Yeah, what the hell is going on here? Ed Koch was on the Daily Show the other night, and he's backing Bush because he still thinks he's the best choice against terrorism. When the hell are all these people going to get a clue?
The Bush administration invaded Iraq because they wanted to. 9/11 was just the excuse, and hordes of insiders in the intelligence community quit their jobs in protest over the administrations misrepresentations of the intelligence. While people were still jumping out of the twin towers, General Clark got a phone call from the White House telling him to look for a way to pin this on Iraq. They didn't even care about who was really responsible!
To understand why the rest of the world is so pissed at George Bush, allow me to present the picture that the rest of the world saw. After 9/11, everyone rallied to America side and sent troops to Afghanistan. We had identified the problem, and we were all going to go after it--even the Muslims in the Middle East were onside. And then, Bush rides off into the sunset on a personal vendetta. The rest of the world just looked on in stunned disbelief and said to each other, "Where the hell is he going?"
Not after Iran, who we knew was working on nuclear weapons. Not after North Korea, who had just attained them. No, he was going after the one Middle Eastern country whose leader Osama bin Laden hated the most, because he was secular. In other words, the one country that Al Qaeda wouldn't deal with. The one country we knew didn't have the WMDs because there were already weapons inspectors in there looking for them. Hell, most of the Iraqi weapons experts had long since moved to other countries because their programs had been shut down--we have few of them living in Canada now. Iraq just didn't have the expertise anymore, and the evidence was there for anyone who wanted to know.
Hussein was evil, yeah, I would have been in favor of deposing him if 9/11 had not happened. But after 9/11 it was the last country to go after, because it was the only Muslim country in the Middle East not controlled by Political Islam. And it gave the terrorists the thing that they'd hoped for; an American invasion of a heavily populated Arab country.
Think about it; do you really believe that Al Qaeda did what they did thinking there would be no consequences, or that they would win the ensuing war? No, they knew exactly what would happen. And they expected to lose. But what terrorists always hope for is a massive retaliation. These people are suididal. They think they're all going to wake up in Paradise after they die. They don't care what happens to themselves, as long as they can drag as many people down with them as possible. They wanted Shock and Awe, as much collateral damage on Muslim civilians as possible, until the civilians become sympathetic to their cause. And they love Bush, because they know how to press his buttons, and they know exactly what he'll do when they press them.
I don't know what to blame--infotainment, self-absorbtion, bad education, clever propaganda--but I do know that Americans seem to be dangerously close to being incapable of participating in democracy. If you don't like Kerry, then consider this: he was the best candidate the system would allow through. Lincoln wouldn't last a day now, thanks to the marvels of modern tabloid partisan politics. What the hell should anyone care whether Bush went to Vietnam, or Kerry protested it, or Cheney has a lesbian daughter, or Clinton screwed Monica. 250 FBI agents examining a blue dress--come on! If democracy fails in America, it may be held up as proof for future generations by future dictators that democracy is an unworkable fantasy, like Communism. Maintaining a democracy is not just about choice. In order to continue to make choices, you must make informed, rational choices. You have to know what you're choosing. Otherwise your options will get pretty limited.
So the reason the rest of the world is pissed at George Bush isn't because he betrayed us. We're pissed at him because he betrayed America.
Playing on fear hits on the second level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, safety. This has to be satisfied before love, self-esteem, or self-actualization. Targetting this hits us at the mammalian level, even below the monkey. Only raw physical drives come before this. This is why SUV's are selling so well. Car buyers have been convinced that SUV's are safer. In fact, they're not--their center of gravity is too high for their wheel base, and their size and weight makes them less maneuverable, making accidents more likely and more deadly when they happen. But the perception, fostered by advertising, has made them a runaway success.
This also explains why politics has been so warped since 9/11. All those alerts are scaring the hell out of people who haven't applied a little statistical perspective and realized that even in 2001, your chances of being killed by a terrorist were less than being killed by lightning. By the same reasoning, we should all stop travelling in cars because your chance of dying in a car crash is several orders of magnitude greater. But rationality doesn't even get a chance at this level.
It also explains why Democrats are more frightened by footing of 9/11 than Republicans. Republicans actually think Bush is doing a good job against terrorism, while Democrats are aware that the invasion in Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, and may make the problem worse by aggravating Islamic paranoia. In other words, Democrats see 9/11 as a threat which has not yet been dealt with properly.
Understanding the role of fear in people's choices explains a lot of things: the War on Drugs (fear of gangs), McCarthyism (fear of Communism), Fundamentalism (fear of uncertainty), and knee-jerk patriotism (fear of foreigners.) Whenever you see people acting like lemurs, it's a pretty good indication that this is what's happening. And the best advertisement of this is the 6:00 news, where no news is good news, and the entire program is spent on statistical anomalies.
Advertising just rides on the coattails of bad journalism.
I am partial to 2nd ed, and I loved the first ed Gygax modules (the Vault of the Drow series and Giants series). And I've got a shelfload of Dragon magazines. But really, the whole point was never the rules, but what you did with them. The nice thing about D&D was the fudge factor--as the DM, you could scale the difficulty level as you went to bring the party to the edge of defeat without wiping them out. More strictly defined rules systems didn't leave this leeway, because players could tell from the dice roll whether they had succeeded or not. In D&D the DM was always the final arbiter. Now you can run online adventures with Neverwinter Nights, so if your old D&D group has split up into different cities, you can still play together, but I'm not sure it gives the same leeway.
I was lucky in that I played in university with a bunch of people with multiple degrees. We had people in history, philosophy, english, political science, psychology, and engineering, all voracious readers, and a couple of hard core gamers. The interesting thing about running in a tabletop game is that the DM plays God, so you really get to see what their idea of justice, politics, economics, and human nature is. This led to a lot of interesting discussions on subjects like the nature of evil or medieval politics. We used to have pitched arguments about the difference between religion in the game world vs. the medieval world. The gods in the game world took active roles, while the God of the medieval church never intervened. This meant that religion in the game world was actually controlled by the gods--a very interesting premise.
Another interesting thing about D&D is that it is intended as a fully cooperative game. A lot of cooperative games were created in the 70's, but D&D is the only one that caught on. The opponents are provided by the DM, who nevertheless is not playing against the players. This was always missed by the hysterical critics, who were obsessed with the violence in the game or the mythical elements (eewwww--the occult!) Media coverage of the game in the early days was pathetic. They were always so intent on looking for a scare story that they couldn't see what was going on right in front of them: players working together in a creative hobby.
I will say that I agree with him on hyper-human skills. Computers are being used in the wrong way. When I worked for a dot com, everyone was raving about alltheworld.com, a flash in the pan search engine. I pointed out that I didn't want 60,000 matches--I just wanted the one that I was really looking for. They all looked at me funny. Computers are being used to flood people with data. What they should actually be doing is giving people the few pieces of data they actually need. And nobody in the dot com world seemed to grasp this. They had no idea what people actually wanted or needed. As Winston Churchill put it, "Give me this day, on one sheet of paper, the following information..."
But the current great extinction has nothing to do with any of the things he's talking about. It has to do with the outsourcing, the bust of the dot com bubble, and a popular belief that now that the dot com bubble has burst, you don't have worry about that computer stuff anymore (I kid you not--a lot of technophobes out there actually think it is all going to go away.)
