The problem with getting rid of classes is play balancing. Players will very quickly discover optimum configurations which become templates for the vast number of characters on the server. The more freedom you give to your players, the greater the domain of possible combinations, and somewhere in a very large domain will inevitably be the killer combination, the thing that your testing did not uncover but suddenly becomes the single most popular template in the game. Instead of greater variety, you end up with much less, precisely because these optimum configurations can punch so far above their weight that nothing else will get invited into a group. The quickest way to fix such configurations is to nerf some part of it--and entire MMORPG's have almost collapsed due to unpopular nerfs, because you have just broken half your server's favourite character. Restricting by archetypes makes the job of play balancing easier.
Your ideas are good, but none of them are new. They would in all likelihood lead to a very interesting game--at first. Then the nerfing would begin and the subscription curve would drop like a rock. And this is after spending several million dollars building and testing it. In other words, not a risk anyone would be willing to take.
Unfortunately, learning to learn is precisely what employers are looking for in university and college graduates--I have heard this very phrase used repeatedly by employers as the reason that they did not hire people with two year certificates. What you're telling me is that the degree is no longer delivering this qualification. If that is the case, employers will begin to hold out for a degree that does. This may well be the reason that companies like IBM won't bother with anyone unless they have a graduate degree or a lot of experience.
Reeling and writhing (as Lewis Carol put it) are taught in grade school and polished in high school. You should have this down by the time you hit college. The same thing goes for attrition, distraction, stultification, and derision, and the rest of math. College or university is where you apply these skills in the pursuit of higher learning--the focus then should be content or application rather than mere expression. When I went to school, I was expected to read in grade two, did hours of grammar and spelling homework in grades three to five, was studying Shakespeare and romantic poetry by grade nine, and was doing calculus and algebra by grade twelve. What the hell happened? Who suddenly decided that kids weren't capable of this?
The most depressing change in post-secondary education is that it has moved from the liberal arts and sciences approach to the trade skill approach. The ideal of university used to be that the university was a resource of knowledge and wisdom to which students would come to drink, but were not forced to drink, and it was a given that they would already have the skills to digest what they imbibed. In places like Oxford and Cambridge, it was a given that many students simply did not bother to attend classes. They took advantage of the libraries, read widely, consulted with professors, and spent long hours in earnest conversation, learning as much in the cafes and taverns from professors and fellow students and as they would in a class. The discipline required to steer ones own studies is the mark of a good student; if the professor is required to take attendance and teach rudimentary skills, the battle is already lost. In the movie A Beautiful Mind John Nash originally shows a profound contempt for course lectures, both in giving them and taking them, because he is obsessed with his own direction of study. A mediocre student will note the professors position and parrot it. A good student will take this and others into account and play freely with the ideas and arrive at his own opinion. If he is a brilliant student, he will form an opinion which is a genuine advance upon existing ideas.
In connection with this, the current trend of questioning the political leanings of professors and insisting upon neutral or balanced opinions is in keeping with the expectation of mediocrity. You don't learn from people who agree with you. A student who emerges with the opinions of his professors is an ape: monkey see, monkey do, but the fear of professors with differing opinions indicates that those who hold this fear expect students to be apes. And a student who expects to go through university and come out with the same opinions he went in with is an arrogant git who intends to preserve his own ignorance. These people should be identified and failed at the earliest possible opportunity. At one time they would have been, but political correctness is the bulwark of mediocrity. You cannot challenge a student's beliefs, no matter how idiotic--just put them on the bell-curve and process them through like so much ground meat. In the place of sound and nuanced reasoning, graduates learn a few sophomoric post-modernist parlour tricks that can be used in the defense of whatever drivel is currently fashionable. And it does not help that the entry standards are so low that professors are expected to teach rudimentary skills that should have been learned five or ten years previously. In this atmosphere, an ape who can dress himself and use a toilet is regarded as an accomplishment.
I think it would be a great idea, but stores would hate it: in North America, anyway, prices are quoted without taxes to hide the additional costs, leaving the final sum to the nearest penny. I don't think you can legally sell something to someone for 44.42 if there is no chance to pay the correct amount--it's false advertising, and you can't round the taxes on the receipt either, because that's tax fraud. This means that the days of nice rounded prices would be over (no more $12.99 or $13.00 plus tax) or prices would have to be quoted with taxes included--except that some of your customers don't have to pay the tax...
See the problem? It can be done, but there would be a shitstorm in the retail sector.
The reason that pennies exist is so that taxes can be collected on small purchases. The government gets billions over dollars in revenue--and we get pennies...
There's another problem here that no one has mentioned. Unskilled entry level jobs were the lowest rung of the ladder that people would climb to success. These are what allowed immigrant labourers to work their way out of poverty; their children became tradesmen, their grandchildren professionals. What we are now doing is phasing out most of these through mechanization and outsourcing. The manufacturing industry in North America is now almost dead. The only thing left is the service industry, which requires human beings on site. Don't forget that Wal-Mart is America's largest employer. Mechanize that, and there will be no way for the lowest economic tier of society to dig themselves out.
The new jobs created are typically in another country now, as U.S. trade deficits demonstrate. The problem isn't technology itself, but the irresponsible use of it to squeeze more and more profit out without any thought of the consequences to the rest of society. The wonder of the world right now is the U.S. economy, with its staggering debts and deficits at all levels. It's been bleeding so profusely for so long, nobody can figure out why it just doesn't keel over and die.
...neither is history or archeology. I don't think you are getting anywhere with such vague assertions. I wonder if you include "biblical" "history" "archeology" and "anthropology", as it clearly has real and historical authorship...
What are you expecting, a point by point refutation of everything in the bible in a single posting? No science is complete and therefore completely consistent, but there are hard nuggets of fact which contradict the stories of the Bible. Forty years to cross the Sinai? It takes four days to walk across it, and there is not a single hint concerning the movement of the Jews in the area, either by physical artifacts or by the Egyptians, who kept meticulous records which we still have. Do you really think that all those stories of miracles don't contradict physics? And the 'prophecy' of Christ's resurrection was interpreted as such and shoehorned into the story long after the fact. Many details of Jesus' life were added to conform to the interpretation of prophecies found in the Old Testament. This leads to absurdities like the claim that he was a descendant of David (through Joseph) in conformance with prophecy--but if he was the son of God, he was not the son of Joseph and therefore not a descendant of David. Here you can see the rival traditions of Hellenism and Judaism in a head-on collision.
By the way, Pontius Pilate ordered Jesus' execution, and he didn't give a damn about Jewish religion. Crucifiction was a Roman institution; the Jews got stuck with the blame later. Pilate just saw a potential political troublemaker, whose latest act was to attack the collectors of the temple tithes. In other words, a tax resistor--tithes, taxes, it was all the same to Pilate.
