Ha ha... and before that... well, read Plato's Republic. The youth of his day were being ruined by the pan pipes, and by the baudier passages of Homer! And some of the early Greeks claimed that literacy was ruining youth because they could write things down, rather than committing things to memory.
Face it, most gamers exchange television time for game time, because gaming is more engaging. The real divide is between active and passive--between television and other activities. It turns out that kids who play video games are as likely to go out and play other games. I love video games too, so much that I was a game developer for 15 years, but on a beautiful sunny day, I have to get out and cycle, run, walk, read a book under a tree, or if there's a lake nearby, swim, paddle a canoe, or sail. If I don't exercise at least an hour a day, I feel slovenly, and I can't sleep well.
But the main divide that Zimbardo and Duncan pay no attention to is between extraverts and introverts. Introverts are viewed with suspicion by our salesman society; we're pathetic broken losers. We should be out pressing the flesh, chatting people up, engaging in team sports (notice that all of the ones I engage in are solitary.) But because we don't, there is obviously something wrong with us. And so, they go in search of the reason we are so pathological.
By the way, video games must be pathological, because they're NEW!
Porn isn't new. And many of the most successful pickup artists I've ever met had huge porn collections. Frankly, the difference I noted between guys who got laid a lot and those who didn't was that the good pickup artists were much more callous, more manipulative, and used women like sex toys. But never mind, that's a sign of maturity. Or maybe women are just as immature as men. This is nothing new, either. Feminism was supposed to address this, but so far, it hasn't made a dent.
Nor do they notice the trend that has been going on for a century: in an age of increasing specialization, the gestation period for everyone, both men and women, is getting longer. The Bar Mitzvah is at 13--at one time, this is when you became a man, and you were ready to start a family then. A hundred years ago, few went to any school beyond what we would now consider elementary school: age 13 to 15. Then we went on to high school, age 17 to 20. Then college, age 21 to 23. Bachelor's Degrees, age 22 to 25. Now advanced degrees, age 25 to 30.
Material expectations are now also much greater. You must have a car, a house, a steady job, to raise children. And the strategy of parents is different; while my parents and earlier generations had as many children as possible, hoping that some would survive, most parents now wait and bet everything on one, two, or three, expecting them all to survive.
The world has changed. But the doomsayers have not.
Because, you know, it's not like any legitimate content is shared by BitTorrent.How nice of them to block WoW updates. And it sure gets rid of those pesky linix torrents--I can certainly see why Microsoft is backing this.
Well said! Political self interest is not the same as rational self interest. I do like my life style, which I try to make as low energy as possible, but I have no wish to starve, live on gruel, or subsist on back breaking labour--all of which are likely outcomes in we do not find an alternative to oil, and if we do not address the challenges of global warming;. The anti-global warming pedants fail to understand that we are trying to preserve their lifestyle, not abolish it, and that we are asking them to make small sacrifices to that end--and that, if they don't, the sacrifices they will be required to make will break them utterly, and will be measured in the blood of their loved ones.
There is some possibility that the rhythmic nature of the sound might have long term effects on health, or that some high frequencies might effect mood and therefore health.
This, of course, is entirely conjectural, and would need some solid evidence to back it up. Without that evidence, I would be inclined to chalk it up to folk superstition, encouraged in part by the anti alternative energy noise machine, which gave us, amongst other urban myths, the notion that florescent bulbs would require hazmat teams to clean up your house if they broke, because they contained some mercury (hint: the florescent tubes we've been using in offices for 70 years now contain more mercury.)
And let's not forget sports. When are one of these clowns going to ask for a ban on high school football? College football? Never? Of course not, despite the towering mass of evidence that demonstrates that this is a major source of violence in our society. This is not about violence, this is about being a demagogue, which means pounding upon minorities for the benefit of majorities. And who gives a fuck about nerds, right? Jocks rule the world, still, so football gets a pass.
A little humility would actually go a long way to addressing the problem. Unfortunately we have so many populist demagogues out there right now, telling people not to trust 'elites' (that is, anyone who knows more on a subject than the demagogue, which pretty much includes anyone who knows anything at all) that humility has been banished from our culture. Even amongst the educated, post-modernism teaches that all opinions have equal merit. The low-brow political bullshit seems to be a recurring feature of democracy, but the high-brow bullshit is new, and is often used to neutralize opposition to the low-brow stuff. This is what we have to get rid of.
So while there may be no such thing as Truth (with a capital T, the thing that ideologues and the clergy try to sell you) we need to bring that truth, you know, the sort of thing you need to get by everyday.
By the way, I'm obviously the best choice for leader, since I'm so intelligent that I have realized that I suck at everything, which obviously makes me the most competent person out there...
Yes, it has been warmer, and no humans were involved. Or existed. Which is the bloody point, you fool. Humans rely on a particular ecosystem that exists within a narrow range of temperature. So, if you can survive by grazing on ferns, like the herbivorous dinosaurs, then you won't have a problem. But if you rely on things like wheat, corn, vegetables, etc, and the animals that also live in this ecosystem, then you will have a major problem.
