A house is not the floor of the Indian Ocean. There is no real basis for comparison of the two; the lowest level of abstraction I can think of that includes both items would be the phrase "Things on the planet earth that can be changed."
My point was that the natural environment cannot damage itself, although people can damage it, and the it can damage people. The natural environment is a hugely dynamic process. Are we to call all changes damage? I don't think so. Check out the Atlantic ridge - it is constantly undergoing volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Are those damages? I don't think so; I think those are the processes that make the ridge what it is.
Anyway - damage to people's things and damage to naturally occurring things aren't comparable, IMNSHO. You are free to disagree. Have a nice day.
Yes, I could agree that the earthquake impacted the ocean floor. It could even be called an agent of change. In this situation, I suppose you could go so far as to call seismologists change management experts.
Sorry. You had me until your last sentence. "Damage to the floor of the Indian Ocean" is a COMPLETELY different concept from "damage to human beings." I would argue that earthquakes CAN NOT cause the former, but they DO cause the latter quite frequently.
"Damage" includes in its connotation the notion that it is a bad thing. If a woodpecker pokes a hole in your house, is it damage? Absolutely. If you poke a hole in a tree, is it damage? Sure. If a woodpecker pokes a hole in the tree, is it damage? NOW you've got an interesting question. See, woodpeckers have been doing that for millions of years, and trees still seem to be around.
Maybe the choice of words wasn't the most scientific And maybe I shouldn't knock ignorance of words' denotations and connotations here on slashdot, where thinking is optional and grammar is rare.
Is this a reason to start jumping up and down and calling people ignorant? Dude. I'm typing. Do you really think that a sentence is going to persuade me to engage in physical activity? Think again. On the other hand, the display of ignorance is the perfect reason to call people ignorant. What better time is there?
Bravo, sir! You have amused me, as well as intelligently disagreeing with me. Truly is it said, "If I can't have a good friend, at least let me have a worthy opponent."
Now, to refute your refutation.
The car is a human artifact. It exists solely because human beings created it. It has a purpose to its existence. When any circumstance makes it less fit for its purpose, we call the result "damage." I don't think you can disagree that this is the generally accepted view of things.
On the other hand, if I take my dented car to an auto-body shop, an old-school one where they still fix things instead of ordering replacement panels, I will find that they dent the car further, and drill holes in it, and scrape it with abrasives. Are these damage? I would suggest not, since these, in the end, make the car more fit for its intended purpose.
(I think I have here the beginnings of a Theory of Intelligent Design for cars.)
"Damage to an ecosystem" must not be semantically entwined with "changes to the ecosystem." Human ecological catastrophes must not be confused with natural ecological changes. Otherwise you will get anti-environmentalists excusing human damage to ecosystems as one more example of nature red in claw and fang, humans as the ultimate predator and shaper of their environments. Beaver dams changing the course of a stream? Normal. Humans building a hydroelectric dam that floods hundreds of square miles? Hey, why not? Beavers do it, right?
Anyway - that's my point (one of them, at least). Start calling natural events damaging...and you've handed the anti-environmentalists a get-out-of-jail-free card. "Sure, we've eradicated 43 species this year - but giant meteors from space have historically done 1,000 times more damage! So it's OK!"
Your first logical error occurs in the first word of your third sentenct. "The floor of the Indian Ocean" is not "Animals, habitats, and plants."
I won't disagree that changes to the environment can be harmful to species living in the environment. That would be silly. I WILL disagree that natural geological processes acting on the geological environment damage the geological environment, any more than spitting damages your mouth, or sniffling damages your nose.
Damaged, changed, modified, whatever it all means the same thing Permit me to respectfully disagree. I'll grant that "changed" and "modified" are synonyms, and I'll grant that "damage" entails change. But unless you are using your own private dictionary, "change" does not imply "damage." When you comb your hair, you change it, but you don't damage it. When you add gasoline to your car, you change it, but you don't damage it. When you reboot your computer, you change it, but you don't damage it.