The original post said:
There has never been anything proven incorrect about the bible. If you took time to study it, then you would've found that out.
Which I is the claim I took issue with, and on that point you seem to agree with me. The rest seems to be a stealth defense of Mormonism. I'll spare you any comments on that...
Oh, come on, people. Your bank knows more about you than your mother does. If you're worried about this little iTunes thing, than you have no idea just how much information is already available about you out there.
All those Air Miles cards out there are data tracking sytems, tracking EVERYTHING you buy with that card. You have no say over who gets this information. Everything you buy with a credit card was tracked already, but now it's been centralized.
If someone wants it, they can get your credit history, estimated net worth, educational records, a fairly large chunk of your medical history, and the record of everywhere you've ever lived or ever worked. Financial institutions have all of this, now. You can't get a mortgage or insurance without telling them most of this--in fact, much of the bank's due dilligence in giving you a large loan is in compiling a dossier on you. They're not really required to be too careful about who they hand it out to, either. Nor are they required to tell you everything they know. Soon they'll know what you like and don't like, if they don't already. They will be able to build a fairly accurate profile of your personality. And they will sell this information to whoever asks, at a pretty cheap price.
All of this privacy paranoia is such a joke. I particularly find it funny when people get paranoid about the government. The CIA can barely remember where they left their keys, but your bank is another matter entirely. You haven't had any privacy for decades. Most of you have never lived in a world where privacy existed. If you thought it did exist, you simply didn't know who was gathering the information. And if you think iTunes is a major threat, you are mind-bogglingly naive.
There has never been anything proven incorrect about the bible. If you took time to study it, then you would've found that out.
Wow, have you even opened the damn book? I mean, without your bible study group to cherry pick the passages and explain away all the glaring inconsistencies? The bible is not consistent with history, archeology, anthropology, physics, any coherent system of ethics, or even with itself! There are two completely different versions of the creation myth and two versions of the ten commandments. The four gospels tell wildly different stories of Jesus' death and resurrection, while Paul never mentions the resurrection once--probably because the myth of the resurrection was not widely adopted till after his death.
In fact, the original sources for the gospels consist of aphorisms, he-said they-said...without a word about what Jesus did or about what happened to him. Look up the Gospel of Thomas if you want to see the original format of the gospels. The story of his life was filled in later, and in the grand tradition of hellenistic heroes, he was made the son of a god. Of the four gospels the sermon on the mount is the only part that everyone agrees is probably accurate. And at the Council of Nicea, they started with over 20 gospels and ended with 4. Wouldn't we all love to know what wound up on the cutting room floor?
Where do fundamentalists get this bizarre notion that there is nothing wrong in the bible? Even a glancing survey of the Old Testament should be enough to dispel this notion. With its numerous calls upon the faithful towards rapine and slaughter, and especially towards murdering children, I seriously suspect that many of the Isrealites were actually still worshipping Moloch for much of it, and they just cut Moloch's name out of the stories later. Traditional Christianity regards the Bible as problematic; in fact, the Catholic Church tried to prevent it from being translated into languages that people could read. This should tell you something. The Catholic Church wrote the Bible, at the council of Nicea. The Nicean Creed, formulated by the same council, remains the core statement of the Catholic articles of faith, and is recited in each Catholic Mass.
The most infuriating thing about this literalistic fundamentalist crap isn't the bogus scientific claims, or the hypocrisy, or even the fascistic danger of a theocracy. The thing that bothers people the most is that it is not and never has been Christianity. It's a political movement masquerading as a religion, completely at odds with nearly all of the Christian tradition. None of the older churches, who remain grounded in this tradition, would bother to challenge evolution--Christianity has no stake in the argument. The desire to invoke supernatural entities to explain and control natural events is not religion, it is magic. Fundamentalists have turned Christianity into some sort of new age occult circus, with people speaking in tongues, angels running around like personal valets, and faces appearing on everything from Mars to your morning toast. The flakiness reaches its height in the Rapture; where the hell did that come from? The word for all this, up until recently, was Witchcraft.
As one rather horrified Christian theologian remarked about all this: "This is really not our business, not our business at all."
If you want your kids to read, make reading a comfort activity. Snuggle up with the kids and read to them and with them. Get them to associate books with contentment, and with love, and they'll be readers all their lives. They will learn to read because they want to. If they never feel that desire, they'll never bother to make the effort, and their reading skills will be poor.
What's missing in all of these educational products is a human being. This is why I don't believe that video games have any more than a marginal effect on behaviour; they simply don't have the emotional influence of another human being, especially of a parent. In order for any of these things to have a deeply significant impact, the child would have to be starved of human contact, and the damage caused by this would probably outweigh all other influences combined.
This works with standard earbuds (I can never hear anything coming out of mine when I take them out.) A few years ago, though, Sony came out with some over-the-head style earbuds that bled the treble out the sides to produce a heavier bass response. These things could be heard from quite a distance away, but when I wore them in traffic, all I could hear was the traffic, so they were no louder on my end than ambient traffic sounds. The people in my office kept telling me I was destroying my hearing, but in fact, the headset was much louder on the outside than on the inside.
Now I use over the ear muffs, partly because they give better sound at a much lower volume level, and partly because, in cold weather, they keep my ears warm.:) The only time I use the ear buds is when I go to the gym to work out on the treadmill--they don't absorb sweat and develop nasty funguses like the ear muffs.
Exactly right. We have become more efficient--so much so that the four day work week has been a serious economic consideration since the 80's. The reason is that we have so much technological leverage that the only alternative is to create mountains of useless garbage and convince people that they need it... oh, right, this would include all those technological gadgets.:) But wander through a super department store sometimes and ask yourself, if half of this stuff disappeared tomorrow, would anyone really miss it? Choice isn't of much benefit if most of what is being offered is bad, and it's hard to tell the difference. Even brand names mean nothing now; when was the last time you were able to buy a good pair of Levis? A lot of this stuff is just landfill--either nobody buys it, and it goes directly into the trash, or someone buys it, and discovers that it's trash shortly thereafter. Either way, it's garbage--wasted time, energy, and resources.
But when you consider how much time people waste with technology, you should also consider that executives could and did waste the same amount of time via their manpower driven alternatives, requesting pointless information, endless re-edits of documents (requiring the secretarial pool to retype the same document, with minor changes, over and over,) and maintaining expensive entourages that required far more time to manage than you can spend instant messaging your friends. And I do mean required--you don't have to instant message your friends, but you did have to manage your staff.
My wife worked at a law firm. The old lawyers, not comfortable with technology, used their computers to play solitaire, while dictating into tape recorders and getting secretaries to type the letter, over and over and over again as they read it and noticed mistakes. The younger lawyers typed their letters directly into their computer, edited it there, and got exactly what they wanted directly. The old guard took three days to produce the letter, the young ones took half an hour. The difference in efficiency, and sheer cost, is staggering. Of course, the old boys just passed these costs on to their clients...