It gets worse. Species evolve in geological time, which is a lot slower than the climate is changing. So we're going to witness massive extinctions, and the replacements that we will need won't be around for thousands of years. And since genetic engineering consists of tweaking existing species, rather than producing radically new ones, the question is: how long can you go without food?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in his talk at last years TAM, showed us a world map that illustrated the number of new scientific research papers filed by country. In 2000, the U.S. was still a leader. Then he showed the 2008 map, and the U.S. looked like a deflated balloon. My comment at the time was that primary research shows you applied research ten years down the road, and industrial innovation 20 years down the road. Guess I was right.
Tyson's point was that the Bush administration's defunding of pure science was reflected in the map. Much as libertarians don't like to hear this, private research goes into low hanging fruit. Primary research is too risky, particularly since, if done right, it enters the public domain. Only a handful of companies do this (IBM and Google, take a bow--Apple and Microsoft, sit down.) Medical advances are particularly susceptible to this. The computer revolution came from NASA and the Apollo project, the internet came from DARPA funding of AT&T for the creation of resilient network (those same Bell labs are now beggars at the table of Alcatel, a French company.)
Every other country that is a major player is spending a lot on primary research, and this funding is coming from the government. It's infrastructure, it lays the road for the business of the future, and its the one area where the government excels. China is spending a fortune on this, and we've exported all of our know how to them already, When IBM farms out manufacturing to another country, they send their engineers there to teach the manufacturers exactly what to do, and many other companies do exactly the same thing. They know almost everything we know, but we don't know everything they know--not anymore.
The Greatest Generation, the people who grew up in the depression and fought the Axis, understood responsibility. They did a lot of things wrong, but they knew how to work together towards a better future, and our standard of living is the result of that. Can you imagine rubber and silk drives today? Americans couldn't even be bothered to pay higher taxes for Iraq and Afghanistan, even while they made noises about supporting the troops. It's time to grow up and carry not only our weight, but more than our weight, and pass a torch that burns brighter for our having held it. So the next time you hear the latest Fox demagogue complaining about taxes, and demanding lower taxes, imagine how his belly aching would have sounded in the 40's.
And Amen again. I worked at a high profile startup that went defect back during the dot.com days, working 60 to 100 hour weeks. I never got a penny of the back pay they owed me, and the guy who worked most of those hours with me died three years later from congestive heart failure caused by stress (he had an otherwise healthy lifestyle). So this isn't just about the quality of your life; it could mean the difference between life and death.
Bingo. When you go to a different place, you don't want to be somewhere where the sun rises at 11 PM and sets at 12 AM. You want a normal day, and the timezone tells you what the range of that day is. Timezones don't interfere with travel, they facilitate travel.
Look, can we just start ignoring libertarians? I mean, when someone is wrong once, you shrug. When they're wrong ten times, you raise an eyebrow. But when they're wrong hundreds of times, they need to be added to the twit filter. These people are the new bolsheviks, who also promised that the state would vanish under their leadership. Never trusted the communists, don't trust the libertarians. Same shit, different bucket.
Even if it doesn't devolve into barbarism, it will draw pirates like flies. And who will they turn to when the pirates occupy their little utopia and steal everything they have? After giving the finger to the rest of the world, who in the world would raise a finger to help them?
I suspect that our rather commonplace legal definition is quite workable; a person is free when they act for their own reasons, but is considered to have been determined to do something, and therefore not free and responsible, when a physical cause circumvents their reasoning. So a person with schizophrenia is not guilty by reason of insanity, because brain dysfunction in this case trumps normal cognitive processes. Likewise the case where someone is acting under duress, and situational determinants outweigh normal decision making. Physical determinism due to normal brain function is irrelevant; like any computer, the proper functioning of the mind requires orderly brain function. Randomness due to any cause does not yield freedom, only determination by random causes, so quantum effects are also irrelevant--this whole line of argument is a red herring. This is where the fallacy lies.
The distinction between reasons and causes is analogous to software and hardware. The randomness introduced by power irregularities or a defective chip does not make a computer free, it makes the computer crash. The hardware must behave in an orderly and deterministic manner for the software to function properly. We find all of this highly mysterious because our intuitive grasp of physical reality is quite limited and often wrong. We have a limited understanding of matter, less understanding of energy, and almost no intuitive grasp of information theory. We have the equations, but like Douglas Adams' 42, they don't mean a damn thing to us. When we say that materialistic explanations are reductive, it is because our own perceptions of these explanations are highly reductive. We simply don't understand them, and we think they are much simpler and limited than they actually are. As Richard Feynmann said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. The problem with Penrose and Chopra is that they think they understand quantum mechanics.
One might object that you can do what you want, but you can't want what you want, but cognitive therapy, not to mention a host of much older cognitive and emotional disciplines, actually addresses this. You can change your character--it's not easy, but it can be done.
They didn't read postmodernists, but they are taking cues from people who did--these arguments have been used by the tobacco lobby and by anti-evolutionists, and now have a broad vogue amongst New Agers and defenders of religion. They may not know the jargon, but ideologues of all persuasions find themselves at war with reality. Evidence must therefore be a conspiracy, and the more compelling the evidence, the larger the conspiracy. Postmodernism is, after all, largely a conspiracy theory--the scientific/political/economic elite have brainwashed us into believing their truth. It isn't actually possible that someone may really know more. They're just bullies, and come the revolution, there will be no truth, so everyone will have to listen to the poor downtrodden postmodernist academics, too.