There is no question that programming will evolve, and that we will work at higher and higher levels in the future. But it is equally true that as the methods ramp up, so will the target, and competition to produce software that reaches that target quickly, efficiently, and easily will demand the best solution, which is always hand tweaked. Build by number tools are always general--2,000,000 lines of code used to do what 1000 lines would do better, because the code is literally written with no idea of what the real task is. And to use these high level tools effectively there are always "Tips, Tricks, and Traps," which require a background knowledge of the underlying architecture to grasp.
And by the way, assembler still does everything better than anything else. Check out Gibson Research (http://www.grc.com/) for proof of that.
As for genetic programming, allow me to contrast the hand coded solution to the genetically designed solution:
Yeah, it will give you the right result... eventually. But if you want to read your email, you better book a couple days time with WETA's server farm. Not to mention that it takes as long to train one of these as it does a human--and it takes someone who knows a lot about computers (a very good programmer) to specify the criteria. A good example: the Pentagon wanted a genetic algorithm that could recognize a tank. They got one that seemed to work, until a new set of photos were used. It turned out that all the criteria photos with tanks were taken on a sunny day, and all the others were taken on a cloudy day. So if the sun is out, it's a tank. Doh!
The more sophisticated the software is, the harder it is to fix when something goes wrong. Superficially simple applications for complex tasks are that much harder to diagnose and fix when they fail. Windows appears easy, until a bug rears its head, and then it takes thousands of man hours just to track down the cause. Linux has a steeper learning curve, but a core simplicity once you're over the hump. Simple software is simple because the brain is built in. But that doesn't mean that the brain will always work.
Eventually, someone will have to go down and sing to the metal.
If you'll recall, this was at the time when 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' was at the height of its attack--probably the dirtiest political attack in a Presidential campaign in decades. That's what the question "How are you holding up?" was about--the real question was already out there, and frankly, SBVFT does not deserve the dignity of being named. Stewart usually just tries to get guests to talk, regardless of which side they're on. He goes as easy on the Republicans as on the Democrats, and sometimes I think he goes too easily on the spin doctors and partisans. The only time he jumps down someone's throat is when they make a claim which is obviously false, like the guy who had just published a book in favour of the invasion of Iraq based on the very arguments that had just been disproven. And the fact is, the Republicans of late have done this a lot more than the Democrats.
Optimistic Tit-for-Tat models human behaviour well in a social setting--we give others the benefit of the doubt, and continue to cooperate when others do. When someone violates our trust, we stop trusting them and punish them, but if they act beneficially towards us again, we might be willing to forgive. Most notable, OTFT produces the best overall score, which in competition between social groups is the deciding factor.
The Southampton strategy is dependent upon large numbers of people who will sacrifice all for the good of the other, and not for the good of their community (the collective performance is worse than OTFT.) I can see sacrifice for the greater good, but this is sacrifice to another person without hope of recompensation or an increase in general wellbeing. This does happen in human societies (I think it's happening now in some political systems), but only when the winner has managed to convince the losers that its all in everyone's best interest. What Southampton has added to this mix is a capacity for extreme self-delusion that directly contravenes the economic assumption of informed choice and self-interest. For purposes of economic modelling, Southampton should probably be disqualified, or these assumptions dropped. But this should also tell you something about what could happen to those nice economic models when they hit the messy world of human beings, who for the most part aren't very informed and often work against their own best interests as a result.
The consequence for a societal group running Southhampton against an OTFT group would be the defeat of the Southhampton group every time. Selection works at individual AND group levels. So the challenge should probably be two-tier: run the programs individually against each other, and run them as tribes against each other.
If I was going to go Mac, I would go all the way, and switch to the hardware too. It's better, and it's just plain cooler. The only reason I don't have a Mac is I like PC games, and there aren't enough for the Mac, and for compatability with work systems.
When people engage in something obsessively, there is usually a pre-existing psychological problem. There are a lot of alcoholics and drug users who begin by self medicating. Eventually the reward systems of the brain adapt to this and they become addicted. The other problem with self-medicating is that while you're dulling the pain, you may not be doing everything you can to solve the cause.
People that I know who have played EQ obsessively were already depressed or at a bad time in their lives. While they're playing the game, they're engaged and forget their problems--but at the same time, their problems will never go away while they're doing this.
I've played games of all kinds for 25 years. They can be a brilliant illumination of a person's character, particularly if they are running the game (you find out what kind of God that person would be, and what their view of human nature is.) I like MMORPG's, but my problem is that I can never be bothered to put in the time required to keep up with other people I know. My limit is about 15 hours a week. I just get bored. And the random reward system of EQ completely turned me off--I just felt I was getting jerked around. I could see doing something where success brought a definite outcome, but for me gambling is about as exciting as watching paint dry. I played slot machines once, and couldn't wait for my $10 in quarters to run out so I could stop. I actually resented the payouts.
So in addition to determining what the reward system used in a game is, we also need to understand why some people respond to intermittent rewards and some don't. EQ is addictive only to a particular kind of person. What is it about them that makes them enjoy this?
I suspect that it is a disconnect between action and consequence, a kind of magical thinking that looks to the gods for one's fortune, like the gambler with a 'system' or the bingo player festooned with luck charms. This belief that the power for success lays in the hands of an external, arbitrary power is itself conducive to a feeling of powerlessness and depression. So, we're back to a pre-existing emotional problem--and to child rearing, too, if this is the result of pattern of parental behaviour.
Oh, come on! Pierre Laporte was the Labour Minister for Quebec. The RCMP is federal. Nor have I ever heard of any accusation of corruption against Laporte. At least try to have a fingernail grip on Canadian politics before you spin this crap.
The article you cite is speculation. The War Measures Act was way over the top, but at the time, Europe had radical terrorist cells popping up like weeds. The U.S. took the situation seriously enough to expand a miltary base in northern NY State from 5000 to 100,000 troops (the draft was still on.) One can just as easily speculate that Trudeau acted as quickly as he did because he was afraid that if he didn't, someone else might.
The RCMP at that time was the Canadian equivalent of the CIA, FBA, NSA, etc., etc. They were the whole show, and they sucked at it, just like the CIA. CSIS nowadays isn't much better--the top level needs to swept into the garbage, again, just like the CIA. Actually, I'd like to see the RCMP set as watchodgs over CSIS. CSE is better because they're new, and not top-heavy yet.
The RCMP, like the rest of the federal government (with the exception of the CSE), is computer illiterate. No surprise there.
I've gotten a Top Secret clearance, despite having a 'high deviance quotient' in my family. It's all nonsense anyway--when I worked as a cleaner in RCMP headquarters as a summer job about 20 years ago, the cleaning staff had to take their coffee maker home at night because their lockers were constantly be broken into and robbed at night--in the basement of RCMP headquarters! And it wasn't the cleaners, because we were the cleaners.
But if you believe that you're being denied a clearance because your father made a poster 30 years back, it probably isn't because they think you're a subversive. It's probably because they think you're an idiot.
America is a well armed society, with at least as many guns per capita as the Swiss. The difference is that the gun is issued as part of the mandatory military service. This does two things--teaches people how to use the gun, and teaches them how not to use it. Because the gun is specifically intended for military use, personal use is a taboo. The Swiss will only take them up in an official capacity, not because Bubba down the road wants to gather a posse. And if everyone is trained in the military, it also means that everyone knows how to fight--with or without a gun. It's a bit hard to throw your weight around when everyone else can too.
Add to this the fact that Swiss society is very homogenous, highly discipined, and poverty is rare, and you'll see that there are other factors involved.
The KKK was very proficient at organizing flash posses. Do you think this a good thing?