Actually, Newtonian physics works perfectly well until you get into relativistic scenarios: high speeds, and very large and very small scales. Most people never will in everyday life, and the math and measurement are a bitch. Contrary to popular belief, Newtonian physics continues to persist in relativity--the extra terms just collapse to insignificance when calculating forces and events at a human scale, essentially giving you the original Newtonian formulas. So it isn't wrong, just incomplete, in that it doesn't incorporate rare details that 99.9% of the people in the world will never need anyway.
Newton's theory of gravity is just a theory too. Does that mean that we can just decide not to believe it and fly?
This is just a semantic trick. The use of the word theory in science differs from the way it is used. Normally, a theory is a theory until it is verified. I have a theory that a car is in the driveway: I look out, see the car, and the theory becomes fact. But scientific theories are more complex, and we persist in calling them theories simply because we can never have all the evidence. We cannot go back in time and witness every step of evolution. But this does not mean that they are mere matters of opinion. Evolution is supported by all the evidence that we have and not contradicted by any evidence. As a scientific theory it is a resounding success, one of the gold standards for scientific truth, with an extraordinary power to explain and predict events in the world of biology. This is as close to certainty as human beings can get, so calling it a fact is not an exageration. After all, that car in the driveway could be a cardboard cutout of a car that just looks like one from the window. Or maybe it's made of paper machier.
On the other hand, if you want to assume an attitude of radical doubt about everything, go ahead. But I would think your religion would be the first thing on the block. You should know the philosophical implications of your postmodernist position--the first thing that goes out the window is faith.
...if you are so sure ID is incorrect, where is the fear coming from that it cannot even be mentioned and discussed by rational thinking people.
I'm pretty sure that crack is bad for you too, but why don't we give equal time to a crack dealer to tell kids of the benefit, and let them decide for themselves? Because they're kids! We send kids to school to get the correct information so that they can make informed choices, not so that they can choose what they want to believe. We don't let neo-nazis teach them that the holocaust was a myth either, because it's a lie, but chidren don't have enough knowledge of history to know this. Children are not rational thinking people. That's why they are not tried in court as adults.
Stop trying to exploit the ignorance of children for your own religious and political ends. It's evil. Stop doing it.
Okay here's one for you: explain the eye. It either works or it doesn't. There is no evolutionary intermediate form that would function so how could it have evolved?
Yes, there are intermediate forms.
The first is a simple photo sensor which can respond to change in ambient light, therefore detecting sudden changes which might be a predator of prey, detect whether the organism is in direct sunlight (and therefore easily spotted) and tell the difference between day and night.
The next is a photo sensor with some directional ability, which can detect movement in crude sectors. This can detect whether something is moving nearby, and give a rough direction of the movement. This is the compound eye of insects.
The next stage adds the ability to focus to some degree. Crude directional ability becomes more refined, permitting the animal to distinguish size and shape, and perhaps even color. This allows to animal to judge whether the moving creature is small enough to be easy prey, or large enough to be dangerous. It also adds a primitive pattern recognition to distinguish between different creatures. A june bug and a bumble bee are the same size, but you don't want to mess with the bumble bee.
The last stage is the type of eye that we have, which permits full pattern recognition, including depth perception with two eyes whose signals are merged to form a full three dimensional image of the world. This permits identification on sight of friend or foe, wounded animals which will make easier prey, food at a distance, and permits navigation by sight alone.
The transition from simple light sensor to the human eye is seamless. Each slight increment makes the proto-eye a better sensor, and confers a slight advantage to the animal. There is nothing mysterious about this at all.
All of this is available on the web and in books if you have the slightest inclination to look. What I so despise about these arguments is not just the ignorance they betray, but the profound dishonesty that underlies them. You can know better. You should know better. If you want to know the answer, there are plenty of people to ask. But instead of asking people who know the answers, creationists make statements like this on public forums, hoping to trick people who don't know. This is contemptible.
I was raised a Christian, and there used to be strong emphasis on honesty in Christian education. Apparently this is no longer the case. Instead, we seem to be plagued by people who think that by calling themselves Christians, they are above the very principles which lay at the heart of Christianity.
If you really want to impress people with your faith, start with a little honesty. No one is impressed by bullshit.
We gotta get this name to stick. I'm sure there is a critical mass of Buffy fans amongst the scientific community to get it done...
And centuries in the future, when they ask why it's called Buffy, they will pull out the old shows, and they will say, "Yeah, of course, celestial body and all that..."
Yeah, well, you never know when you're going to take a groin hit. That chain mail bikini just might save... ah, no it won't.
I can see the lack on armor on a caster, but a fighter? Please... unless you happen to be an ancient Celt, who fought naked (which may explain why they lost a lot.) But even if you're planning to spend a lot of time in the wilderness and not fight, long pants and sleeves are a very good idea.
This all reminds me of a story about a woman in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronisms) who was walking across Central Park late one night after a fancy dress feast. She was a fighter and had on full ceremonial regalia, which included a padded knee-length hauberk of real chain and a perfectly functional long sword (not used in combat, only for show, but the rattan swords have the same weight and heft, so she actually knew how to use it.) This was back in the bad old days of Central Park, and a mugger with a knife jumped her. After breaking his knife on the hauberk, she drew the long sword. I would have loved to have seen the look on his face just before he ran away!
Actually, Bill Gates is very extroverted. People who worked with him in the early days talked about how he always dominated conversations, meetings, etc. He was known for running things, not for doing them. That's typical of extroverts. The fact that the man can't dress himself doesn't detract from that.:) Introverts do succeed in business, but don't thrive on the networking usually required to build one. They usually hire or partner with someone who takes care of that end.
Taking an idea and seeing it to fruition and adoption isn't an easy task.
Adoption is where the sales come into it. During the dot com days I worked at a company that produced, amongst other things, a security product that could very well have saved the company--if anyone had known about it. Six months after it was completed, another product, that wasn't as good, came out, and made boatloads of money. The guy in charge of the project was a typical dot com entrepreneur. He didn't follow through at the end and get the product out there. He was the kind of salesman who excelled at selling ideas and shares, not product. Building it is good, but you don't make any money unless it gets sold.
I agree that protectionism for the sake of protectionism is doomed--it produces a hot-house economy that wilts under the first sign of stress. I have no problem with outsourcing, as long as the workers in those countries are making good wages by local standards; eventually, that will lift their entire economy and create a market for our goods. But when the free market becomes an article of faith, the results can be disastrous. Governments can and do shelter sectors of their economies to incubate talent and expertise, until they are ready to compete in the free market. The film, music, and game industries in Canada are a good example of this. At the opposite extreme, you have Iraq, where a weak and profoundly compromised economy was thrown open to the wolves, instead of being sheltered and given time to recover.