And if the Ford Motor Company had taken this stance, Brave New World would have been banned, and Aldous Huxley would have been sued into penury.
This is called rent seeking behavior, and it's almost always a bad thing, because it diverts resources and effort away from making things towards owning them. It blocks off whole fields of new enterprise, and it's entirely state dependent--if the law is stuck down, or the state loses the power to enforce it, all the wealth evaporates. So, if foreign countries decide to ignore our copyright laws, we're broke. But if we're still making stuff that they want, we're still in business.
Wow, talk about being part of the problem. Many of the responses to this article, above and below, are the problem.
The internet kill switch is not there to prevent political dissent, it's a reaction to terrorist attack at that hotel in Mumbai a couple years ago, where the terrorists used cel phones and text messaging to coordinate the attacks. Pretty much every government in the world is looking into something like this. The kill switch won't work (because no one will know how they're coordinating until it's too late), but it's there for the same reason you have to take your shoes off in airports (only in America, by the way)--it gives people the illusion of safety, and that gets votes. Israeli airport security experts have already broadly mocked American security measures, but any government that dismantles them will get slaughtered at the polls, and you know it. Your problem is not the government. Your problem is that you have a democracy where people are inclined to vote for a lot of stupid things. They're afraid, because the media has discovered that you can sell a lot of shit by scaring people.
So if you want the people of America to rise up, who are they rising up against? A democratic government, duly and legally elected. So the problem is the people, or the fact that the people have the vote, which is what you will have to change in whatever utopia you have planned. Who's the fascist now? Oh, and by the way, one of the stupid things that people will vote for in times of higher crime and civil unrest is tighter control: more police, more prisons, more draconian laws. That's how the Nazis won. So, either you become the fascists, or the government that people vote for to stop you becomes fascist.
Most revolutions make things worse--the only reason that the American Revolution went so well is that it wasn't a revolution but a war of independence against a foreign power (as was the breakup of the East Bloc in 1990). The people who ran America afterward and established the rules of government were pretty much the same people who ran it before. What happened in France, Russia, China, Cambodia, and Iran are a lot more typical. Revolutions are wars between elites using the people as pawns, and the elite in opposition usually have some idiotically simple ideology, some ism, that they claim will fix everything. It never does, because the world is unbelievably complex, and pretty soon they have to look around for someone to blame for their failures; the infidels, the counter-revolutionaries, the capitalists or communists, or maybe just the Jews. Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss--or worse. We'll see how long the Egyptian democracy survives the influence of the Islamic Brotherhood. Hopefully, they're smarter than the revolutionaries of Iran, but like the Iranians, they're pretty young and naive. If you think Americans are stupid, people who've never had the opportunity to participate in politics and see how it works are completely clueless.
One of the worst things about good times is that people forget about the bad old days start to think they're living in them. They get bored and think anything new would be better, more interesting. Well, yes, war is interesting. Death is interesting. War and revolution are the very last option, and I doubt many people on Slashdot have actually tried, or even studied, many other options. Blowing shit up is easy; building it is hard. So the question for any would-be revolutionary is: are you really a brave visionary, or just fucking lazy?
This all depends on what you are doing. If you are doing a particular type of work in a particular environment, then the work experience will be just as good. But if you are expected to adapt to a radically different task very quickly, you aren't likely to learn that on the job, because the job will only teach you what is relevant to the task you are currently doing. I was told this by a number of senior consultants and engineers over the years, who had tried to hire community college grads and people without degrees for this type of work (hey, they were cheaper) and simply found that they could never do the work.
To give you an example of the kind of work I'm talking about, this is a conversation I had about fifteen years ago, which took place about 3 in the afternoon:
"We want you to go over to a client tomorrow at 8:00 and solve some problems their having with their database. Have you ever used database X?" "No." "Well, Phil has a book on it on his desk. Borrow it tonight." "What tools are they using?" "No idea." "Can I bring along my own?" "No, they don't want you to install anything on their systems. Just figure it out when you get there." "What problems are they having?" "They've got a pretty long list. They'll fill you in tomorrow morning."
So you just figure it out on the fly, while the client is watching and expecting you to know more than he does. Doing that means that you have to come into the job knowing a lot about a lot of different things, and no employer is going to pay you to take the time to learn all that, because the very kind of job that will teach you that is the kind of job that you can't do unless you know it in the first place. This is why a lot of the major firms I spoke to would not consider anyone with less that a four year computer science degree, and some were moving to making a masters degree an entry level requirement.
Later, during the dot-com years, I arrived at a startup where nearly everyone had little or no schooling, just 'experience', and saw entire projects collapse and pull the company down with them because no one working on them had even a basic grasp of simple engineering principles. Unless someone has actually been educated in this stuff, there will be no one to teach it to you one the job, and you just won't ever learn.
There were a lot of studies that have been done, starting in the mid nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, and all show forty hours a week to be about optimum for productivity. This is not the point where extra hours don't give as much payoff--this is the point where the extra hours actually result in lower productivity for the week, because errors due to fatigue more than cancel the gains.
And yet, somehow, each generation thinks that things are different for them, as if somehow human nature has changed in the last decade. And they have to learn this all over again the hard way.