Anyway, my original point stands - not denying that geological changes affect living things, but denying that geological changes damage geological structures. "Damage" is the wrong word to use in that context.
every thing that happens in the universe is due to nature Nope. The word "nature" generally connotes processes that are not attributable to humanity. When I dump 50,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid into a river, it's not natural - unless you are an extreme right-wing "what's good for business is good for America" capitalist nut job.
Why don't you use your self-proclaimed knowledge for something useful, like understanding that words can mean multiple things and not everything people write about is a semantic argument? I'm rubber, you're glue...have a nice day.
BZZZT! Wrong answer. It is ALTERED, but not DAMAGED. "Damage" implies some sort of breakage, or loss of function, or abnormal behavior. Plate tectonics are none of that.
When an iceberg calves, the glacier is not damaged. If the glacier melts, the glacier isn't damaged. Gone, yes, but not damaged. When an avalanch occurs, the snowfield is not damaged. When it rains, the clouds are not damaged. When a river floods and changes course, its floodplain is not damaged. All of these are nature's normal behavior. On a geological timescale, these things are happening constantly. They are not damaging to the earth, nor to any part of the earth. The earth rejuvenates itself and will continue to do so as long as the sun shines and radioactive decay heats the earth's interior.
Again, my point is not to equate NATURAL CHANGE with DAMAGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT.
BZZZT! The surface of the earth cannot be damaged. Changed, yes, but not damaged. Unless you're suggesting that we need to get back to Pangaea somehow.
Look, there are natural tectonic processes that have been going on for as long as the earth existed. Volcanoes and earthquakes are CONSTANTLY reshaping the surface of the earth. THIS IS NOT DAMAGE. This is normal behavior for the ecosystem.
Next we'll be hearing that the predator/prey relationship needs to be banned because it damages animal populations, or that animals need to poop more because the coprophilic bacterial populations are abnormally low.
You make sense until I consider a human infant. Were I to follow your line of reasoning, they should be discoraged from rolling over, sitting up, or crawling, because these aren't remotely the same as walking. Not that I want to identify with the late Mr. Agnew, but you strike me as the sort of nattering nabob of negativism that he once railed against.
Permit me to pick a few nits:
Not from any direct descendant of SS1 Nor from any direct descendant of the steam locomotive, but without machine tool expertise gained in commercial production of steam locomotives, there'd be no space flight. Nor from any direct descendant of Chinese fireworks rockets. Nor from any direct descendant of the German V2. You get my point, I hope...the most important thing to be gained in these experiments is expertise and experience that can be applied to other, larger projects.
a company like scaled couldn't dream of making on their own NASA in the 1950s couldn't make ANYTHING on their own. It's a good thing they were aware of the capabilities of contractors. I'll bet you that Rutan couldn't build the chip fab necessary for producing avionics components. Somehow, I don't think that was an impediment.
those windows are nice for suborbital PRECISELY. Keep reading...
they'd be serious weak points on *real* space travel But serious strong points when it comes to selling suborbital space tourism. Not much point in a tourist flight when the tourists can't see out. I thinkIt's fairly common when an entrepeneur plans an ambitious commercial venture to do so in stages, letting the initial stages fund the later stages. Rutan's business plan involves building suborbital space tourism and letting that fund the R&D for orbital space tourism (there may be other interim steps).
Besides, building windows into a wall is harder than building a wall without windows.
You have to handle *everything* needed to keep people alive for long periods See previous point about space tourism. "Long" s a pretty generic term. I think for a 2-3 hour orbital flight, you could tell your passengers not to drink for a few hours before the flight, and to use the toilet before they left.
Orbital and suborbital spaceflight aren't even remotely the same sort of beast. I hope you get my point: it doesn't matter. If we translate your essay back into the 1960s, it'd be going on about how the Mercury capsules were ENTIRELY unsuitable for moon landings.
Well, smack my head and call me an idiot. I'd been under the impression that the Europeans were wholly responsible for this mission. Thanks to your comment, and a bit of googling, I now have a lot less respect for the European scientific community.
Sure, they built a dandy little lander, but frankly, how hard is it to design a vehicle that has to detach, decelerate, and deploy a parachute? NASA seems to have literally done the heavy lifting here. The Huygens probe was fairly small, compared to Cassini. NASA launched the craft, got it to Saturn, and relayed back (most of) the information.