Well, every time I hear about a vulnerability in Firefox, I also hear that it's already fixed. When I hear about holes in IE, I usually hear that Microsoft is 'working on it'. And those are the holes we know about...
Umm, no, Freedom of Religion is not derived from Christianity. Christianity is a triumphalist religion, like Islam. This means that, according to Christianity, unless you're a Christian, you're going to hell. Or according to Catholicism, if you're not a Catholic, or according to Presbyterians, if you're not a Presbyterian... you get the picture.
Christianity now plays nice mainly because it gets beaten up if it doesn't. It wasn't long ago Christians were as bad or worse as political Islam is now. Consider the Crusades, the slaughter of the Cathars, the wars that were sparked by the Reformation, Cromwell, the witch hunts, Northern Ireland, and the list goes on and on. And of course, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...
Ahem... sorry...
What I'm driving at here is that the First Amendment is the separation of church and state, because it means that the state is never to take any religion's side against another religion. A lot of the people who had emigrated to America had already had quite enough of that. I think every child should probably be taught the Bible in school, and the Koran, and the Tao Te Ching, be acquainted with the ancient Greek philosophers, as well as being taught critical thinking, the ideas of the enlightenment, and humanism. But none of the religions would permit their own faith to be treated as just one more color in the rainbow. Triumphalist religions think the have the TRUTH (caps necessary), while everything else is just the opinions of those who don't know any better--or work for Satan.
As soon as you teach religion in school, you have to choose one. The alliance of the faithful will only last until they win. That's when the real holy war starts, between the faiths, and the various forms of each faith. What the Falwells and Robertsons of the world have to understand is that the secular humanists are their best friends. They're the ones preventing the faithful from strangling each other.
And if anyone pipes up and says that science and evolution are religions too, I will have to hurt them.
The entanglement method just discovered only allows them to read the state of the photons. The photons themselves still have to travel a distance.
But the fact that paired photons remain somehow connected over any distance, and that this connection permits intantaneous action, means that faster than light communication is theoretically possible, even if we don't currently know of a way to take advantage of it.
No kidding. My sister is 55 years old, and every time she asks me to fix her computer, I find a ton of crap on it.
What worries me is the new, particularly nasty spam mail that's out there. Has anyone out there seen the ebay phisher spam? It sends you an email that is indistinguishable from something ebay would send you (though, of course, ebay would never send this,) which redirects you to a bare URL to 'update' your information--including your credit card. Easy enough to spot if you know what's going on out there, but there are a lot of people who don't. Then there's the 'Message Returned' trojans, which come with attachments. These spooked me at first because I thought my machine had actually tried to relay something, till I saw the attachment. But some people will open these attachments, not realizing that they did not originate on their own machine.
One of the wonders of the internet is that it connects you to everyone in the world... including the most sociopathic and corrupt people in the world. The dirty tricks specialists in the former East Bloc have gone into business for themselves--and they're making good money working with the spam factories. Oh, lucky us!
Yeah, America is pretty closed off to the outside world. A lot of Canadians who travel to the U.S. feel like they've entered some kind of sound chamber: nothing gets in. On an average day I'll get news from America, Canada, Britain, France, and Holland. In the States it can be hard to get even national news, and the 6:00 news in most cities is the most sensationalistic FUD I've ever heard. No wonder Americans are afraid to step outside their homes unarmed.
We get the same kind of crap up in Canada, but it doesn't have the monopoly position it has in the U.S. It's a shame, too; there is good journalism in America, but most Americans never get to see it. Media giants like Rupert Murdoch don't help the situation either. By the way, Murdoch is Australian--my advice is to send the bastard back home.
An insular press will result in an insular educational system, influencing public opinion concerning priorities. It also doesn't help that America sends a lot of troops abroad, and American troops tend to be the poorest and worst educated of the American population. This is not helped by a steady diet of sensationalistic media mixed with the us-vs-them mentality common to all armies. Probably not the best ambassadors--this might have something to do with America's image problem abroad.
It could be worse, though. They could be rude and arrogant, like the French. And insularity... the Japanese had a toy robot named 'God-o-Jesus'...
There's another very good side effect. Air conditioning units are very inefficient, producing far more heat than they extract from the air. The net result is that all of the air conditioning units in a city pump out hot air, which makes the city hotter, which requires the air conditioners to work harder... you get the picture.
This is a simple heat exchange to something that is already cold. You don't need to do a lot of work, so the overhead in heat production is minimized, and the heat is sinked out, rather than blasted out into the air. The next effect will be that Toronto itself will become cooler. We are finally doing what I always thought we should do in Canada: take a bit of winter and carry it to the hot parts of summer. Now if only we can keep a bit of summer around...
My first recommendation is that you get a router with a hardware firewall--for the price, there's really no reason not to. And any ISP who discourages the use of routers is just plain irresponsible.
If you don't have a router, have the free version of ZoneAlarm handy, and a list of the services you can shut down on Windows (everything you don't need that uses ports or acts as a server.) Shut down these services and install ZoneAlarm before you plug the machine back into the internet. When you do connect to the web, no one will even know you're there.
Between my router, ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware, and some good anti-virus software, I haven't been touched by anthing out there for 10 years, even when installing and patching.
While Avians and marine animals might be intelligent, they are unlikely to be tool users, so you won't find them out in space. You aren't likely to meet them unless you go to their homeworld (visiting a non-space faring race on their home planet is rather ethically dubious--think of the impact of the Spanish on South America.) If avians evolve into tool users, the wings are likely to atrophy, and you end up with something humanoid. Underwater tool users are hampered by a single significant factor: combustion is rare underwater, making metallurgy virtually impossible (remember all those metal ages?) Low gravity planets will not hold enough atmosphere to support megafauna--never mind the availability of oxygen, there is also the moderating effect on temperature, and protection from radiation and spacial debris.
There is no reason to assume that bipedal intelligent life will be rare. Consider the evolutionary trail we followed. Four legged creatures walk and run very well, but six legged creatures are problematic--they tend to stumble and jerk a lot. Not a problem if you're a small light animal like an ant, but military research into six legged miltary ATV's was aborted because of this problem. The bigger the creature, the more pronounced the problem.
Intelligent, tool using animals must readapt at least some of their limbs to prehnensile appendages. Given that their predecessors will probably begin with four legs, you end up with a creature that walks upright, with two limbs for manipulation, sense organs located high up for good vantage, close to the brain for high speed transmission of information. In other words, humanoid.
It is possible to start with eight legs and end up with six, or six and end up with four on the floor, and high gravity species may well take this route. But there is still that problematic number six before or after, and there is also the problem of energy expenditure of moving all those extra limbs, especially in high gravity.
The singularity is a possibility, but the increasing ignorance of science, not to mention growing political naivety, threatens this. It is hard to build a vast distributed intelligence when ignorance seems to be growing more common. The singularity also threatens more archaic world views, which will become more militant as this threat becomes apparent to them. The singularity would either eradicate religion entirely, or become the dominant religion itself. This is the real root of the conflicts in the middle east--an attempt to preserve what is essentially a medieval world view against the assault of modernity itself. The singularity is also partially dependent on the availability of energy. If we can make fusion work as a safe, cheap, energy supply, we're home free. Otherwise the singularity may recede even if the science and technology is available to make it possible.