One of the most distressing things that seems to be happening, though, is the extreme disparity forming between the workers at the bottom and the people at the top. In the 50's the difference in incomes would typically be in the range of 100 to 1 at the most. Now we have disparities of 10,000 to 1 or more, which means that money is stagnating at the top, and social mobility is breaking down. Social mobility is what the American Dream is all about. America resisted the choking grasp of organized labour that crippled England because Americans considered themselves rich people in the making. Once people get stuck at the bottom, and see no hope of escape, they identify with those at the same economic level as themselves. The result is class consciousness, and suddenly, Marxism becomes relevant again. It is especially dangerous if you get intelligent people stuck in the underclass--they become the agitators. This is precisely what people like Ford and Rockefeller where trying to prevent. Flawed as they were, they at least could see that the system that supported their fortunes was threatened by the very disparity they enjoyed. Marxists hated them, not just for being capitalists, but for saving capitalism itself.
People on Slashdot dislike business because running a business is a career more suited to extroverts. Slashdot is loaded with nerds, who tend to be introverts--they want to be left alone to do the work. In other words, they're the kind of people who make businesses succeed. Running around selling your services, or the services of others, is about as attractive to most of us as sticking pins in our eyes.
And no, socialism is not the fig leaf of losers who don't have the balls to succeed. A lot of the most successful businessmen of all time have thrown their money into what are now considered "socialist" causes. They supported these because they were trying to prevent the formation of a permanent underclass, and establish a standard of living sufficient to provide a market for their goods. They understood that if there was no way for the poor to climb the ladder, the American Dream would fail and capitalism itself would collapse. This is precisely the sort of long term thinking that made them incredibly rich in the first place.
When there is no one left to buy your services at a price that you can live on, you'll become a socialist too, of the worst kind--and trust me, I've seen this happen to people. But by then, it will be too late.
You should have both a software and hardware firewall. Hardware firewalls are much better for dealing with attacks from outside, but they will not prevent spyware or trojans from sending information out. Something like ZoneAlarm will at least notify you when something that should not have internet access is trying to get through. Hardware firewalls are pretty much useless once a program is on your machine.
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
He's not saying don't read, or stop reading once you hit a specific age. But I have met people who read constantly and yet don't seem to have a thought in their head, who don't even have the organizational skills to retain or make sense of what they're reading. To get anything out of a book, you have to roll it around in your mind a bit. It's a matter of balance. And books are better than the internet in this regard; they provide facts in context, structured into an argument, with sources. Discourse is slower and more thoughtful, facts better established. The internet often degrades into a shouting match of I say/you say, back by lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I'm tempted to put off unpleasant work by doing a lot of things. I get up, walk around, chat with people, get a coffee, wash my mug, and look at the web. Most people do this. That's not addiction, it's procrastination. Addiction is when you can't stop doing what you're doing to do anything else.
What people don't like about these stories is the scare factor, used by all media to sell their stories. Yet another reason to overreact to the latest interests of your family or friends. Some people can get addicted to pretty much anything, and yes, they really are addicted. But stories like these smear everyone who does the activity to some extent. It isn't the fault of the psychologists, but of the sensationalistic media who know that fear sells.
"Moderation in all things--including moderation." Instead of trying to stamp out every single thing that someone might get addicted to, we have to understand why the hell some people just never know when enough is enough.
Religion is about magic, which does not work in the physical world but does work in subjective and social world. The higher power idea of AA adresses two common problems that alcoholics have; the control issue, and the feeling of futility. Alcoholics are usually control freaks who need to let go and relax, and "Let go and let God" provides the rationale for that. Appeal to religion also invokes the miraculous, allowing someone to make a clean break with past behavious patterns. For a brief moment, everything is possible, and deep psychological changes can occur. This is not an act of God, but a deep cognitive excuse to do what you would otherwise consider impossible. When it works, it becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card, a promise not of deteminism but of radical freedom.
This can probably be done without the pseudo-christian overtones of AA, but we still haven't found the proper technique. This is definitely something we have to work on. For while religion can stop someone from drinking, it may not solve the whole set of related problems--in fact, it may make them worse, resulting in a "dry drunk." George Bush is an example of this; he would be better off as a member of a secularly oriented AA group which emphasizes personal responsibility more and magic less. As it is, he's still a dilletante millionaire playboy partying with money he hasn't earned, and his policies show this.
By the way, genetics doesn't say we can't do something, only that it's going to be harder for some people. So people who are naturally bouncy and active shouldn't feel so damn smug, and some who do find it hard to stay active aren't just whiners. In addition to the disadvantages of obesity and poor physical condition, most fat people are also depressed about it. Genetics may tend to make you less active, but depression will stop you dead in your tracks. Trust me, they know being fat is a bad thing without other people whipping them.
Uh, yeah... Hellyer has wandered into the land of the rubber room and the tight long vests.
Any civilization that could reach us wouldn't have to. It's not like we're a threat, or that we have anything they would need. Dead, terraform candidate planets would probably be a lot more attractive to them than this place. Why not just mine asteroids and build orbitals? Why send occupied craft at all? This crap is like religion--limited human minds conceiving of advanced intellects as being the same as us. Like the God of most religions, they are obsessed with us, and want to control us and the world we live on. We saw it in Star Trek, Kirk's speech to one Superior Race after another about how we've moved beyond them. Even Babylon 5 did this shtick--I couldn't believe that after all his bitching about Star Trek, Harlan Ellison consulted on a series that repeated the only plot idea that Rodenberry ever had. That's when I knew Ellison was a complete has-been, and had gone legally brain dead somewhere in the mid 70's.
If you're going to talk about an advanced race, use a little imagination, for Christ's sake. If you want to impress me, describe an advanced alien race that behaves like one, not like some ancient roman throwback. Why the hell would they give a rat's ass about what happens on some little mudball in the unfashionable arm of the galaxy? (thank you, Douglas Adams, for exercising the gift of perspective.) They would be going after Mars, not Earth. What makes you think that they'd even like our atmosphere, let alone our biosphere? As for Earth, they'd show up with an outrageous display of overwhelming force, just to let us know they're not taking us over, not because they can't, but because they don't want to, and then say, offhand, "You know, you really are semi-evolved monkeys. It's right here in your DNA. Work on that. Get over yourselves. And if you get your shit together, we might even let you have a piece of the new planet we're building."