As ineffective as NASA seems to be these days, they're doing FAR more than any other space agency in the world could realistically dream of doing. Kudos to the ESA, but without NASA, they'd have a prohibitively expensive pie plate on their hands.
the resolution of the radio telescopes was good enough to track Huygen's position to within one kilometer
...the position tracking might not have been done if the world weren't so fired up about processing the data received by the radio telescopes. Sure, there might have been some grad student somewhere who would have analyzed the data sometime in the next couple of years and published the same results, but by then we would have OOH! SHINY!
Suppose the US has 5% of the world's population and:
25% of the literate population 33% of the well-fed population 12% of the Nobel prize population
Given your reasoning, we should do our best to reduce literacy, food availability, and education. Rather than demanding that the US become poor so that the poor don't feel deprived, don't you think it would be better to make everyone rich? This is not as ridiculous as you might think. The overwhelming majority of people in the US live better than any ancient or medieval king did; the only thing we lack, compared to such monarchs, is absolute personal power over large numbers of people and large swaths of land. We eat better food, we see better spectacles, we live in warmer homes. The US has made its citizens rich. Why not do that for the world?
The other problem with the argument is that 99% of expenditures in the US are for luxuries. Your food purchases are luxuries unless you buy only unprocessed vegetables and grains. Your housing costs are luxuries unless you live in a one-room shack heated by wood (with a pit outside for a toilet). Your transportation costs are luxuries unless you travel only to earn or spend money for food and housing, and you travel only on public transportation. And so forth.
You got that right! NOT ONE of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence went on to serve in the newly formed Federal government. NOT ONE governed one of the 13 states after the revolution. NOT ONE of them was permitted to survive until the Constitutional Convention. All of them were either shot in the Boston Massacre or drowned in the Boston Tea Party.
(Yes, I realize that you were being funny, but a couple of the moderators didn't.)
Which part makes you laugh? The bit where his fortune drops from $41E6 to $36E6? Or the bit where, within a year, it drops to $4E6? (Check the stock prices for 2000 - symbol LNUX on NASDQ)Doubtless your scorn made him cry all the way to the bank.
Now, if you can point me to a posting that says "Yeah, I held onto it until the share price dropped from $450 to $1" then I'll laugh with you.
I know, if no machine was ever vulnerable, it could never happen.
Which is a bit like saying that breaking and entering is the homeowner's fault for using windows. No windows means no part of the wall is easily breakable, so no one can get in.
Do you mean when IBM first designed it, or how it is actually used now?
I mean how it's marketed to business types. Sure, it's poorly suited for developers...but business types can use it. I have watched query and "business intelligence" tools come and go for almost 10 years, and SQL keeps on chugging.
a better relational language Presumably by "better" you mean something like more powerful or more useful. Naturally this translates into something a comp sci major can grok but that makes an MBA's head explode. As far as they are concerned, SQL already IS good enough.
The name "FORTRAN" came from "FORmula TRANslator." It was created so that engineers and scientists could write programs to perform calculations. They wouldn't need a degree in programming, and they wouldn't be reliant on programming staff. They would be able to independently take advantage of a company's (or university's) computing resources. It wasn't DESIGNED to be a pretty language; it was designed to be used by people who would have stared blankly at you if you'd mentioned the concept of a pretty language. It served its purpose well.
It reminds me of SQL in that respect. I have worked with managers who knew less about computers than their secretaries, but they were able to use SQL to write queries to get information that they wanted. SQL was written for that purpose. It ain't pretty, but it serves its target market.
I doubt that designers of armored cars and dump trucks worry about the slings and arrows of the Ferrari's designers; I think this rant is pretty much in the same vein as that. Beauty and utility are not synonymous.
No, losing credibility isn't the worst thing he did. Announcing that 100,000 had dies was the BEST thing that could have happened to the RNC. After his ridiculously inflated number had been paraded around, the White House released the real number (15,000 I think?) and the nation breathed a sigh of relief that so few had died.
It had about the same effect as the CBS faked memo - it completely destroyed the public's ability to care about a valid issue.