There is one last problem with any vision of the future: if the prophet can understand the messiah, then the prophet is the messiah. The messiah here is any radical, Copernican revolution which changes the entire world view. You could not predict the theory of general relativity unless you already had it, that is, unless you had already worked it out yourself. Nearly all hard science fiction works upon the technological consequences of existing science. Science fiction fills in the blanks for things we know we should be able to do but cannot do yet. That target moves with each advance in science.
Finally, most works of science fiction work by extrapolating current social and political trends, which can change suddenly and without notice. Cold War science fiction often extrapolated the Cold war into the far future; William Gibson's Neuromancer, written at the height of Japan's rise as an economic dynamo, had Japanese culture permeating all things western. This aspect of it has become somewhat dated. I suspect that a lot of science fiction writers might be tempted to extrapolate the current religious tensions into the far future. But I suspect that a lot of Muslims may be getting tired of being medieval peasants and having their neighbourhoods blown up by fanatics and the armies sent to fight them. This too could change, and the change may be very swift when it comes.
I'd have to agree with this. As one of my profs put it, they don't teach you the details, they teach you how to learn the subject. Any specific certificate is going to become dated VERY fast--basically, if you don't have a job within 18 months, you're dead in the water. A degree teaches you the principles that all of the rest is based on. You can pick up the rest. When I was a consultant, I would often be dropped into situations where I had never used the specific software, but I had enough general knowledge that I could recognize and fix the problem. A certificate won't give you that.
The other problem is what I call the 'bedroom coder', the guy who learned to code in his bedroom and filled out his technical knowledge with a certificate. Granted, they're much better than the guy who has never touched a computer before and only took the course so they could get a job. They can be very good hackers--when they're working in their bedroom, with complete control over everything. But put them on a team and they suddenly start bitching about having to learn and use other people's code, and don't care how much else they break as long as their code works. After second year we did very few solo projects. Most of them were team based, and you get used to working with other people adapting to other styles. Certificates don't stress this enough.
The last problem, related to this, is overall design. This relates to the bedroom coder problem because it requires conceptual simplicity and flexibility, with developers working in one area providing services to other developers via api's, etc. This is not something you're going to learn playing in your own little sandbox. In a lot of projects I've worked in, you have the lead programmer blazing forward on his own personal stream of consciousness, and the rest of the team trying to work around this, wondering what the hell he's trying to do. The result is endless repetition, and slow and bulky code (this is why some people in the industry suggest that you should fire the 'star' of the team, so that everyone else can do their job.) If you have your project working, but it's a pig with notes everywhere in the code saying 'Fix me!', not only are you not done, you may have not even started.
There is a neo-con strategy called "Starve the Beast," whose goal is nothing less than to push the government to near bankruptcy so that it is incapable of governing. The rationale is that this will force the government into laissez-faire policies. Bush's slash and spend policies are in line with this policy, rather than the traditional policies of conservatives, which is to match tax cuts with spending cuts.
But even the traditional policy can lead to disaster. Infrastructure requires constant maintenance. Think of a loose shingle on your roof. Replacing it will cost 50 dollars. If you leave it, the others around will will also come loose. Now you have to spend 500 dollars to fix it. Let this go, and you suffer water damage. $5000 to replace that section of the roof. Ignore this, and the water may get into the house, into the wiring, and cause a fire. Then you lose the whole house. Costs delayed are costs increased. Ignore the state of your highways, power grid, environment, etc, and the costs that you incur when you can no longer ignore it will be crippling.
The danger of 'Starve the Beast' should be obvious. The economy runs on the rails of infrastructure provided by the government; highways, police, courts, regulations which protect business as well as prevent unfair practices, etc. Without the ability to do this, capitalism itself will collapse. Corporations are, first and foremost, legal entities sanctioned by government authority. Their very existence is made possibly by the efficacy of government. And we haven't even touched on the military yet. A bankrupt federal government will mark the end of America as a Superpower. All of this is why large numbers of old school conservatives are furious with Bush.
I still haven't touched on the liberal arguments against what Bush is doing. Those who have little money left over after necessities pay a much larger proportion of their income in taxes, through sales tax. There is no tax on securities and stocks, and the financial slight of hand that uses tax shelters is available only to those with a large surplus of capital. When Henry Ford paid his workers an unheard of amount of money for common labourers, he created a large working middle class, with disposable income which allowed them to buy the products of their own labour. This rendered obsolete what was probably the only legitimate claim of Karl Marx: that when workers could no longer buy the products of their own labour, the markets would collapse. The result of Ford's policy eventually spread to most of the American working class, creating the most powerful economic dynamo the world has ever seen. The decline of the middle and working classes make the pie smaller for everyone. The rich may get richer for while, but they will be fewer in number. It is only a matter of time before they feel the pinch. The wolf that grows fat on the poor will soon go after bigger prey.
Both the long term and the short term consequences of Bush's policies are disastrous. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation is. It may be disastrous for the Democrats if they win, because they will inherit such a mess that it will be hard to wow the crowd. America cannot afford four more years of Bush. And even the conservatives are beginning to realize this.
Remote mini guns. Why send humans into an enemy held building. Send a team of remote controlled armored Uzi's into a the bulding.
In which case, why send the soldier at all? Just imagine the horror of all those first person shooter afficienados, finally unleashed to control remote drones on the other side of the world.
The ultimate low-ping bastard!
And if you get hit, well, the respawn point is just back at the machine carrier.
So I guess all those Sony stores running Pixar movies on their big screen TVs are breaking the law. And Future Shop, an just about every other store that sells TVs.
The bizarre thing about this is that it has nothing to do with their business model.
Think about it. You pay by the month. The cost is fixed no matter how much you play. The more time players spend online, the higher the overhead for the company providing the game, in extra servers, bandwidth, content, etc, etc... If someone has maintained a character on your server for two years, there should be reward for sticking with it, even if they didn't have much time to play.
Why don't MMORPG's allow people to log intentions, which are resolved the next time they log back on. Instead of spending 30 hours clicking the mouse to make chain mail gloves to boost your armoring skill, why not let the player just go the armory and click on the forge, say he's going to practice his skill, and log off. When he logs back on, he's raised his skill, or made some money, or a bit of both. And he really only has to log on for a few minutes a week if he's busy.
This could be done for crafting, selling goods, training skills, and so on, all the stuff that MMORPG's use for trial by boredom. If I want to spend my time making chain mail gloves, I'll buy some wire and metal working tools. I don't need a game for this. And make travel powers and items common, like they do in CoH, so that I don't have to spend hours running across the landscape to fulfill a quest. This is just another form of Trial by Boredom.
Another problem is the rare spawn, rare drop syndrome. EQ used this to death, and I recently quit DAOC when they introduced it in Trials of Atlantis. This is where you sit at your PC for 5 hours waiting for that rare named NPC to pop, or kill the same creature 500 times to get that rare treasure. I could never be bothered, so my equipment was always sub-par.
One more thing: essential character development quests and battles should never involve more than a single full group. I don't know how much time people in MMORPG's wait around for enough people to show up to fight the next Boss in the quest, but at later levels, it probably accounts for half the playing time. Everything that can be gained doing these mass battles should be obtainable in another way. You may need to fight more things, and it may take longer, but at least you would be doing something, instead of standing around waiting.
No, what he's saying is that the policy is wrong, but the Democrats had nothing to do with the policy. It was put in place by the current administration.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what the hell is going on here? Ed Koch was on the Daily Show the other night, and he's backing Bush because he still thinks he's the best choice against terrorism. When the hell are all these people going to get a clue?