I worked in a sweatshop in the games industry during the late 90's where the manager of one project insisted that 60+ hours a week was absolutely necessary. The project very nearly failed; it got to the point where the bugs were creeping in faster than they could fix them, that the core architecture was fundamentally flawed, and the lead programmer finally told them that the project could never be completed as planned.
When the project started, six of the team were married; all were divorced by the end (and some had kids.) They had adapted to the long hours so that they clocked 60+ hours but only worked 40. This meant that their work habits were so badly damaged that it was no longer possible to get a real full day's work out of them under any schedule. Finally, the whole team had to be given a month off, their hours were scaled back to 40 per week, and half of the promised features of the game had to be scrapped. They were able to salvage something of it, but it wasn't enough, and the company went bankrupt.
Even more depressing... reading that article, I realized that it is actually advertising boilerplate for the Phillips Wake Up Light--an ad that was presented as news. Who needs journalists when you can get spin directly from corporations? Tells you a lot about the quality of Fox news.
Never go to a dictionary for a philosophical definition. It's sloppy, and the definition will always be wrong. In this case, the definition seems to have been deliberately slanted (I suggest you find another dictionary.)
As just about everyone else here has mentioned, gnostic atheism is very rare. However, most atheists consider the existence of God to be a highly unlikely proposition, because of the complete lack of evidence even though billions of people have been highly motivated to seek proof. In the absence of any evidence for a belief, the only fact left to be explained is the belief itself, and there are a broad range of explanations sufficient to the task of explaining religion.
Doubting the unlikely is an example of what we call the Null Hypothesis. It is entirely possible that someone has put a cobra under my bed, poisoned the food in my refrigerator, put a bomb in my car, or is waiting outside my door with a gun. But all of these are unlikely, and I simply do not bother worrying about them. A person unable to dismiss unsubstantiated and unlikely possibilities would not be able to function (an extremely severe psychotic episode can cause this.) So what does it say about belief in God that it requires you to discard a principle that you must use hundreds or even thousands of times a day, just to keep yourself sane?
You probably don't understand the current situation in Canadian politics. The Harper government got in on 35% of the popular vote, and probably less. How? Four other parties split the left of center vote: the Liberals, the NDP, the Green Party, and the Block Quebecois. Two thirds of the country did not want and did not vote for the Conservatives, and voter apathy is at an all time high.
This story hits right to the crux of the matter. The Conservatives beat the Liberals by campaigning on the issue of--wait for it--transparency! They then immediately proceeded to shut down all avenues of public information from the government except official channels, and Conservative ministers usually refuse to talk to the press at all, sending party spin doctors instead when they can no longer avoid talking to the press. Government access is now funneled entirely through Access to Information, which can take months or years (effectively making it useless to the media), and National Security is invoked on the merest wisp of an excuse. So this story is part of a longstanding practice, not just a reasonable approach to the media.
A month ago, the Conservatives triggered a shit storm by attempting to shut down the long form census, claiming that the questions were intrusive. The question they cited was, "How many beds do you have in your house?" I will explain why this seemed significant to their base in a moment (hint: they equate beds with sex.) The Conservatives claimed they could get the data by other means. This means your bank, credit cards, air miles, browsing habits, etc--all of which have your name attached to the data, are quite expensive, and all of which come with non-disclosure agreements. But the census does not associate names with data (these get separated upon receipt), and gives statistical data on the state of the nation. In other words, it serves as a report card on government policy, and is open source. The other data is spotty, not much good for statistical analysis, not available for public view, but gives the government unprecedented access to personal information. In other words, our government wants more information about us, but doesn't want us to know anything about it.
And yes, they will know how many beds we have, and will have a pretty good idea of what we do in them.
How do they get away with it? The 35% comprises two groups: mainly social conservatives (the religious right and immigrants from third world countries), and "economic conservatives"-- the Canadian equivalent to the Tea Partiers. The former I can understand, but those alone would make the Conservatives a political backwater. The latter are a mystery. The Liberals paid down the debt for fourteen years, and Paul Martin could have steered through the current economic crisis with his eyes closed. We threw away the best economic manager we've ever had on a whim. It isn't like our federal government was out of control--Americans would have killed to have a guy like Martin. The Conservatives are now taking credit for Canada's remarkably stable banking system, yet in their first throne speech, they tried to dismantle it, pressuring the banks into allowing subprime mortgages; forty and even fifty years long. Fortunately, the financial institutions imported from the U.S. to foster this insanity were not yet too big to fail, and collapsed without much of an impact. But what if Harper had gotten power in 2000? We would have conditions that mirrored Bush's America, with huge military expenses in Iraq, a housing bubble, and failing banks. And their pet project? Twenty Billion for prisons, to build an American style prison industry/lobby. Conrad Black (hardly a bleeding heart liberal) has discovered for himself the obscenity of this proposal. No one in favour of this has any right to call himself a libertarian. And so, as under the last Conservative government, we have record deficits, a failing economy, and the largest trade deficit in our history.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, yeah, they have. They've crashed several times.
Bitcoins are guaranteed by computer, while real currency is supported by people and resources--you know, real things.
Currency is a social phenomena. Machines really don't count.
er.. bawdier... damn you Slashdot, you make me think in BANDWIDTH!