By the time you are old enough to want to make a list of things to tell young people they need to do to be happy, you are too old to relate to any young person in a meaningful or influential way.
You are completely, utterly, absolutely, and in every other way, wrong. I can obliterate your argument with one word: parenthood.
I'll grant that many parents fail at their task, and do not relate to their children "in a meaningful or influential way." That, however, is one of the two tasks that parents have. The first, of course, is to care for the physical needs of their children - feed them, clothe them, house them, teach them to use a toilet, etc. The other task, though, is to understand their children. (There is no excuse for failing to do so, just as ther is no excuse for failing to feed children.) With that understanding comes the ability to determine how and when to influence the children.
Again, I will grant that many (perhaps even most) parents have failed at their task. If the parents (who have the opportunity to love and understand their child more than any other human being does) can't influence their children positively, then there is absolutely NO guarantee that anyone else will be able to. Sure, many of us were fortunate in that we were willing to receive good guidance from other people, but, as Graham points out, the world is largely indifferent to children whose needs aren't met by their parents, and any influence that comes to such children is random (and, as he points out, mostly bad.)
I think the biggest cause of regret in young people is mixed messages being sent from all directions from know-it-all nannys. Parents shouldn't permit mixed messages. Begin planning NOW how you will help your children understand that you have the answers, and that if you don't, you can help them find them.
I wouldn't say useless. I'll be using those pictures to pique children's interest in science. While news of the Titan landing is still fresh in their minds, I can show them WHY it's such a big deal. Wait six months for decent processing from the scientists and it will be a bit more ho-hum, rather like showing kids the Viking lander photos. Six months, 26 years - it's all the same to them.
Slashdot Mirror
A house is not the floor of the Indian Ocean. There is no real basis for comparison of the two; the lowest level of abstraction I can think of that includes both items would be the phrase "Things on the planet earth that can be changed."
My point was that the natural environment cannot damage itself, although people can damage it, and the it can damage people. The natural environment is a hugely dynamic process. Are we to call all changes damage? I don't think so. Check out the Atlantic ridge - it is constantly undergoing volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Are those damages? I don't think so; I think those are the processes that make the ridge what it is.
Anyway - damage to people's things and damage to naturally occurring things aren't comparable, IMNSHO. You are free to disagree. Have a nice day.
Yes, I could agree that the earthquake impacted the ocean floor. It could even be called an agent of change. In this situation, I suppose you could go so far as to call seismologists change management experts.
DINGDINGDING!
Hey, I've won Buzzword Bingo!
Sorry. You had me until your last sentence. "Damage to the floor of the Indian Ocean" is a COMPLETELY different concept from "damage to human beings." I would argue that earthquakes CAN NOT cause the former, but they DO cause the latter quite frequently.
"Damage" includes in its connotation the notion that it is a bad thing. If a woodpecker pokes a hole in your house, is it damage? Absolutely. If you poke a hole in a tree, is it damage? Sure. If a woodpecker pokes a hole in the tree, is it damage? NOW you've got an interesting question. See, woodpeckers have been doing that for millions of years, and trees still seem to be around.
Maybe the choice of words wasn't the most scientific
And maybe I shouldn't knock ignorance of words' denotations and connotations here on slashdot, where thinking is optional and grammar is rare.
Is this a reason to start jumping up and down and calling people ignorant?
Dude. I'm typing. Do you really think that a sentence is going to persuade me to engage in physical activity? Think again. On the other hand, the display of ignorance is the perfect reason to call people ignorant. What better time is there?
Bravo, sir! You have amused me, as well as intelligently disagreeing with me. Truly is it said, "If I can't have a good friend, at least let me have a worthy opponent."
Now, to refute your refutation.
The car is a human artifact. It exists solely because human beings created it. It has a purpose to its existence. When any circumstance makes it less fit for its purpose, we call the result "damage." I don't think you can disagree that this is the generally accepted view of things.
On the other hand, if I take my dented car to an auto-body shop, an old-school one where they still fix things instead of ordering replacement panels, I will find that they dent the car further, and drill holes in it, and scrape it with abrasives. Are these damage? I would suggest not, since these, in the end, make the car more fit for its intended purpose.