The Bush administration invaded Iraq because they wanted to. 9/11 was just the excuse, and hordes of insiders in the intelligence community quit their jobs in protest over the administrations misrepresentations of the intelligence. While people were still jumping out of the twin towers, General Clark got a phone call from the White House telling him to look for a way to pin this on Iraq. They didn't even care about who was really responsible!
To understand why the rest of the world is so pissed at George Bush, allow me to present the picture that the rest of the world saw. After 9/11, everyone rallied to America side and sent troops to Afghanistan. We had identified the problem, and we were all going to go after it--even the Muslims in the Middle East were onside. And then, Bush rides off into the sunset on a personal vendetta. The rest of the world just looked on in stunned disbelief and said to each other, "Where the hell is he going?"
Not after Iran, who we knew was working on nuclear weapons. Not after North Korea, who had just attained them. No, he was going after the one Middle Eastern country whose leader Osama bin Laden hated the most, because he was secular. In other words, the one country that Al Qaeda wouldn't deal with. The one country we knew didn't have the WMDs because there were already weapons inspectors in there looking for them. Hell, most of the Iraqi weapons experts had long since moved to other countries because their programs had been shut down--we have few of them living in Canada now. Iraq just didn't have the expertise anymore, and the evidence was there for anyone who wanted to know.
Hussein was evil, yeah, I would have been in favor of deposing him if 9/11 had not happened. But after 9/11 it was the last country to go after, because it was the only Muslim country in the Middle East not controlled by Political Islam. And it gave the terrorists the thing that they'd hoped for; an American invasion of a heavily populated Arab country.
Think about it; do you really believe that Al Qaeda did what they did thinking there would be no consequences, or that they would win the ensuing war? No, they knew exactly what would happen. And they expected to lose. But what terrorists always hope for is a massive retaliation. These people are suididal. They think they're all going to wake up in Paradise after they die. They don't care what happens to themselves, as long as they can drag as many people down with them as possible. They wanted Shock and Awe, as much collateral damage on Muslim civilians as possible, until the civilians become sympathetic to their cause. And they love Bush, because they know how to press his buttons, and they know exactly what he'll do when they press them.
I don't know what to blame--infotainment, self-absorbtion, bad education, clever propaganda--but I do know that Americans seem to be dangerously close to being incapable of participating in democracy. If you don't like Kerry, then consider this: he was the best candidate the system would allow through. Lincoln wouldn't last a day now, thanks to the marvels of modern tabloid partisan politics. What the hell should anyone care whether Bush went to Vietnam, or Kerry protested it, or Cheney has a lesbian daughter, or Clinton screwed Monica. 250 FBI agents examining a blue dress--come on! If democracy fails in America, it may be held up as proof for future generations by future dictators that democracy is an unworkable fantasy, like Communism. Maintaining a democracy is not just about choice. In order to continue to make choices, you must make informed, rational choices. You have to know what you're choosing. Otherwise your options will get pretty limited.
So the reason the rest of the world is pissed at George Bush isn't because he betrayed us. We're pissed at him because he betrayed America.
Like the answer isn't already obvious: fear.
Playing on fear hits on the second level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, safety. This has to be satisfied before love, self-esteem, or self-actualization. Targetting this hits us at the mammalian level, even below the monkey. Only raw physical drives come before this. This is why SUV's are selling so well. Car buyers have been convinced that SUV's are safer. In fact, they're not--their center of gravity is too high for their wheel base, and their size and weight makes them less maneuverable, making accidents more likely and more deadly when they happen. But the perception, fostered by advertising, has made them a runaway success.
This also explains why politics has been so warped since 9/11. All those alerts are scaring the hell out of people who haven't applied a little statistical perspective and realized that even in 2001, your chances of being killed by a terrorist were less than being killed by lightning. By the same reasoning, we should all stop travelling in cars because your chance of dying in a car crash is several orders of magnitude greater. But rationality doesn't even get a chance at this level.
It also explains why Democrats are more frightened by footing of 9/11 than Republicans. Republicans actually think Bush is doing a good job against terrorism, while Democrats are aware that the invasion in Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, and may make the problem worse by aggravating Islamic paranoia. In other words, Democrats see 9/11 as a threat which has not yet been dealt with properly.
Understanding the role of fear in people's choices explains a lot of things: the War on Drugs (fear of gangs), McCarthyism (fear of Communism), Fundamentalism (fear of uncertainty), and knee-jerk patriotism (fear of foreigners.) Whenever you see people acting like lemurs, it's a pretty good indication that this is what's happening. And the best advertisement of this is the 6:00 news, where no news is good news, and the entire program is spent on statistical anomalies.
Advertising just rides on the coattails of bad journalism.
I am partial to 2nd ed, and I loved the first ed Gygax modules (the Vault of the Drow series and Giants series). And I've got a shelfload of Dragon magazines. But really, the whole point was never the rules, but what you did with them. The nice thing about D&D was the fudge factor--as the DM, you could scale the difficulty level as you went to bring the party to the edge of defeat without wiping them out. More strictly defined rules systems didn't leave this leeway, because players could tell from the dice roll whether they had succeeded or not. In D&D the DM was always the final arbiter. Now you can run online adventures with Neverwinter Nights, so if your old D&D group has split up into different cities, you can still play together, but I'm not sure it gives the same leeway.
I was lucky in that I played in university with a bunch of people with multiple degrees. We had people in history, philosophy, english, political science, psychology, and engineering, all voracious readers, and a couple of hard core gamers. The interesting thing about running in a tabletop game is that the DM plays God, so you really get to see what their idea of justice, politics, economics, and human nature is. This led to a lot of interesting discussions on subjects like the nature of evil or medieval politics. We used to have pitched arguments about the difference between religion in the game world vs. the medieval world. The gods in the game world took active roles, while the God of the medieval church never intervened. This meant that religion in the game world was actually controlled by the gods--a very interesting premise.
Another interesting thing about D&D is that it is intended as a fully cooperative game. A lot of cooperative games were created in the 70's, but D&D is the only one that caught on. The opponents are provided by the DM, who nevertheless is not playing against the players. This was always missed by the hysterical critics, who were obsessed with the violence in the game or the mythical elements (eewwww--the occult!) Media coverage of the game in the early days was pathetic. They were always so intent on looking for a scare story that they couldn't see what was going on right in front of them: players working together in a creative hobby.
I will say that I agree with him on hyper-human skills. Computers are being used in the wrong way. When I worked for a dot com, everyone was raving about alltheworld.com, a flash in the pan search engine. I pointed out that I didn't want 60,000 matches--I just wanted the one that I was really looking for. They all looked at me funny. Computers are being used to flood people with data. What they should actually be doing is giving people the few pieces of data they actually need. And nobody in the dot com world seemed to grasp this. They had no idea what people actually wanted or needed. As Winston Churchill put it, "Give me this day, on one sheet of paper, the following information..."
But the current great extinction has nothing to do with any of the things he's talking about. It has to do with the outsourcing, the bust of the dot com bubble, and a popular belief that now that the dot com bubble has burst, you don't have worry about that computer stuff anymore (I kid you not--a lot of technophobes out there actually think it is all going to go away.)
There is no question that programming will evolve, and that we will work at higher and higher levels in the future. But it is equally true that as the methods ramp up, so will the target, and competition to produce software that reaches that target quickly, efficiently, and easily will demand the best solution, which is always hand tweaked. Build by number tools are always general--2,000,000 lines of code used to do what 1000 lines would do better, because the code is literally written with no idea of what the real task is. And to use these high level tools effectively there are always "Tips, Tricks, and Traps," which require a background knowledge of the underlying architecture to grasp.