This stuff is pathetic. It's not even good science fiction. But then, the bright lights of the various defense departments are still working on remote viewing and telekinesis. And to think that these guys haven't done drugs. I say, go for it, drop a tab or two. It's not like it could do any harm, from the looks of it. Ground control to Major Tom...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with getting rid of classes is play balancing. Players will very quickly discover optimum configurations which become templates for the vast number of characters on the server. The more freedom you give to your players, the greater the domain of possible combinations, and somewhere in a very large domain will inevitably be the killer combination, the thing that your testing did not uncover but suddenly becomes the single most popular template in the game. Instead of greater variety, you end up with much less, precisely because these optimum configurations can punch so far above their weight that nothing else will get invited into a group. The quickest way to fix such configurations is to nerf some part of it--and entire MMORPG's have almost collapsed due to unpopular nerfs, because you have just broken half your server's favourite character. Restricting by archetypes makes the job of play balancing easier.
Your ideas are good, but none of them are new. They would in all likelihood lead to a very interesting game--at first. Then the nerfing would begin and the subscription curve would drop like a rock. And this is after spending several million dollars building and testing it. In other words, not a risk anyone would be willing to take.
Unfortunately, learning to learn is precisely what employers are looking for in university and college graduates--I have heard this very phrase used repeatedly by employers as the reason that they did not hire people with two year certificates. What you're telling me is that the degree is no longer delivering this qualification. If that is the case, employers will begin to hold out for a degree that does. This may well be the reason that companies like IBM won't bother with anyone unless they have a graduate degree or a lot of experience.
Reeling and writhing (as Lewis Carol put it) are taught in grade school and polished in high school. You should have this down by the time you hit college. The same thing goes for attrition, distraction, stultification, and derision, and the rest of math. College or university is where you apply these skills in the pursuit of higher learning--the focus then should be content or application rather than mere expression. When I went to school, I was expected to read in grade two, did hours of grammar and spelling homework in grades three to five, was studying Shakespeare and romantic poetry by grade nine, and was doing calculus and algebra by grade twelve. What the hell happened? Who suddenly decided that kids weren't capable of this?
The most depressing change in post-secondary education is that it has moved from the liberal arts and sciences approach to the trade skill approach. The ideal of university used to be that the university was a resource of knowledge and wisdom to which students would come to drink, but were not forced to drink, and it was a given that they would already have the skills to digest what they imbibed. In places like Oxford and Cambridge, it was a given that many students simply did not bother to attend classes. They took advantage of the libraries, read widely, consulted with professors, and spent long hours in earnest conversation, learning as much in the cafes and taverns from professors and fellow students and as they would in a class. The discipline required to steer ones own studies is the mark of a good student; if the professor is required to take attendance and teach rudimentary skills, the battle is already lost. In the movie A Beautiful Mind John Nash originally shows a profound contempt for course lectures, both in giving them and taking them, because he is obsessed with his own direction of study. A mediocre student will note the professors position and parrot it. A good student will take this and others into account and play freely with the ideas and arrive at his own opinion. If he is a brilliant student, he will form an opinion which is a genuine advance upon existing ideas.
In connection with this, the current trend of questioning the political leanings of professors and insisting upon neutral or balanced opinions is in keeping with the expectation of mediocrity. You don't learn from people who agree with you. A student who emerges with the opinions of his professors is an ape: monkey see, monkey do, but the fear of professors with differing opinions indicates that those who hold this fear expect students to be apes. And a student who expects to go through university and come out with the same opinions he went in with is an arrogant git who intends to preserve his own ignorance. These people should be identified and failed at the earliest possible opportunity. At one time they would have been, but political correctness is the bulwark of mediocrity. You cannot challenge a student's beliefs, no matter how idiotic--just put them on the bell-curve and process them through like so much ground meat. In the place of sound and nuanced reasoning, graduates learn a few sophomoric post-modernist parlour tricks that can be used in the defense of whatever drivel is currently fashionable. And it does not help that the entry standards are so low that professors are expected to teach rudimentary skills that should have been learned five or ten years previously. In this atmosphere, an ape who can dress himself and use a toilet is regarded as an accomplishment.
I think it would be a great idea, but stores would hate it: in North America, anyway, prices are quoted without taxes to hide the additional costs, leaving the final sum to the nearest penny. I don't think you can legally sell something to someone for 44.42 if there is no chance to pay the correct amount--it's false advertising, and you can't round the taxes on the receipt either, because that's tax fraud. This means that the days of nice rounded prices would be over (no more $12.99 or $13.00 plus tax) or prices would have to be quoted with taxes included--except that some of your customers don't have to pay the tax...
See the problem? It can be done, but there would be a shitstorm in the retail sector.
The reason that pennies exist is so that taxes can be collected on small purchases. The government gets billions over dollars in revenue--and we get pennies...
There's another problem here that no one has mentioned. Unskilled entry level jobs were the lowest rung of the ladder that people would climb to success. These are what allowed immigrant labourers to work their way out of poverty; their children became tradesmen, their grandchildren professionals. What we are now doing is phasing out most of these through mechanization and outsourcing. The manufacturing industry in North America is now almost dead. The only thing left is the service industry, which requires human beings on site. Don't forget that Wal-Mart is America's largest employer. Mechanize that, and there will be no way for the lowest economic tier of society to dig themselves out.
The new jobs created are typically in another country now, as U.S. trade deficits demonstrate. The problem isn't technology itself, but the irresponsible use of it to squeeze more and more profit out without any thought of the consequences to the rest of society. The wonder of the world right now is the U.S. economy, with its staggering debts and deficits at all levels. It's been bleeding so profusely for so long, nobody can figure out why it just doesn't keel over and die.
"It's normal to feel a little guilty after achieving sexual satisfaction through mechanical means." -- Robot in Heavy Metal
...neither is history or archeology. I don't think you are getting anywhere with such vague assertions. I wonder if you include "biblical" "history" "archeology" and "anthropology", as it clearly has real and historical authorship...
What are you expecting, a point by point refutation of everything in the bible in a single posting? No science is complete and therefore completely consistent, but there are hard nuggets of fact which contradict the stories of the Bible. Forty years to cross the Sinai? It takes four days to walk across it, and there is not a single hint concerning the movement of the Jews in the area, either by physical artifacts or by the Egyptians, who kept meticulous records which we still have. Do you really think that all those stories of miracles don't contradict physics? And the 'prophecy' of Christ's resurrection was interpreted as such and shoehorned into the story long after the fact. Many details of Jesus' life were added to conform to the interpretation of prophecies found in the Old Testament. This leads to absurdities like the claim that he was a descendant of David (through Joseph) in conformance with prophecy--but if he was the son of God, he was not the son of Joseph and therefore not a descendant of David. Here you can see the rival traditions of Hellenism and Judaism in a head-on collision.