Ha ha... and before that... well, read Plato's Republic. The youth of his day were being ruined by the pan pipes, and by the baudier passages of Homer! And some of the early Greeks claimed that literacy was ruining youth because they could write things down, rather than committing things to memory.
Face it, most gamers exchange television time for game time, because gaming is more engaging. The real divide is between active and passive--between television and other activities. It turns out that kids who play video games are as likely to go out and play other games. I love video games too, so much that I was a game developer for 15 years, but on a beautiful sunny day, I have to get out and cycle, run, walk, read a book under a tree, or if there's a lake nearby, swim, paddle a canoe, or sail. If I don't exercise at least an hour a day, I feel slovenly, and I can't sleep well.
But the main divide that Zimbardo and Duncan pay no attention to is between extraverts and introverts. Introverts are viewed with suspicion by our salesman society; we're pathetic broken losers. We should be out pressing the flesh, chatting people up, engaging in team sports (notice that all of the ones I engage in are solitary.) But because we don't, there is obviously something wrong with us. And so, they go in search of the reason we are so pathological.
By the way, video games must be pathological, because they're NEW!
Porn isn't new. And many of the most successful pickup artists I've ever met had huge porn collections. Frankly, the difference I noted between guys who got laid a lot and those who didn't was that the good pickup artists were much more callous, more manipulative, and used women like sex toys. But never mind, that's a sign of maturity. Or maybe women are just as immature as men. This is nothing new, either. Feminism was supposed to address this, but so far, it hasn't made a dent.
Nor do they notice the trend that has been going on for a century: in an age of increasing specialization, the gestation period for everyone, both men and women, is getting longer. The Bar Mitzvah is at 13--at one time, this is when you became a man, and you were ready to start a family then. A hundred years ago, few went to any school beyond what we would now consider elementary school: age 13 to 15. Then we went on to high school, age 17 to 20. Then college, age 21 to 23. Bachelor's Degrees, age 22 to 25. Now advanced degrees, age 25 to 30.
Material expectations are now also much greater. You must have a car, a house, a steady job, to raise children. And the strategy of parents is different; while my parents and earlier generations had as many children as possible, hoping that some would survive, most parents now wait and bet everything on one, two, or three, expecting them all to survive.
The world has changed. But the doomsayers have not.
Because, you know, it's not like any legitimate content is shared by BitTorrent.How nice of them to block WoW updates. And it sure gets rid of those pesky linix torrents--I can certainly see why Microsoft is backing this.
Well said! Political self interest is not the same as rational self interest. I do like my life style, which I try to make as low energy as possible, but I have no wish to starve, live on gruel, or subsist on back breaking labour--all of which are likely outcomes in we do not find an alternative to oil, and if we do not address the challenges of global warming;. The anti-global warming pedants fail to understand that we are trying to preserve their lifestyle, not abolish it, and that we are asking them to make small sacrifices to that end--and that, if they don't, the sacrifices they will be required to make will break them utterly, and will be measured in the blood of their loved ones.
Cite your source. Is this just another assumption being put forth as evidence?
You can start with Wikipedia and follow on from there. The effect of prayer is basically placebo.
There is some possibility that the rhythmic nature of the sound might have long term effects on health, or that some high frequencies might effect mood and therefore health.
This, of course, is entirely conjectural, and would need some solid evidence to back it up. Without that evidence, I would be inclined to chalk it up to folk superstition, encouraged in part by the anti alternative energy noise machine, which gave us, amongst other urban myths, the notion that florescent bulbs would require hazmat teams to clean up your house if they broke, because they contained some mercury (hint: the florescent tubes we've been using in offices for 70 years now contain more mercury.)
And let's not forget sports. When are one of these clowns going to ask for a ban on high school football? College football? Never? Of course not, despite the towering mass of evidence that demonstrates that this is a major source of violence in our society. This is not about violence, this is about being a demagogue, which means pounding upon minorities for the benefit of majorities. And who gives a fuck about nerds, right? Jocks rule the world, still, so football gets a pass.
This is all bullshit.
A little humility would actually go a long way to addressing the problem. Unfortunately we have so many populist demagogues out there right now, telling people not to trust 'elites' (that is, anyone who knows more on a subject than the demagogue, which pretty much includes anyone who knows anything at all) that humility has been banished from our culture. Even amongst the educated, post-modernism teaches that all opinions have equal merit. The low-brow political bullshit seems to be a recurring feature of democracy, but the high-brow bullshit is new, and is often used to neutralize opposition to the low-brow stuff. This is what we have to get rid of.
So while there may be no such thing as Truth (with a capital T, the thing that ideologues and the clergy try to sell you) we need to bring that truth, you know, the sort of thing you need to get by everyday.
By the way, I'm obviously the best choice for leader, since I'm so intelligent that I have realized that I suck at everything, which obviously makes me the most competent person out there...
Yes, it has been warmer, and no humans were involved. Or existed. Which is the bloody point, you fool. Humans rely on a particular ecosystem that exists within a narrow range of temperature. So, if you can survive by grazing on ferns, like the herbivorous dinosaurs, then you won't have a problem. But if you rely on things like wheat, corn, vegetables, etc, and the animals that also live in this ecosystem, then you will have a major problem.