And by the way, assembler still does everything better than anything else. Check out Gibson Research (http://www.grc.com/) for proof of that.
As for genetic programming, allow me to contrast the hand coded solution to the genetically designed solution:
Hand coded: 2 + 2 = 4;
Genetic: 1 + 1 + 3 - (4 * 3) + 3 + (6/2) + 2.5 + 1.5 + ln(e) = 4
Yeah, it will give you the right result... eventually. But if you want to read your email, you better book a couple days time with WETA's server farm. Not to mention that it takes as long to train one of these as it does a human--and it takes someone who knows a lot about computers (a very good programmer) to specify the criteria. A good example: the Pentagon wanted a genetic algorithm that could recognize a tank. They got one that seemed to work, until a new set of photos were used. It turned out that all the criteria photos with tanks were taken on a sunny day, and all the others were taken on a cloudy day. So if the sun is out, it's a tank. Doh!
The more sophisticated the software is, the harder it is to fix when something goes wrong. Superficially simple applications for complex tasks are that much harder to diagnose and fix when they fail. Windows appears easy, until a bug rears its head, and then it takes thousands of man hours just to track down the cause. Linux has a steeper learning curve, but a core simplicity once you're over the hump. Simple software is simple because the brain is built in. But that doesn't mean that the brain will always work.
Eventually, someone will have to go down and sing to the metal.
If you'll recall, this was at the time when 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' was at the height of its attack--probably the dirtiest political attack in a Presidential campaign in decades. That's what the question "How are you holding up?" was about--the real question was already out there, and frankly, SBVFT does not deserve the dignity of being named. Stewart usually just tries to get guests to talk, regardless of which side they're on. He goes as easy on the Republicans as on the Democrats, and sometimes I think he goes too easily on the spin doctors and partisans. The only time he jumps down someone's throat is when they make a claim which is obviously false, like the guy who had just published a book in favour of the invasion of Iraq based on the very arguments that had just been disproven. And the fact is, the Republicans of late have done this a lot more than the Democrats.
Optimistic Tit-for-Tat models human behaviour well in a social setting--we give others the benefit of the doubt, and continue to cooperate when others do. When someone violates our trust, we stop trusting them and punish them, but if they act beneficially towards us again, we might be willing to forgive. Most notable, OTFT produces the best overall score, which in competition between social groups is the deciding factor.
The Southampton strategy is dependent upon large numbers of people who will sacrifice all for the good of the other, and not for the good of their community (the collective performance is worse than OTFT.) I can see sacrifice for the greater good, but this is sacrifice to another person without hope of recompensation or an increase in general wellbeing. This does happen in human societies (I think it's happening now in some political systems), but only when the winner has managed to convince the losers that its all in everyone's best interest. What Southampton has added to this mix is a capacity for extreme self-delusion that directly contravenes the economic assumption of informed choice and self-interest. For purposes of economic modelling, Southampton should probably be disqualified, or these assumptions dropped. But this should also tell you something about what could happen to those nice economic models when they hit the messy world of human beings, who for the most part aren't very informed and often work against their own best interests as a result.
The consequence for a societal group running Southhampton against an OTFT group would be the defeat of the Southhampton group every time. Selection works at individual AND group levels. So the challenge should probably be two-tier: run the programs individually against each other, and run them as tribes against each other.
If I was going to go Mac, I would go all the way, and switch to the hardware too. It's better, and it's just plain cooler. The only reason I don't have a Mac is I like PC games, and there aren't enough for the Mac, and for compatability with work systems.
When people engage in something obsessively, there is usually a pre-existing psychological problem. There are a lot of alcoholics and drug users who begin by self medicating. Eventually the reward systems of the brain adapt to this and they become addicted. The other problem with self-medicating is that while you're dulling the pain, you may not be doing everything you can to solve the cause.
People that I know who have played EQ obsessively were already depressed or at a bad time in their lives. While they're playing the game, they're engaged and forget their problems--but at the same time, their problems will never go away while they're doing this.
I've played games of all kinds for 25 years. They can be a brilliant illumination of a person's character, particularly if they are running the game (you find out what kind of God that person would be, and what their view of human nature is.) I like MMORPG's, but my problem is that I can never be bothered to put in the time required to keep up with other people I know. My limit is about 15 hours a week. I just get bored. And the random reward system of EQ completely turned me off--I just felt I was getting jerked around. I could see doing something where success brought a definite outcome, but for me gambling is about as exciting as watching paint dry. I played slot machines once, and couldn't wait for my $10 in quarters to run out so I could stop. I actually resented the payouts.
So in addition to determining what the reward system used in a game is, we also need to understand why some people respond to intermittent rewards and some don't. EQ is addictive only to a particular kind of person. What is it about them that makes them enjoy this?
I suspect that it is a disconnect between action and consequence, a kind of magical thinking that looks to the gods for one's fortune, like the gambler with a 'system' or the bingo player festooned with luck charms. This belief that the power for success lays in the hands of an external, arbitrary power is itself conducive to a feeling of powerlessness and depression. So, we're back to a pre-existing emotional problem--and to child rearing, too, if this is the result of pattern of parental behaviour.
Now there's a study I'd pay to see done.
Oh, come on! Pierre Laporte was the Labour Minister for Quebec. The RCMP is federal. Nor have I ever heard of any accusation of corruption against Laporte. At least try to have a fingernail grip on Canadian politics before you spin this crap.
The article you cite is speculation. The War Measures Act was way over the top, but at the time, Europe had radical terrorist cells popping up like weeds. The U.S. took the situation seriously enough to expand a miltary base in northern NY State from 5000 to 100,000 troops (the draft was still on.) One can just as easily speculate that Trudeau acted as quickly as he did because he was afraid that if he didn't, someone else might.
The RCMP at that time was the Canadian equivalent of the CIA, FBA, NSA, etc., etc. They were the whole show, and they sucked at it, just like the CIA. CSIS nowadays isn't much better--the top level needs to swept into the garbage, again, just like the CIA. Actually, I'd like to see the RCMP set as watchodgs over CSIS. CSE is better because they're new, and not top-heavy yet.
The RCMP, like the rest of the federal government (with the exception of the CSE), is computer illiterate. No surprise there.
I've gotten a Top Secret clearance, despite having a 'high deviance quotient' in my family. It's all nonsense anyway--when I worked as a cleaner in RCMP headquarters as a summer job about 20 years ago, the cleaning staff had to take their coffee maker home at night because their lockers were constantly be broken into and robbed at night--in the basement of RCMP headquarters! And it wasn't the cleaners, because we were the cleaners.
But if you believe that you're being denied a clearance because your father made a poster 30 years back, it probably isn't because they think you're a subversive. It's probably because they think you're an idiot.
America is a well armed society, with at least as many guns per capita as the Swiss. The difference is that the gun is issued as part of the mandatory military service. This does two things--teaches people how to use the gun, and teaches them how not to use it. Because the gun is specifically intended for military use, personal use is a taboo. The Swiss will only take them up in an official capacity, not because Bubba down the road wants to gather a posse. And if everyone is trained in the military, it also means that everyone knows how to fight--with or without a gun. It's a bit hard to throw your weight around when everyone else can too.
Add to this the fact that Swiss society is very homogenous, highly discipined, and poverty is rare, and you'll see that there are other factors involved.
