing legacy for whites, so it often is not talked about. This is the first time I've written about this part of my family legacy, and I hesitated, even though I am pseudo-anonymous, but stories like these need to be told more often, so that people understand what is really going on. It's similar to the story of the teenage girl that is raped and has an abortion. As compelling of a case as it makes for abortion, the story is not told, often because people are embarrassed and ashamed. So, the injustice remains hidden.
Ok, I understand your fear, and we're not that far apart in that respect. I think things could get much worse in the near future (near meaning the next century or two). And no, I don't have much faith in corporations or the system. It needs to be replaced. In fact, it's not that I have faith in the system, it's that I think the system is horribly hard on most people, especially the 40 million poor people in the US (living at or below povery level). I think if anything, they have huge selective pressures to battle against. So, for every person that's able to afford proper medical treatment, there is another American, 37% of the population if I remember correctly, who can't even afford health insurance. That, and we're really talking about recent history, the past 100 years, which is very small evolutionarily speaking. Also, I think the people that are getting the kind of medical care you speak of, that allows them to "cheat" evolution, are a small fraction of the population. And, we're enormously successful as a species, so, even if there is some disaster, chances are that there are quite a few people who have what it takes to survive it.
The real reason that I like to argue against those that "worry" about evolution, is that evolution is a mechanism to explain speciation and biological diversity, and I really think that we should concern ourselves with how to care for human beings (not that these things are mutually exclusive, but it often seems to me that those who worry about evolution have a callous attitude towards those who are less fortunate). I think that we are going to go in one of two directions. We will either descend into chaos, in which case, people who worry about evolution won't have to worry anymore. Or, we will keep progressing and eventually learn how to manipulate our genetic code, in which case, again, we won't have to worry about evolution. I think that as long as we don't blow ourselves up, we'll be able to manipulate our genome in a short period of timee.
I would still say that intelligence helps in reproductive success, and that whatever other traits we might be losing, we will keep getting smarter for quite some time. As long as we keep getting smarter, the other traits will eventually become moot. As far as other traits go, well, that was a losing battle the first day our ancestors discovered that fire and animal clothing was a better way to keep warm than waiting for evolution to grow fur.
That makes you quite different than most people who have wealth. Just keep in mind, that poor people aren't "stupid". While I may have said that in an abrasive manner earlier, it might save your life if you ditch some of your classist misconcenptions. If you are saying the things you said out loud earlier on a forum, there is no doubt that you are broadcasting it when you are out and about. Keep in mind that you might offend one of the "stupid" people unintentionally.
P.S. While your story is somewhat inspiring, it's interesting that I have a hard time telling the difference between someone born with a silver spoon in their mouth, at least online. I guess you are implying that everyone you grew up with was lazy, or genetically inferior in some way?
People that get worked up over evolution "stopping" are showing, quite obviously, that they think the system is perfectly fair. What you are really saying is that poor people are reproducing more, and it bothers you, because you think that wealth is a sign of intelligence. Therefore, if wealthy people reproduce less, we are "dumbing down". I can see a few holes in this premise, one of them being that wealthy people are more intelligent. In fact, I think the fact that the kinds of people who are wealthy are reproducing at a slower rate is a good thing. Capitalism might be selecting for these kinds of people, but at least evolution has enough sense to pass them by. I'm really not so sure I would consider the perfect capitalist is the person who I would want us to evolve into.
I'd love to see a guy like you walk over into the bad area of town and get made a fool out of by the "stupid people". You wouldn't stand a chance. Seriously, do you even walk outside? Or do you only hang out with other overpriveledged snobs?
Oh, and as far as welfare goes, it's 2% of the US population, which is far less than the current unemployment rate. Or maybe you are saying that Americans are more intelligent than other, more socialist, countries? right... Try getting your facts from someone other than Rush.
I'm not so sure that "highly educated" is a sign of intelligence. It's pretty synonymous with "highly trained monkey" if you ask me. I don't think we're even close to having stupidity selected for as a desirable trait. The fact that there are highly educated people who believe that stupid people reproduce more often is further evidence that there is still stupidity that needs to be eliminated.
I would say that probably the trait most selected for in current US society is the ability to sell things, whether it's an idea, or a bullshit story. This would seem to require the ability to compartmentalize and maintain a set of (possibly conflicting) facts. In spite of slashdot bias to the contrary, being a good liar would seem to require intelligence. And yes, I think that this even applies to the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. It would seem to me that the guy with a sharper brain is going to be better at attracting the opposite sex. Granted we're not talking about rocket science, but it's a form of intelligence none the less.
If losing means agreeing that Bush is incompetent, then call me a loser. I would say that both markets and republicans should be replaced. The reality is that the entire system failed. Shouting , "Every man for himself!", which is the free market mantra, is obviously not an evacuation plan. However, turning things over to the market will ensure that this will be the way everthing is dealt with. The Bush government is presenting us with a false choice, a lose-lose proposition, which involves either choosing him or choosing the markets. I would choose neither. My solution is:
1. Get rid of Bush and the neocons.
2. Get rid of capitalism and replace it with something like participatory economics.
BTW, by "privately owned" are you referring to buildings that the state financed, like the superdome?
Except that, they DID respond the way Walmart responded, they closed up shop and left town.
Yes, and it's really difficult to tell where the boardroom ends and government begins. They're all in it together, so blaming one and promoting the other is somewhat naive. But, that hasn't kept people from replying to me in support of private industry, when my whole point was that the ENTIRE SYSTEM failed. To promote private industry would be just as naive as re-electing Bush for a third term if it were possible.
The reason government is taking the fall so easily is because they really don't care, their primary paycheck is coming from private industry, so what do they care if they get booted out of office? The PR machine that drives our political process will just groom another John Kerry or George Bush to keep the whole thing rolling.