It gets worse. Species evolve in geological time, which is a lot slower than the climate is changing. So we're going to witness massive extinctions, and the replacements that we will need won't be around for thousands of years. And since genetic engineering consists of tweaking existing species, rather than producing radically new ones, the question is: how long can you go without food?
Thank you, Mr. Murdoch. We can always count on you for honest journalism. (/sarcasm)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in his talk at last years TAM, showed us a world map that illustrated the number of new scientific research papers filed by country. In 2000, the U.S. was still a leader. Then he showed the 2008 map, and the U.S. looked like a deflated balloon. My comment at the time was that primary research shows you applied research ten years down the road, and industrial innovation 20 years down the road. Guess I was right.
Tyson's point was that the Bush administration's defunding of pure science was reflected in the map. Much as libertarians don't like to hear this, private research goes into low hanging fruit. Primary research is too risky, particularly since, if done right, it enters the public domain. Only a handful of companies do this (IBM and Google, take a bow--Apple and Microsoft, sit down.) Medical advances are particularly susceptible to this. The computer revolution came from NASA and the Apollo project, the internet came from DARPA funding of AT&T for the creation of resilient network (those same Bell labs are now beggars at the table of Alcatel, a French company.)
Every other country that is a major player is spending a lot on primary research, and this funding is coming from the government. It's infrastructure, it lays the road for the business of the future, and its the one area where the government excels. China is spending a fortune on this, and we've exported all of our know how to them already, When IBM farms out manufacturing to another country, they send their engineers there to teach the manufacturers exactly what to do, and many other companies do exactly the same thing. They know almost everything we know, but we don't know everything they know--not anymore.
The Greatest Generation, the people who grew up in the depression and fought the Axis, understood responsibility. They did a lot of things wrong, but they knew how to work together towards a better future, and our standard of living is the result of that. Can you imagine rubber and silk drives today? Americans couldn't even be bothered to pay higher taxes for Iraq and Afghanistan, even while they made noises about supporting the troops. It's time to grow up and carry not only our weight, but more than our weight, and pass a torch that burns brighter for our having held it. So the next time you hear the latest Fox demagogue complaining about taxes, and demanding lower taxes, imagine how his belly aching would have sounded in the 40's.
And Amen again. I worked at a high profile startup that went defect back during the dot.com days, working 60 to 100 hour weeks. I never got a penny of the back pay they owed me, and the guy who worked most of those hours with me died three years later from congestive heart failure caused by stress (he had an otherwise healthy lifestyle). So this isn't just about the quality of your life; it could mean the difference between life and death.
Bingo. When you go to a different place, you don't want to be somewhere where the sun rises at 11 PM and sets at 12 AM. You want a normal day, and the timezone tells you what the range of that day is. Timezones don't interfere with travel, they facilitate travel.
Look, can we just start ignoring libertarians? I mean, when someone is wrong once, you shrug. When they're wrong ten times, you raise an eyebrow. But when they're wrong hundreds of times, they need to be added to the twit filter. These people are the new bolsheviks, who also promised that the state would vanish under their leadership. Never trusted the communists, don't trust the libertarians. Same shit, different bucket.
Even if it doesn't devolve into barbarism, it will draw pirates like flies. And who will they turn to when the pirates occupy their little utopia and steal everything they have? After giving the finger to the rest of the world, who in the world would raise a finger to help them?
I suspect that our rather commonplace legal definition is quite workable; a person is free when they act for their own reasons, but is considered to have been determined to do something, and therefore not free and responsible, when a physical cause circumvents their reasoning. So a person with schizophrenia is not guilty by reason of insanity, because brain dysfunction in this case trumps normal cognitive processes. Likewise the case where someone is acting under duress, and situational determinants outweigh normal decision making. Physical determinism due to normal brain function is irrelevant; like any computer, the proper functioning of the mind requires orderly brain function. Randomness due to any cause does not yield freedom, only determination by random causes, so quantum effects are also irrelevant--this whole line of argument is a red herring. This is where the fallacy lies.
The distinction between reasons and causes is analogous to software and hardware. The randomness introduced by power irregularities or a defective chip does not make a computer free, it makes the computer crash. The hardware must behave in an orderly and deterministic manner for the software to function properly. We find all of this highly mysterious because our intuitive grasp of physical reality is quite limited and often wrong. We have a limited understanding of matter, less understanding of energy, and almost no intuitive grasp of information theory. We have the equations, but like Douglas Adams' 42, they don't mean a damn thing to us. When we say that materialistic explanations are reductive, it is because our own perceptions of these explanations are highly reductive. We simply don't understand them, and we think they are much simpler and limited than they actually are. As Richard Feynmann said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. The problem with Penrose and Chopra is that they think they understand quantum mechanics.
One might object that you can do what you want, but you can't want what you want, but cognitive therapy, not to mention a host of much older cognitive and emotional disciplines, actually addresses this. You can change your character--it's not easy, but it can be done.
They didn't read postmodernists, but they are taking cues from people who did--these arguments have been used by the tobacco lobby and by anti-evolutionists, and now have a broad vogue amongst New Agers and defenders of religion. They may not know the jargon, but ideologues of all persuasions find themselves at war with reality. Evidence must therefore be a conspiracy, and the more compelling the evidence, the larger the conspiracy. Postmodernism is, after all, largely a conspiracy theory--the scientific/political/economic elite have brainwashed us into believing their truth. It isn't actually possible that someone may really know more. They're just bullies, and come the revolution, there will be no truth, so everyone will have to listen to the poor downtrodden postmodernist academics, too.