By the way, Pontius Pilate ordered Jesus' execution, and he didn't give a damn about Jewish religion. Crucifiction was a Roman institution; the Jews got stuck with the blame later. Pilate just saw a potential political troublemaker, whose latest act was to attack the collectors of the temple tithes. In other words, a tax resistor--tithes, taxes, it was all the same to Pilate.
The original post said:
There has never been anything proven incorrect about the bible. If you took time to study it, then you would've found that out.
Which I is the claim I took issue with, and on that point you seem to agree with me. The rest seems to be a stealth defense of Mormonism. I'll spare you any comments on that...
Oh, come on, people. Your bank knows more about you than your mother does. If you're worried about this little iTunes thing, than you have no idea just how much information is already available about you out there.
All those Air Miles cards out there are data tracking sytems, tracking EVERYTHING you buy with that card. You have no say over who gets this information. Everything you buy with a credit card was tracked already, but now it's been centralized.
If someone wants it, they can get your credit history, estimated net worth, educational records, a fairly large chunk of your medical history, and the record of everywhere you've ever lived or ever worked. Financial institutions have all of this, now. You can't get a mortgage or insurance without telling them most of this--in fact, much of the bank's due dilligence in giving you a large loan is in compiling a dossier on you. They're not really required to be too careful about who they hand it out to, either. Nor are they required to tell you everything they know. Soon they'll know what you like and don't like, if they don't already. They will be able to build a fairly accurate profile of your personality. And they will sell this information to whoever asks, at a pretty cheap price.
All of this privacy paranoia is such a joke. I particularly find it funny when people get paranoid about the government. The CIA can barely remember where they left their keys, but your bank is another matter entirely. You haven't had any privacy for decades. Most of you have never lived in a world where privacy existed. If you thought it did exist, you simply didn't know who was gathering the information. And if you think iTunes is a major threat, you are mind-bogglingly naive.
There has never been anything proven incorrect about the bible. If you took time to study it, then you would've found that out.
Wow, have you even opened the damn book? I mean, without your bible study group to cherry pick the passages and explain away all the glaring inconsistencies? The bible is not consistent with history, archeology, anthropology, physics, any coherent system of ethics, or even with itself! There are two completely different versions of the creation myth and two versions of the ten commandments. The four gospels tell wildly different stories of Jesus' death and resurrection, while Paul never mentions the resurrection once--probably because the myth of the resurrection was not widely adopted till after his death.
In fact, the original sources for the gospels consist of aphorisms, he-said they-said...without a word about what Jesus did or about what happened to him. Look up the Gospel of Thomas if you want to see the original format of the gospels. The story of his life was filled in later, and in the grand tradition of hellenistic heroes, he was made the son of a god. Of the four gospels the sermon on the mount is the only part that everyone agrees is probably accurate. And at the Council of Nicea, they started with over 20 gospels and ended with 4. Wouldn't we all love to know what wound up on the cutting room floor?
Where do fundamentalists get this bizarre notion that there is nothing wrong in the bible? Even a glancing survey of the Old Testament should be enough to dispel this notion. With its numerous calls upon the faithful towards rapine and slaughter, and especially towards murdering children, I seriously suspect that many of the Isrealites were actually still worshipping Moloch for much of it, and they just cut Moloch's name out of the stories later. Traditional Christianity regards the Bible as problematic; in fact, the Catholic Church tried to prevent it from being translated into languages that people could read. This should tell you something. The Catholic Church wrote the Bible, at the council of Nicea. The Nicean Creed, formulated by the same council, remains the core statement of the Catholic articles of faith, and is recited in each Catholic Mass.
The most infuriating thing about this literalistic fundamentalist crap isn't the bogus scientific claims, or the hypocrisy, or even the fascistic danger of a theocracy. The thing that bothers people the most is that it is not and never has been Christianity. It's a political movement masquerading as a religion, completely at odds with nearly all of the Christian tradition. None of the older churches, who remain grounded in this tradition, would bother to challenge evolution--Christianity has no stake in the argument. The desire to invoke supernatural entities to explain and control natural events is not religion, it is magic. Fundamentalists have turned Christianity into some sort of new age occult circus, with people speaking in tongues, angels running around like personal valets, and faces appearing on everything from Mars to your morning toast. The flakiness reaches its height in the Rapture; where the hell did that come from? The word for all this, up until recently, was Witchcraft.
As one rather horrified Christian theologian remarked about all this: "This is really not our business, not our business at all."
If you want your kids to read, make reading a comfort activity. Snuggle up with the kids and read to them and with them. Get them to associate books with contentment, and with love, and they'll be readers all their lives. They will learn to read because they want to. If they never feel that desire, they'll never bother to make the effort, and their reading skills will be poor.
What's missing in all of these educational products is a human being. This is why I don't believe that video games have any more than a marginal effect on behaviour; they simply don't have the emotional influence of another human being, especially of a parent. In order for any of these things to have a deeply significant impact, the child would have to be starved of human contact, and the damage caused by this would probably outweigh all other influences combined.
This works with standard earbuds (I can never hear anything coming out of mine when I take them out.) A few years ago, though, Sony came out with some over-the-head style earbuds that bled the treble out the sides to produce a heavier bass response. These things could be heard from quite a distance away, but when I wore them in traffic, all I could hear was the traffic, so they were no louder on my end than ambient traffic sounds. The people in my office kept telling me I was destroying my hearing, but in fact, the headset was much louder on the outside than on the inside.
:) The only time I use the ear buds is when I go to the gym to work out on the treadmill--they don't absorb sweat and develop nasty funguses like the ear muffs.
Now I use over the ear muffs, partly because they give better sound at a much lower volume level, and partly because, in cold weather, they keep my ears warm.
Exactly right. We have become more efficient--so much so that the four day work week has been a serious economic consideration since the 80's. The reason is that we have so much technological leverage that the only alternative is to create mountains of useless garbage and convince people that they need it... oh, right, this would include all those technological gadgets. :) But wander through a super department store sometimes and ask yourself, if half of this stuff disappeared tomorrow, would anyone really miss it? Choice isn't of much benefit if most of what is being offered is bad, and it's hard to tell the difference. Even brand names mean nothing now; when was the last time you were able to buy a good pair of Levis? A lot of this stuff is just landfill--either nobody buys it, and it goes directly into the trash, or someone buys it, and discovers that it's trash shortly thereafter. Either way, it's garbage--wasted time, energy, and resources.
But when you consider how much time people waste with technology, you should also consider that executives could and did waste the same amount of time via their manpower driven alternatives, requesting pointless information, endless re-edits of documents (requiring the secretarial pool to retype the same document, with minor changes, over and over,) and maintaining expensive entourages that required far more time to manage than you can spend instant messaging your friends. And I do mean required--you don't have to instant message your friends, but you did have to manage your staff.