The KKK was very proficient at organizing flash posses. Do you think this a good thing?
Well, every time I hear about a vulnerability in Firefox, I also hear that it's already fixed. When I hear about holes in IE, I usually hear that Microsoft is 'working on it'. And those are the holes we know about...
Umm, no, Freedom of Religion is not derived from Christianity. Christianity is a triumphalist religion, like Islam. This means that, according to Christianity, unless you're a Christian, you're going to hell. Or according to Catholicism, if you're not a Catholic, or according to Presbyterians, if you're not a Presbyterian... you get the picture.
Christianity now plays nice mainly because it gets beaten up if it doesn't. It wasn't long ago Christians were as bad or worse as political Islam is now. Consider the Crusades, the slaughter of the Cathars, the wars that were sparked by the Reformation, Cromwell, the witch hunts, Northern Ireland, and the list goes on and on. And of course, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...
Ahem... sorry...
What I'm driving at here is that the First Amendment is the separation of church and state, because it means that the state is never to take any religion's side against another religion. A lot of the people who had emigrated to America had already had quite enough of that. I think every child should probably be taught the Bible in school, and the Koran, and the Tao Te Ching, be acquainted with the ancient Greek philosophers, as well as being taught critical thinking, the ideas of the enlightenment, and humanism. But none of the religions would permit their own faith to be treated as just one more color in the rainbow. Triumphalist religions think the have the TRUTH (caps necessary), while everything else is just the opinions of those who don't know any better--or work for Satan.
As soon as you teach religion in school, you have to choose one. The alliance of the faithful will only last until they win. That's when the real holy war starts, between the faiths, and the various forms of each faith. What the Falwells and Robertsons of the world have to understand is that the secular humanists are their best friends. They're the ones preventing the faithful from strangling each other.
And if anyone pipes up and says that science and evolution are religions too, I will have to hurt them.
Badly.
Not yet. But the photons themselves do communicate instantaneously. For an example of this, see http://www.jlab.org/news/internet/1997/spooky.html /.
The entanglement method just discovered only allows them to read the state of the photons. The photons themselves still have to travel a distance.
But the fact that paired photons remain somehow connected over any distance, and that this connection permits intantaneous action, means that faster than light communication is theoretically possible, even if we don't currently know of a way to take advantage of it.
No kidding. My sister is 55 years old, and every time she asks me to fix her computer, I find a ton of crap on it.
What worries me is the new, particularly nasty spam mail that's out there. Has anyone out there seen the ebay phisher spam? It sends you an email that is indistinguishable from something ebay would send you (though, of course, ebay would never send this,) which redirects you to a bare URL to 'update' your information--including your credit card. Easy enough to spot if you know what's going on out there, but there are a lot of people who don't. Then there's the 'Message Returned' trojans, which come with attachments. These spooked me at first because I thought my machine had actually tried to relay something, till I saw the attachment. But some people will open these attachments, not realizing that they did not originate on their own machine.
One of the wonders of the internet is that it connects you to everyone in the world... including the most sociopathic and corrupt people in the world. The dirty tricks specialists in the former East Bloc have gone into business for themselves--and they're making good money working with the spam factories. Oh, lucky us!
Yeah, America is pretty closed off to the outside world. A lot of Canadians who travel to the U.S. feel like they've entered some kind of sound chamber: nothing gets in. On an average day I'll get news from America, Canada, Britain, France, and Holland. In the States it can be hard to get even national news, and the 6:00 news in most cities is the most sensationalistic FUD I've ever heard. No wonder Americans are afraid to step outside their homes unarmed.
We get the same kind of crap up in Canada, but it doesn't have the monopoly position it has in the U.S. It's a shame, too; there is good journalism in America, but most Americans never get to see it. Media giants like Rupert Murdoch don't help the situation either. By the way, Murdoch is Australian--my advice is to send the bastard back home.
An insular press will result in an insular educational system, influencing public opinion concerning priorities. It also doesn't help that America sends a lot of troops abroad, and American troops tend to be the poorest and worst educated of the American population. This is not helped by a steady diet of sensationalistic media mixed with the us-vs-them mentality common to all armies. Probably not the best ambassadors--this might have something to do with America's image problem abroad.
It could be worse, though. They could be rude and arrogant, like the French. And insularity... the Japanese had a toy robot named 'God-o-Jesus'...
There's another very good side effect. Air conditioning units are very inefficient, producing far more heat than they extract from the air. The net result is that all of the air conditioning units in a city pump out hot air, which makes the city hotter, which requires the air conditioners to work harder... you get the picture.
This is a simple heat exchange to something that is already cold. You don't need to do a lot of work, so the overhead in heat production is minimized, and the heat is sinked out, rather than blasted out into the air. The next effect will be that Toronto itself will become cooler. We are finally doing what I always thought we should do in Canada: take a bit of winter and carry it to the hot parts of summer. Now if only we can keep a bit of summer around...
My first recommendation is that you get a router with a hardware firewall--for the price, there's really no reason not to. And any ISP who discourages the use of routers is just plain irresponsible.
If you don't have a router, have the free version of ZoneAlarm handy, and a list of the services you can shut down on Windows (everything you don't need that uses ports or acts as a server.) Shut down these services and install ZoneAlarm before you plug the machine back into the internet. When you do connect to the web, no one will even know you're there.
Between my router, ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware, and some good anti-virus software, I haven't been touched by anthing out there for 10 years, even when installing and patching.
While Avians and marine animals might be intelligent, they are unlikely to be tool users, so you won't find them out in space. You aren't likely to meet them unless you go to their homeworld (visiting a non-space faring race on their home planet is rather ethically dubious--think of the impact of the Spanish on South America.) If avians evolve into tool users, the wings are likely to atrophy, and you end up with something humanoid. Underwater tool users are hampered by a single significant factor: combustion is rare underwater, making metallurgy virtually impossible (remember all those metal ages?) Low gravity planets will not hold enough atmosphere to support megafauna--never mind the availability of oxygen, there is also the moderating effect on temperature, and protection from radiation and spacial debris.
There is no reason to assume that bipedal intelligent life will be rare. Consider the evolutionary trail we followed. Four legged creatures walk and run very well, but six legged creatures are problematic--they tend to stumble and jerk a lot. Not a problem if you're a small light animal like an ant, but military research into six legged miltary ATV's was aborted because of this problem. The bigger the creature, the more pronounced the problem.
Intelligent, tool using animals must readapt at least some of their limbs to prehnensile appendages. Given that their predecessors will probably begin with four legs, you end up with a creature that walks upright, with two limbs for manipulation, sense organs located high up for good vantage, close to the brain for high speed transmission of information. In other words, humanoid.
It is possible to start with eight legs and end up with six, or six and end up with four on the floor, and high gravity species may well take this route. But there is still that problematic number six before or after, and there is also the problem of energy expenditure of moving all those extra limbs, especially in high gravity.
The singularity is a possibility, but the increasing ignorance of science, not to mention growing political naivety, threatens this. It is hard to build a vast distributed intelligence when ignorance seems to be growing more common. The singularity also threatens more archaic world views, which will become more militant as this threat becomes apparent to them. The singularity would either eradicate religion entirely, or become the dominant religion itself. This is the real root of the conflicts in the middle east--an attempt to preserve what is essentially a medieval world view against the assault of modernity itself. The singularity is also partially dependent on the availability of energy. If we can make fusion work as a safe, cheap, energy supply, we're home free. Otherwise the singularity may recede even if the science and technology is available to make it possible.