And if the Ford Motor Company had taken this stance, Brave New World would have been banned, and Aldous Huxley would have been sued into penury.
This is called rent seeking behavior, and it's almost always a bad thing, because it diverts resources and effort away from making things towards owning them. It blocks off whole fields of new enterprise, and it's entirely state dependent--if the law is stuck down, or the state loses the power to enforce it, all the wealth evaporates. So, if foreign countries decide to ignore our copyright laws, we're broke. But if we're still making stuff that they want, we're still in business.
Wow, talk about being part of the problem. Many of the responses to this article, above and below, are the problem.
The internet kill switch is not there to prevent political dissent, it's a reaction to terrorist attack at that hotel in Mumbai a couple years ago, where the terrorists used cel phones and text messaging to coordinate the attacks. Pretty much every government in the world is looking into something like this. The kill switch won't work (because no one will know how they're coordinating until it's too late), but it's there for the same reason you have to take your shoes off in airports (only in America, by the way)--it gives people the illusion of safety, and that gets votes. Israeli airport security experts have already broadly mocked American security measures, but any government that dismantles them will get slaughtered at the polls, and you know it. Your problem is not the government. Your problem is that you have a democracy where people are inclined to vote for a lot of stupid things. They're afraid, because the media has discovered that you can sell a lot of shit by scaring people.
So if you want the people of America to rise up, who are they rising up against? A democratic government, duly and legally elected. So the problem is the people, or the fact that the people have the vote, which is what you will have to change in whatever utopia you have planned. Who's the fascist now? Oh, and by the way, one of the stupid things that people will vote for in times of higher crime and civil unrest is tighter control: more police, more prisons, more draconian laws. That's how the Nazis won. So, either you become the fascists, or the government that people vote for to stop you becomes fascist.
Most revolutions make things worse--the only reason that the American Revolution went so well is that it wasn't a revolution but a war of independence against a foreign power (as was the breakup of the East Bloc in 1990). The people who ran America afterward and established the rules of government were pretty much the same people who ran it before. What happened in France, Russia, China, Cambodia, and Iran are a lot more typical. Revolutions are wars between elites using the people as pawns, and the elite in opposition usually have some idiotically simple ideology, some ism, that they claim will fix everything. It never does, because the world is unbelievably complex, and pretty soon they have to look around for someone to blame for their failures; the infidels, the counter-revolutionaries, the capitalists or communists, or maybe just the Jews. Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss--or worse. We'll see how long the Egyptian democracy survives the influence of the Islamic Brotherhood. Hopefully, they're smarter than the revolutionaries of Iran, but like the Iranians, they're pretty young and naive. If you think Americans are stupid, people who've never had the opportunity to participate in politics and see how it works are completely clueless.
One of the worst things about good times is that people forget about the bad old days start to think they're living in them. They get bored and think anything new would be better, more interesting. Well, yes, war is interesting. Death is interesting. War and revolution are the very last option, and I doubt many people on Slashdot have actually tried, or even studied, many other options. Blowing shit up is easy; building it is hard. So the question for any would-be revolutionary is: are you really a brave visionary, or just fucking lazy?
This all depends on what you are doing. If you are doing a particular type of work in a particular environment, then the work experience will be just as good. But if you are expected to adapt to a radically different task very quickly, you aren't likely to learn that on the job, because the job will only teach you what is relevant to the task you are currently doing. I was told this by a number of senior consultants and engineers over the years, who had tried to hire community college grads and people without degrees for this type of work (hey, they were cheaper) and simply found that they could never do the work.
To give you an example of the kind of work I'm talking about, this is a conversation I had about fifteen years ago, which took place about 3 in the afternoon:
"We want you to go over to a client tomorrow at 8:00 and solve some problems their having with their database. Have you ever used database X?"
"No."
"Well, Phil has a book on it on his desk. Borrow it tonight."
"What tools are they using?"
"No idea."
"Can I bring along my own?"
"No, they don't want you to install anything on their systems. Just figure it out when you get there."
"What problems are they having?"
"They've got a pretty long list. They'll fill you in tomorrow morning."
So you just figure it out on the fly, while the client is watching and expecting you to know more than he does. Doing that means that you have to come into the job knowing a lot about a lot of different things, and no employer is going to pay you to take the time to learn all that, because the very kind of job that will teach you that is the kind of job that you can't do unless you know it in the first place. This is why a lot of the major firms I spoke to would not consider anyone with less that a four year computer science degree, and some were moving to making a masters degree an entry level requirement.
Later, during the dot-com years, I arrived at a startup where nearly everyone had little or no schooling, just 'experience', and saw entire projects collapse and pull the company down with them because no one working on them had even a basic grasp of simple engineering principles. Unless someone has actually been educated in this stuff, there will be no one to teach it to you one the job, and you just won't ever learn.
There were a lot of studies that have been done, starting in the mid nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, and all show forty hours a week to be about optimum for productivity. This is not the point where extra hours don't give as much payoff--this is the point where the extra hours actually result in lower productivity for the week, because errors due to fatigue more than cancel the gains.