(I think I have here the beginnings of a Theory of Intelligent Design for cars.)
"Damage to an ecosystem" must not be semantically entwined with "changes to the ecosystem." Human ecological catastrophes must not be confused with natural ecological changes. Otherwise you will get anti-environmentalists excusing human damage to ecosystems as one more example of nature red in claw and fang, humans as the ultimate predator and shaper of their environments. Beaver dams changing the course of a stream? Normal. Humans building a hydroelectric dam that floods hundreds of square miles? Hey, why not? Beavers do it, right?
Anyway - that's my point (one of them, at least). Start calling natural events damaging...and you've handed the anti-environmentalists a get-out-of-jail-free card. "Sure, we've eradicated 43 species this year - but giant meteors from space have historically done 1,000 times more damage! So it's OK!"
Your first logical error occurs in the first word of your third sentenct. "The floor of the Indian Ocean" is not "Animals, habitats, and plants."
I won't disagree that changes to the environment can be harmful to species living in the environment. That would be silly. I WILL disagree that natural geological processes acting on the geological environment damage the geological environment, any more than spitting damages your mouth, or sniffling damages your nose.
Damaged, changed, modified, whatever it all means the same thing
Permit me to respectfully disagree. I'll grant that "changed" and "modified" are synonyms, and I'll grant that "damage" entails change. But unless you are using your own private dictionary, "change" does not imply "damage." When you comb your hair, you change it, but you don't damage it. When you add gasoline to your car, you change it, but you don't damage it. When you reboot your computer, you change it, but you don't damage it.
Anyway, my original point stands - not denying that geological changes affect living things, but denying that geological changes damage geological structures. "Damage" is the wrong word to use in that context.
every thing that happens in the universe is due to nature
Nope. The word "nature" generally connotes processes that are not attributable to humanity. When I dump 50,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid into a river, it's not natural - unless you are an extreme right-wing "what's good for business is good for America" capitalist nut job.
Why don't you use your self-proclaimed knowledge for something useful, like understanding that words can mean multiple things and not everything people write about is a semantic argument?
I'm rubber, you're glue...have a nice day.
BZZZT! Wrong answer. It is ALTERED, but not DAMAGED. "Damage" implies some sort of breakage, or loss of function, or abnormal behavior. Plate tectonics are none of that.
When an iceberg calves, the glacier is not damaged. If the glacier melts, the glacier isn't damaged. Gone, yes, but not damaged. When an avalanch occurs, the snowfield is not damaged. When it rains, the clouds are not damaged. When a river floods and changes course, its floodplain is not damaged. All of these are nature's normal behavior. On a geological timescale, these things are happening constantly. They are not damaging to the earth, nor to any part of the earth. The earth rejuvenates itself and will continue to do so as long as the sun shines and radioactive decay heats the earth's interior.
Again, my point is not to equate NATURAL CHANGE with DAMAGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT.
damage to the floor of the Indian Ocean
BZZZT! The surface of the earth cannot be damaged. Changed, yes, but not damaged. Unless you're suggesting that we need to get back to Pangaea somehow.
Look, there are natural tectonic processes that have been going on for as long as the earth existed. Volcanoes and earthquakes are CONSTANTLY reshaping the surface of the earth. THIS IS NOT DAMAGE. This is normal behavior for the ecosystem.
Next we'll be hearing that the predator/prey relationship needs to be banned because it damages animal populations, or that animals need to poop more because the coprophilic bacterial populations are abnormally low.
You make sense until I consider a human infant. Were I to follow your line of reasoning, they should be discoraged from rolling over, sitting up, or crawling, because these aren't remotely the same as walking. Not that I want to identify with the late Mr. Agnew, but you strike me as the sort of nattering nabob of negativism that he once railed against.