There is one last problem with any vision of the future: if the prophet can understand the messiah, then the prophet is the messiah. The messiah here is any radical, Copernican revolution which changes the entire world view. You could not predict the theory of general relativity unless you already had it, that is, unless you had already worked it out yourself. Nearly all hard science fiction works upon the technological consequences of existing science. Science fiction fills in the blanks for things we know we should be able to do but cannot do yet. That target moves with each advance in science.
Finally, most works of science fiction work by extrapolating current social and political trends, which can change suddenly and without notice. Cold War science fiction often extrapolated the Cold war into the far future; William Gibson's Neuromancer, written at the height of Japan's rise as an economic dynamo, had Japanese culture permeating all things western. This aspect of it has become somewhat dated. I suspect that a lot of science fiction writers might be tempted to extrapolate the current religious tensions into the far future. But I suspect that a lot of Muslims may be getting tired of being medieval peasants and having their neighbourhoods blown up by fanatics and the armies sent to fight them. This too could change, and the change may be very swift when it comes.
I'd have to agree with this. As one of my profs put it, they don't teach you the details, they teach you how to learn the subject. Any specific certificate is going to become dated VERY fast--basically, if you don't have a job within 18 months, you're dead in the water. A degree teaches you the principles that all of the rest is based on. You can pick up the rest. When I was a consultant, I would often be dropped into situations where I had never used the specific software, but I had enough general knowledge that I could recognize and fix the problem. A certificate won't give you that.
The other problem is what I call the 'bedroom coder', the guy who learned to code in his bedroom and filled out his technical knowledge with a certificate. Granted, they're much better than the guy who has never touched a computer before and only took the course so they could get a job. They can be very good hackers--when they're working in their bedroom, with complete control over everything. But put them on a team and they suddenly start bitching about having to learn and use other people's code, and don't care how much else they break as long as their code works. After second year we did very few solo projects. Most of them were team based, and you get used to working with other people adapting to other styles. Certificates don't stress this enough.
The last problem, related to this, is overall design. This relates to the bedroom coder problem because it requires conceptual simplicity and flexibility, with developers working in one area providing services to other developers via api's, etc. This is not something you're going to learn playing in your own little sandbox. In a lot of projects I've worked in, you have the lead programmer blazing forward on his own personal stream of consciousness, and the rest of the team trying to work around this, wondering what the hell he's trying to do. The result is endless repetition, and slow and bulky code (this is why some people in the industry suggest that you should fire the 'star' of the team, so that everyone else can do their job.) If you have your project working, but it's a pig with notes everywhere in the code saying 'Fix me!', not only are you not done, you may have not even started.
There is a neo-con strategy called "Starve the Beast," whose goal is nothing less than to push the government to near bankruptcy so that it is incapable of governing. The rationale is that this will force the government into laissez-faire policies. Bush's slash and spend policies are in line with this policy, rather than the traditional policies of conservatives, which is to match tax cuts with spending cuts.
But even the traditional policy can lead to disaster. Infrastructure requires constant maintenance. Think of a loose shingle on your roof. Replacing it will cost 50 dollars. If you leave it, the others around will will also come loose. Now you have to spend 500 dollars to fix it. Let this go, and you suffer water damage. $5000 to replace that section of the roof. Ignore this, and the water may get into the house, into the wiring, and cause a fire. Then you lose the whole house. Costs delayed are costs increased. Ignore the state of your highways, power grid, environment, etc, and the costs that you incur when you can no longer ignore it will be crippling.
The danger of 'Starve the Beast' should be obvious. The economy runs on the rails of infrastructure provided by the government; highways, police, courts, regulations which protect business as well as prevent unfair practices, etc. Without the ability to do this, capitalism itself will collapse. Corporations are, first and foremost, legal entities sanctioned by government authority. Their very existence is made possibly by the efficacy of government. And we haven't even touched on the military yet. A bankrupt federal government will mark the end of America as a Superpower. All of this is why large numbers of old school conservatives are furious with Bush.
I still haven't touched on the liberal arguments against what Bush is doing. Those who have little money left over after necessities pay a much larger proportion of their income in taxes, through sales tax. There is no tax on securities and stocks, and the financial slight of hand that uses tax shelters is available only to those with a large surplus of capital. When Henry Ford paid his workers an unheard of amount of money for common labourers, he created a large working middle class, with disposable income which allowed them to buy the products of their own labour. This rendered obsolete what was probably the only legitimate claim of Karl Marx: that when workers could no longer buy the products of their own labour, the markets would collapse. The result of Ford's policy eventually spread to most of the American working class, creating the most powerful economic dynamo the world has ever seen. The decline of the middle and working classes make the pie smaller for everyone. The rich may get richer for while, but they will be fewer in number. It is only a matter of time before they feel the pinch. The wolf that grows fat on the poor will soon go after bigger prey.
Both the long term and the short term consequences of Bush's policies are disastrous. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation is. It may be disastrous for the Democrats if they win, because they will inherit such a mess that it will be hard to wow the crowd. America cannot afford four more years of Bush. And even the conservatives are beginning to realize this.
Remote mini guns. Why send humans into an enemy held building. Send a team of remote controlled armored Uzi's into a the bulding.
In which case, why send the soldier at all? Just imagine the horror of all those first person shooter afficienados, finally unleashed to control remote drones on the other side of the world.
The ultimate low-ping bastard!
And if you get hit, well, the respawn point is just back at the machine carrier.
So I guess all those Sony stores running Pixar movies on their big screen TVs are breaking the law. And Future Shop, an just about every other store that sells TVs.
The bizarre thing about this is that it has nothing to do with their business model.
Think about it. You pay by the month. The cost is fixed no matter how much you play. The more time players spend online, the higher the overhead for the company providing the game, in extra servers, bandwidth, content, etc, etc... If someone has maintained a character on your server for two years, there should be reward for sticking with it, even if they didn't have much time to play.
Why don't MMORPG's allow people to log intentions, which are resolved the next time they log back on. Instead of spending 30 hours clicking the mouse to make chain mail gloves to boost your armoring skill, why not let the player just go the armory and click on the forge, say he's going to practice his skill, and log off. When he logs back on, he's raised his skill, or made some money, or a bit of both. And he really only has to log on for a few minutes a week if he's busy.
This could be done for crafting, selling goods, training skills, and so on, all the stuff that MMORPG's use for trial by boredom. If I want to spend my time making chain mail gloves, I'll buy some wire and metal working tools. I don't need a game for this. And make travel powers and items common, like they do in CoH, so that I don't have to spend hours running across the landscape to fulfill a quest. This is just another form of Trial by Boredom.
Another problem is the rare spawn, rare drop syndrome. EQ used this to death, and I recently quit DAOC when they introduced it in Trials of Atlantis. This is where you sit at your PC for 5 hours waiting for that rare named NPC to pop, or kill the same creature 500 times to get that rare treasure. I could never be bothered, so my equipment was always sub-par.
One more thing: essential character development quests and battles should never involve more than a single full group. I don't know how much time people in MMORPG's wait around for enough people to show up to fight the next Boss in the quest, but at later levels, it probably accounts for half the playing time. Everything that can be gained doing these mass battles should be obtainable in another way. You may need to fight more things, and it may take longer, but at least you would be doing something, instead of standing around waiting.
No, what he's saying is that the policy is wrong, but the Democrats had nothing to do with the policy. It was put in place by the current administration.
You do know who's in White House, don't you?