And yet, somehow, each generation thinks that things are different for them, as if somehow human nature has changed in the last decade. And they have to learn this all over again the hard way.
I worked in a sweatshop in the games industry during the late 90's where the manager of one project insisted that 60+ hours a week was absolutely necessary. The project very nearly failed; it got to the point where the bugs were creeping in faster than they could fix them, that the core architecture was fundamentally flawed, and the lead programmer finally told them that the project could never be completed as planned.
When the project started, six of the team were married; all were divorced by the end (and some had kids.) They had adapted to the long hours so that they clocked 60+ hours but only worked 40. This meant that their work habits were so badly damaged that it was no longer possible to get a real full day's work out of them under any schedule. Finally, the whole team had to be given a month off, their hours were scaled back to 40 per week, and half of the promised features of the game had to be scrapped. They were able to salvage something of it, but it wasn't enough, and the company went bankrupt.
Even more depressing... reading that article, I realized that it is actually advertising boilerplate for the Phillips Wake Up Light--an ad that was presented as news. Who needs journalists when you can get spin directly from corporations? Tells you a lot about the quality of Fox news.
Never go to a dictionary for a philosophical definition. It's sloppy, and the definition will always be wrong. In this case, the definition seems to have been deliberately slanted (I suggest you find another dictionary.)
As just about everyone else here has mentioned, gnostic atheism is very rare. However, most atheists consider the existence of God to be a highly unlikely proposition, because of the complete lack of evidence even though billions of people have been highly motivated to seek proof. In the absence of any evidence for a belief, the only fact left to be explained is the belief itself, and there are a broad range of explanations sufficient to the task of explaining religion.
Doubting the unlikely is an example of what we call the Null Hypothesis. It is entirely possible that someone has put a cobra under my bed, poisoned the food in my refrigerator, put a bomb in my car, or is waiting outside my door with a gun. But all of these are unlikely, and I simply do not bother worrying about them. A person unable to dismiss unsubstantiated and unlikely possibilities would not be able to function (an extremely severe psychotic episode can cause this.) So what does it say about belief in God that it requires you to discard a principle that you must use hundreds or even thousands of times a day, just to keep yourself sane?
The Conrad Black links was this.
You probably don't understand the current situation in Canadian politics. The Harper government got in on 35% of the popular vote, and probably less. How? Four other parties split the left of center vote: the Liberals, the NDP, the Green Party, and the Block Quebecois. Two thirds of the country did not want and did not vote for the Conservatives, and voter apathy is at an all time high.
This story hits right to the crux of the matter. The Conservatives beat the Liberals by campaigning on the issue of--wait for it--transparency! They then immediately proceeded to shut down all avenues of public information from the government except official channels, and Conservative ministers usually refuse to talk to the press at all, sending party spin doctors instead when they can no longer avoid talking to the press. Government access is now funneled entirely through Access to Information, which can take months or years (effectively making it useless to the media), and National Security is invoked on the merest wisp of an excuse. So this story is part of a longstanding practice, not just a reasonable approach to the media.
A month ago, the Conservatives triggered a shit storm by attempting to shut down the long form census, claiming that the questions were intrusive. The question they cited was, "How many beds do you have in your house?" I will explain why this seemed significant to their base in a moment (hint: they equate beds with sex.) The Conservatives claimed they could get the data by other means. This means your bank, credit cards, air miles, browsing habits, etc--all of which have your name attached to the data, are quite expensive, and all of which come with non-disclosure agreements. But the census does not associate names with data (these get separated upon receipt), and gives statistical data on the state of the nation. In other words, it serves as a report card on government policy, and is open source. The other data is spotty, not much good for statistical analysis, not available for public view, but gives the government unprecedented access to personal information. In other words, our government wants more information about us, but doesn't want us to know anything about it.
And yes, they will know how many beds we have, and will have a pretty good idea of what we do in them.
How do they get away with it? The 35% comprises two groups: mainly social conservatives (the religious right and immigrants from third world countries), and "economic conservatives"-- the Canadian equivalent to the Tea Partiers. The former I can understand, but those alone would make the Conservatives a political backwater. The latter are a mystery. The Liberals paid down the debt for fourteen years, and Paul Martin could have steered through the current economic crisis with his eyes closed. We threw away the best economic manager we've ever had on a whim. It isn't like our federal government was out of control--Americans would have killed to have a guy like Martin. The Conservatives are now taking credit for Canada's remarkably stable banking system, yet in their first throne speech, they tried to dismantle it, pressuring the banks into allowing subprime mortgages; forty and even fifty years long. Fortunately, the financial institutions imported from the U.S. to foster this insanity were not yet too big to fail, and collapsed without much of an impact. But what if Harper had gotten power in 2000? We would have conditions that mirrored Bush's America, with huge military expenses in Iraq, a housing bubble, and failing banks. And their pet project? Twenty Billion for prisons, to build an American style prison industry/lobby. Conrad Black (hardly a bleeding heart liberal) has discovered for himself the obscenity of this proposal. No one in favour of this has any right to call himself a libertarian. And so, as under the last Conservative government, we have record deficits, a failing economy, and the largest trade deficit in our history.
The majority of Canadians are socially liberal