Permit me to pick a few nits:
Not from any direct descendant of SS1
Nor from any direct descendant of the steam locomotive, but without machine tool expertise gained in commercial production of steam locomotives, there'd be no space flight. Nor from any direct descendant of Chinese fireworks rockets. Nor from any direct descendant of the German V2. You get my point, I hope...the most important thing to be gained in these experiments is expertise and experience that can be applied to other, larger projects.
a company like scaled couldn't dream of making on their own
NASA in the 1950s couldn't make ANYTHING on their own. It's a good thing they were aware of the capabilities of contractors. I'll bet you that Rutan couldn't build the chip fab necessary for producing avionics components. Somehow, I don't think that was an impediment.
those windows are nice for suborbital
PRECISELY. Keep reading...
they'd be serious weak points on *real* space travel
But serious strong points when it comes to selling suborbital space tourism. Not much point in a tourist flight when the tourists can't see out. I thinkIt's fairly common when an entrepeneur plans an ambitious commercial venture to do so in stages, letting the initial stages fund the later stages. Rutan's business plan involves building suborbital space tourism and letting that fund the R&D for orbital space tourism (there may be other interim steps).
Besides, building windows into a wall is harder than building a wall without windows.
You have to handle *everything* needed to keep people alive for long periods
See previous point about space tourism. "Long" s a pretty generic term. I think for a 2-3 hour orbital flight, you could tell your passengers not to drink for a few hours before the flight, and to use the toilet before they left.
Orbital and suborbital spaceflight aren't even remotely the same sort of beast.
I hope you get my point: it doesn't matter. If we translate your essay back into the 1960s, it'd be going on about how the Mercury capsules were ENTIRELY unsuitable for moon landings.
Well, smack my head and call me an idiot. I'd been under the impression that the Europeans were wholly responsible for this mission. Thanks to your comment, and a bit of googling, I now have a lot less respect for the European scientific community.
Sure, they built a dandy little lander, but frankly, how hard is it to design a vehicle that has to detach, decelerate, and deploy a parachute? NASA seems to have literally done the heavy lifting here. The Huygens probe was fairly small, compared to Cassini. NASA launched the craft, got it to Saturn, and relayed back (most of) the information.
As ineffective as NASA seems to be these days, they're doing FAR more than any other space agency in the world could realistically dream of doing. Kudos to the ESA, but without NASA, they'd have a prohibitively expensive pie plate on their hands.
the resolution of the radio telescopes was good enough to track Huygen's position to within one kilometer
...the position tracking might not have been done if the world weren't so fired up about processing the data received by the radio telescopes. Sure, there might have been some grad student somewhere who would have analyzed the data sometime in the next couple of years and published the same results, but by then we would have OOH! SHINY!
Suppose the US has 5% of the world's population and:
25% of the literate population
33% of the well-fed population
12% of the Nobel prize population
Given your reasoning, we should do our best to reduce literacy, food availability, and education. Rather than demanding that the US become poor so that the poor don't feel deprived, don't you think it would be better to make everyone rich? This is not as ridiculous as you might think. The overwhelming majority of people in the US live better than any ancient or medieval king did; the only thing we lack, compared to such monarchs, is absolute personal power over large numbers of people and large swaths of land. We eat better food, we see better spectacles, we live in warmer homes. The US has made its citizens rich. Why not do that for the world?
The US doesn't.
This suggests a deep cultural divide between developed countries and the US. I suggest a new category: self-actualized countries.
Thank you for demonstrating your complete lack of understanding of thermodynamics, time, and radioactive decay products.
The other problem with the argument is that 99% of expenditures in the US are for luxuries. Your food purchases are luxuries unless you buy only unprocessed vegetables and grains. Your housing costs are luxuries unless you live in a one-room shack heated by wood (with a pit outside for a toilet). Your transportation costs are luxuries unless you travel only to earn or spend money for food and housing, and you travel only on public transportation. And so forth.
"proprietary Gnu license"
Well-played, sir, well-played. I admire the constructor of a good troll, and it's so rare to actually see one these days.
You got that right! NOT ONE of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence went on to serve in the newly formed Federal government. NOT ONE governed one of the 13 states after the revolution. NOT ONE of them was permitted to survive until the Constitutional Convention. All of them were either shot in the Boston Massacre or drowned in the Boston Tea Party.
(Yes, I realize that you were being funny, but a couple of the moderators didn't.)