My wife worked at a law firm. The old lawyers, not comfortable with technology, used their computers to play solitaire, while dictating into tape recorders and getting secretaries to type the letter, over and over and over again as they read it and noticed mistakes. The younger lawyers typed their letters directly into their computer, edited it there, and got exactly what they wanted directly. The old guard took three days to produce the letter, the young ones took half an hour. The difference in efficiency, and sheer cost, is staggering. Of course, the old boys just passed these costs on to their clients...
Actually, Newtonian physics works perfectly well until you get into relativistic scenarios: high speeds, and very large and very small scales. Most people never will in everyday life, and the math and measurement are a bitch. Contrary to popular belief, Newtonian physics continues to persist in relativity--the extra terms just collapse to insignificance when calculating forces and events at a human scale, essentially giving you the original Newtonian formulas. So it isn't wrong, just incomplete, in that it doesn't incorporate rare details that 99.9% of the people in the world will never need anyway.
This is just a semantic trick. The use of the word theory in science differs from the way it is used. Normally, a theory is a theory until it is verified. I have a theory that a car is in the driveway: I look out, see the car, and the theory becomes fact. But scientific theories are more complex, and we persist in calling them theories simply because we can never have all the evidence. We cannot go back in time and witness every step of evolution. But this does not mean that they are mere matters of opinion. Evolution is supported by all the evidence that we have and not contradicted by any evidence. As a scientific theory it is a resounding success, one of the gold standards for scientific truth, with an extraordinary power to explain and predict events in the world of biology. This is as close to certainty as human beings can get, so calling it a fact is not an exageration. After all, that car in the driveway could be a cardboard cutout of a car that just looks like one from the window. Or maybe it's made of paper machier.
On the other hand, if you want to assume an attitude of radical doubt about everything, go ahead. But I would think your religion would be the first thing on the block. You should know the philosophical implications of your postmodernist position--the first thing that goes out the window is faith.
I'm pretty sure that crack is bad for you too, but why don't we give equal time to a crack dealer to tell kids of the benefit, and let them decide for themselves? Because they're kids! We send kids to school to get the correct information so that they can make informed choices, not so that they can choose what they want to believe. We don't let neo-nazis teach them that the holocaust was a myth either, because it's a lie, but chidren don't have enough knowledge of history to know this. Children are not rational thinking people. That's why they are not tried in court as adults.
Stop trying to exploit the ignorance of children for your own religious and political ends. It's evil. Stop doing it.
Okay here's one for you: explain the eye. It either works or it doesn't. There is no evolutionary intermediate form that would function so how could it have evolved?
Yes, there are intermediate forms.
The first is a simple photo sensor which can respond to change in ambient light, therefore detecting sudden changes which might be a predator of prey, detect whether the organism is in direct sunlight (and therefore easily spotted) and tell the difference between day and night.
The next is a photo sensor with some directional ability, which can detect movement in crude sectors. This can detect whether something is moving nearby, and give a rough direction of the movement. This is the compound eye of insects.
The next stage adds the ability to focus to some degree. Crude directional ability becomes more refined, permitting the animal to distinguish size and shape, and perhaps even color. This allows to animal to judge whether the moving creature is small enough to be easy prey, or large enough to be dangerous. It also adds a primitive pattern recognition to distinguish between different creatures. A june bug and a bumble bee are the same size, but you don't want to mess with the bumble bee.
The last stage is the type of eye that we have, which permits full pattern recognition, including depth perception with two eyes whose signals are merged to form a full three dimensional image of the world. This permits identification on sight of friend or foe, wounded animals which will make easier prey, food at a distance, and permits navigation by sight alone.
The transition from simple light sensor to the human eye is seamless. Each slight increment makes the proto-eye a better sensor, and confers a slight advantage to the animal. There is nothing mysterious about this at all.
All of this is available on the web and in books if you have the slightest inclination to look. What I so despise about these arguments is not just the ignorance they betray, but the profound dishonesty that underlies them. You can know better. You should know better. If you want to know the answer, there are plenty of people to ask. But instead of asking people who know the answers, creationists make statements like this on public forums, hoping to trick people who don't know. This is contemptible.
I was raised a Christian, and there used to be strong emphasis on honesty in Christian education. Apparently this is no longer the case. Instead, we seem to be plagued by people who think that by calling themselves Christians, they are above the very principles which lay at the heart of Christianity.
If you really want to impress people with your faith, start with a little honesty. No one is impressed by bullshit.
We gotta get this name to stick. I'm sure there is a critical mass of Buffy fans amongst the scientific community to get it done...
And centuries in the future, when they ask why it's called Buffy, they will pull out the old shows, and they will say, "Yeah, of course, celestial body and all that..."
Yeah, well, you never know when you're going to take a groin hit. That chain mail bikini just might save... ah, no it won't.
I can see the lack on armor on a caster, but a fighter? Please... unless you happen to be an ancient Celt, who fought naked (which may explain why they lost a lot.) But even if you're planning to spend a lot of time in the wilderness and not fight, long pants and sleeves are a very good idea.
This all reminds me of a story about a woman in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronisms) who was walking across Central Park late one night after a fancy dress feast. She was a fighter and had on full ceremonial regalia, which included a padded knee-length hauberk of real chain and a perfectly functional long sword (not used in combat, only for show, but the rattan swords have the same weight and heft, so she actually knew how to use it.) This was back in the bad old days of Central Park, and a mugger with a knife jumped her. After breaking his knife on the hauberk, she drew the long sword. I would have loved to have seen the look on his face just before he ran away!
Actually, Bill Gates is very extroverted. People who worked with him in the early days talked about how he always dominated conversations, meetings, etc. He was known for running things, not for doing them. That's typical of extroverts. The fact that the man can't dress himself doesn't detract from that. :) Introverts do succeed in business, but don't thrive on the networking usually required to build one. They usually hire or partner with someone who takes care of that end.
Taking an idea and seeing it to fruition and adoption isn't an easy task.
Adoption is where the sales come into it. During the dot com days I worked at a company that produced, amongst other things, a security product that could very well have saved the company--if anyone had known about it. Six months after it was completed, another product, that wasn't as good, came out, and made boatloads of money. The guy in charge of the project was a typical dot com entrepreneur. He didn't follow through at the end and get the product out there. He was the kind of salesman who excelled at selling ideas and shares, not product. Building it is good, but you don't make any money unless it gets sold.
I agree that protectionism for the sake of protectionism is doomed--it produces a hot-house economy that wilts under the first sign of stress. I have no problem with outsourcing, as long as the workers in those countries are making good wages by local standards; eventually, that will lift their entire economy and create a market for our goods. But when the free market becomes an article of faith, the results can be disastrous. Governments can and do shelter sectors of their economies to incubate talent and expertise, until they are ready to compete in the free market. The film, music, and game industries in Canada are a good example of this. At the opposite extreme, you have Iraq, where a weak and profoundly compromised economy was thrown open to the wolves, instead of being sheltered and given time to recover.