It doesn't require fomenting armed revolution
Which, by the way, is something that ESR does. That's what libertarian gun ownership is all about - if you don't like the government, you shoot at it.
Which part makes you laugh? The bit where his fortune drops from $41E6 to $36E6? Or the bit where, within a year, it drops to $4E6? (Check the stock prices for 2000 - symbol LNUX on NASDQ)Doubtless your scorn made him cry all the way to the bank.
Now, if you can point me to a posting that says "Yeah, I held onto it until the share price dropped from $450 to $1" then I'll laugh with you.
I know, if no machine was ever vulnerable, it could never happen.
Which is a bit like saying that breaking and entering is the homeowner's fault for using windows. No windows means no part of the wall is easily breakable, so no one can get in.
Do you mean when IBM first designed it, or how it is actually used now?
I mean how it's marketed to business types. Sure, it's poorly suited for developers...but business types can use it. I have watched query and "business intelligence" tools come and go for almost 10 years, and SQL keeps on chugging.
a better relational language
Presumably by "better" you mean something like more powerful or more useful. Naturally this translates into something a comp sci major can grok but that makes an MBA's head explode. As far as they are concerned, SQL already IS good enough.
The name "FORTRAN" came from "FORmula TRANslator." It was created so that engineers and scientists could write programs to perform calculations. They wouldn't need a degree in programming, and they wouldn't be reliant on programming staff. They would be able to independently take advantage of a company's (or university's) computing resources. It wasn't DESIGNED to be a pretty language; it was designed to be used by people who would have stared blankly at you if you'd mentioned the concept of a pretty language. It served its purpose well.
It reminds me of SQL in that respect. I have worked with managers who knew less about computers than their secretaries, but they were able to use SQL to write queries to get information that they wanted. SQL was written for that purpose. It ain't pretty, but it serves its target market.
I doubt that designers of armored cars and dump trucks worry about the slings and arrows of the Ferrari's designers; I think this rant is pretty much in the same vein as that. Beauty and utility are not synonymous.
That that is is that that is not is not
One better...
that that is is that that is not is not is that it it is
And my favorite...
john while mary had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher
No, losing credibility isn't the worst thing he did. Announcing that 100,000 had dies was the BEST thing that could have happened to the RNC. After his ridiculously inflated number had been paraded around, the White House released the real number (15,000 I think?) and the nation breathed a sigh of relief that so few had died.
It had about the same effect as the CBS faked memo - it completely destroyed the public's ability to care about a valid issue.
By the time you are old enough to want to make a list of things to tell young people they need to do to be happy, you are too old to relate to any young person in a meaningful or influential way.
You are completely, utterly, absolutely, and in every other way, wrong. I can obliterate your argument with one word: parenthood.
I'll grant that many parents fail at their task, and do not relate to their children "in a meaningful or influential way." That, however, is one of the two tasks that parents have. The first, of course, is to care for the physical needs of their children - feed them, clothe them, house them, teach them to use a toilet, etc. The other task, though, is to understand their children. (There is no excuse for failing to do so, just as ther is no excuse for failing to feed children.) With that understanding comes the ability to determine how and when to influence the children.
Again, I will grant that many (perhaps even most) parents have failed at their task. If the parents (who have the opportunity to love and understand their child more than any other human being does) can't influence their children positively, then there is absolutely NO guarantee that anyone else will be able to. Sure, many of us were fortunate in that we were willing to receive good guidance from other people, but, as Graham points out, the world is largely indifferent to children whose needs aren't met by their parents, and any influence that comes to such children is random (and, as he points out, mostly bad.)
I think the biggest cause of regret in young people is mixed messages being sent from all directions from know-it-all nannys.
Parents shouldn't permit mixed messages. Begin planning NOW how you will help your children understand that you have the answers, and that if you don't, you can help them find them.
I wouldn't say useless. I'll be using those pictures to pique children's interest in science. While news of the Titan landing is still fresh in their minds, I can show them WHY it's such a big deal. Wait six months for decent processing from the scientists and it will be a bit more ho-hum, rather like showing kids the Viking lander photos. Six months, 26 years - it's all the same to them.