One of the most distressing things that seems to be happening, though, is the extreme disparity forming between the workers at the bottom and the people at the top. In the 50's the difference in incomes would typically be in the range of 100 to 1 at the most. Now we have disparities of 10,000 to 1 or more, which means that money is stagnating at the top, and social mobility is breaking down. Social mobility is what the American Dream is all about. America resisted the choking grasp of organized labour that crippled England because Americans considered themselves rich people in the making. Once people get stuck at the bottom, and see no hope of escape, they identify with those at the same economic level as themselves. The result is class consciousness, and suddenly, Marxism becomes relevant again. It is especially dangerous if you get intelligent people stuck in the underclass--they become the agitators. This is precisely what people like Ford and Rockefeller where trying to prevent. Flawed as they were, they at least could see that the system that supported their fortunes was threatened by the very disparity they enjoyed. Marxists hated them, not just for being capitalists, but for saving capitalism itself.
People on Slashdot dislike business because running a business is a career more suited to extroverts. Slashdot is loaded with nerds, who tend to be introverts--they want to be left alone to do the work. In other words, they're the kind of people who make businesses succeed. Running around selling your services, or the services of others, is about as attractive to most of us as sticking pins in our eyes.
And no, socialism is not the fig leaf of losers who don't have the balls to succeed. A lot of the most successful businessmen of all time have thrown their money into what are now considered "socialist" causes. They supported these because they were trying to prevent the formation of a permanent underclass, and establish a standard of living sufficient to provide a market for their goods. They understood that if there was no way for the poor to climb the ladder, the American Dream would fail and capitalism itself would collapse. This is precisely the sort of long term thinking that made them incredibly rich in the first place.
When there is no one left to buy your services at a price that you can live on, you'll become a socialist too, of the worst kind--and trust me, I've seen this happen to people. But by then, it will be too late.
You should have both a software and hardware firewall. Hardware firewalls are much better for dealing with attacks from outside, but they will not prevent spyware or trojans from sending information out. Something like ZoneAlarm will at least notify you when something that should not have internet access is trying to get through. Hardware firewalls are pretty much useless once a program is on your machine.
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
He's not saying don't read, or stop reading once you hit a specific age. But I have met people who read constantly and yet don't seem to have a thought in their head, who don't even have the organizational skills to retain or make sense of what they're reading. To get anything out of a book, you have to roll it around in your mind a bit. It's a matter of balance. And books are better than the internet in this regard; they provide facts in context, structured into an argument, with sources. Discourse is slower and more thoughtful, facts better established. The internet often degrades into a shouting match of I say/you say, back by lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I'm tempted to put off unpleasant work by doing a lot of things. I get up, walk around, chat with people, get a coffee, wash my mug, and look at the web. Most people do this. That's not addiction, it's procrastination. Addiction is when you can't stop doing what you're doing to do anything else.
What people don't like about these stories is the scare factor, used by all media to sell their stories. Yet another reason to overreact to the latest interests of your family or friends. Some people can get addicted to pretty much anything, and yes, they really are addicted. But stories like these smear everyone who does the activity to some extent. It isn't the fault of the psychologists, but of the sensationalistic media who know that fear sells.
"Moderation in all things--including moderation." Instead of trying to stamp out every single thing that someone might get addicted to, we have to understand why the hell some people just never know when enough is enough.
Religion is about magic, which does not work in the physical world but does work in subjective and social world. The higher power idea of AA adresses two common problems that alcoholics have; the control issue, and the feeling of futility. Alcoholics are usually control freaks who need to let go and relax, and "Let go and let God" provides the rationale for that. Appeal to religion also invokes the miraculous, allowing someone to make a clean break with past behavious patterns. For a brief moment, everything is possible, and deep psychological changes can occur. This is not an act of God, but a deep cognitive excuse to do what you would otherwise consider impossible. When it works, it becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card, a promise not of deteminism but of radical freedom.
This can probably be done without the pseudo-christian overtones of AA, but we still haven't found the proper technique. This is definitely something we have to work on. For while religion can stop someone from drinking, it may not solve the whole set of related problems--in fact, it may make them worse, resulting in a "dry drunk." George Bush is an example of this; he would be better off as a member of a secularly oriented AA group which emphasizes personal responsibility more and magic less. As it is, he's still a dilletante millionaire playboy partying with money he hasn't earned, and his policies show this.
By the way, genetics doesn't say we can't do something, only that it's going to be harder for some people. So people who are naturally bouncy and active shouldn't feel so damn smug, and some who do find it hard to stay active aren't just whiners. In addition to the disadvantages of obesity and poor physical condition, most fat people are also depressed about it. Genetics may tend to make you less active, but depression will stop you dead in your tracks. Trust me, they know being fat is a bad thing without other people whipping them.
Uh, yeah... Hellyer has wandered into the land of the rubber room and the tight long vests.
Any civilization that could reach us wouldn't have to. It's not like we're a threat, or that we have anything they would need. Dead, terraform candidate planets would probably be a lot more attractive to them than this place. Why not just mine asteroids and build orbitals? Why send occupied craft at all? This crap is like religion--limited human minds conceiving of advanced intellects as being the same as us. Like the God of most religions, they are obsessed with us, and want to control us and the world we live on. We saw it in Star Trek, Kirk's speech to one Superior Race after another about how we've moved beyond them. Even Babylon 5 did this shtick--I couldn't believe that after all his bitching about Star Trek, Harlan Ellison consulted on a series that repeated the only plot idea that Rodenberry ever had. That's when I knew Ellison was a complete has-been, and had gone legally brain dead somewhere in the mid 70's.
If you're going to talk about an advanced race, use a little imagination, for Christ's sake. If you want to impress me, describe an advanced alien race that behaves like one, not like some ancient roman throwback. Why the hell would they give a rat's ass about what happens on some little mudball in the unfashionable arm of the galaxy? (thank you, Douglas Adams, for exercising the gift of perspective.) They would be going after Mars, not Earth. What makes you think that they'd even like our atmosphere, let alone our biosphere? As for Earth, they'd show up with an outrageous display of overwhelming force, just to let us know they're not taking us over, not because they can't, but because they don't want to, and then say, offhand, "You know, you really are semi-evolved monkeys. It's right here in your DNA. Work on that. Get over yourselves. And if you get your shit together, we might even let you have a piece of the new planet we're building."
This stuff is pathetic. It's not even good science fiction. But then, the bright lights of the various defense departments are still working on remote viewing and telekinesis. And to think that these guys haven't done drugs. I say, go for it, drop a tab or two. It's not like it could do any harm, from the looks of it. Ground control to Major Tom...