We can dance if we want to We can leave M$ behind 'Cause M$ don't dance And if they don't dance well they're No friends of mine
We can run what (OS) we want to It's our gain and it's their loss And you can run OS2, or Linux or Mac BSD or DR-DOS
Why non-techies say that
on
NetSlaves
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· Score: 2
...almost immediately they say: "Oh wow, that must be a great job! Working with technology, and such."
Maybe they're just trying to be polite.
Maybe they really do envy you.
Think about it. You're stressed, your bosses expect the impossible, and the deadline was yesterday. Their job is just the same! Only they probably don't have a valuable skill like yours. They don't get to feel superior to their incompetent bosses, or to the morons who call with questions or complaints.
People think it'd be great if only they could get a high-tech job like yours? Pity them. Think how dreadful their job must be.
Many times they "outsource" the network duties to contracting firms so that they do not have to hire and pay their own employees to do the work. This saves the megacorp lots of money.
It can, but there are other reasons why this happens - it's not as callous and cruel as it sounds.
Consider: contract employees don't get much in the way of benefits (not from the widget company anyway - the contracting firms sometimes have good bennies, as it helps them keep qualified people) but they often cost more, on an hourly basis, than WidgeTron's own employees. 'Cause the contracting firm has to take their cut, and still pay the "netslave" enough that s/he will stay on. It's a tradeoff. And for many companies, what swings the balance is that they want (to borrow a Dilbertism) to "concentrate on their core business". For a widget manufacturer that means manufacturing widgets, not being a cutting-edge IT firm. But they need cutting-edge IT people, so they contract for them from a company whose core business is cutting-edge IT.
Note the Judge only said Microsoft has a monopoly in the Intel-compatible operating system space.
That's a pretty big space. Big enough for a monopoly. If I may borrow somebody else's analogy, that's like saying Major League Baseball only has a monopoly in the baseball-compatible sports space. There are other sports available - therefore MLB doesn't have a monopoly? I don't think so.
Since it's been clear from the beginning that he's out to get Microsoft, this is hardly surprising.
It has not been clear from the beginning that the judge has been out to get Microsoft. If he had been, this finding of fact would not have been so long in coming.
It [freon] will work as well as most other inhalants. It will indeed get you high.
Only if most other inhalants work by merely causing oxygen deprivation (which is possible, given that oxygen deprivation can make one pleasantly - or unpleasantly - lightheaded). It's been a long time since I took any classes about it, but as I recall, freon is mucho unreactive. It even requires UV to make it react with something very reactive - like ozone in the upper atmosphere. Of course once it does the reaction continues unchecked (a radical chain reaction IIRC). But in any case I have my doubts that freon would react - at the mild temperatures and pressures of a human body - to produce anything toxic or psychoactive. But it would work as well as any other inert substance to keep adequate oxygen from being absorbed into the blood.
This is not to say that it's safe to inhale freon. Oxygen deprivation can kill.
The teacher gave Beamon a score of 100 on the writing assignment, on which she also wrote "outstanding."
Then, perhaps remembering the ongoing post-Columbine assault... [snip largely-irrelevant bit about who the assault is directed at, as that shouldn't matter. It's wrong, regardless of who it's targeting] she thought better of the grade and his story, and turned Beamon in to the principal.
Here's where this really gets sinister. Turning him in to the principal was the entirely wrong thing to do. Turning him in to (or just asking him to visit with) a school guidance counselor would be far more beneficial.
It's the counselor's business to determine who in the school is sufficiently disturbed to really do something destructive to themselves, others, or school property, and who is just being normal (or even harmlessly abnormal) for an adolescent. At least that's what counselors did when I was a student, lo these many years ago.
The counselor, who should be more qualified than the principal in these matters, can then determine whether the police need to get involved.
Calling in the police in this case was even more wrong-headed than calling in the principal. This kid wrote a paper ferchissakes. He didn't detonate a bomb, come to school drunk or high, or assault other students. Those are the kinds of things that principals and police need to put a stop to - not creative writing, however violent or poorly spelled it is.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for pedophiles" crowd buy their votes on censorship.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for drug dealers and terrorists" crowd buy their votes on crypto.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a great way to track all customers and send them offers which will interest them" crowd buy their votes on privacy.
All those things happen - and will continue to happen - whether "we" ignore it or not.
Buy their votes ourselves.
That's only an option because a lot of "us" have money now. "They" used to do Bad Things (buying the favors of politicians is, IMHO, a Bad Thing) that "we" were unable to do. Now some of "us" are in a position to do those same Bad Things. That doesn't make it right.
Politicans are for sale. Deal with it.
Oh I do deal with it. But I don't have to like it, and I don't have to believe it's a Good Thing. It's not. It wasn't when The Opposition was buying all the votes, and it won't be when you and I are buying them. A Good Thing would be if politicians voted their conscience without regard for who was lining their pockets this week.
Surely it's better that it be our dollars doing the buying than those of our opponents.
Natural selection works best when there's a competition for resources (food, shelter, breeding parters, etc).
No it doesn't. It works all the time, equally well. It tends to work fastest when there's severe shortages of resources (or when there's severe crises like hurricanes, comets striking the Earth, etc.), but fastest isn't necessarily best. K-selected species (look it up) like humans are most viable when conditions are stable. If another mass extinction occurs, humans will be ant food.
People who are poorly educated, stay at home, and breed like rabbits have certain advantages over the ones too busy fighting in the modern day economic survival wars to produce progeny in this environment.
That may be true, or it may not. And keep in mind that correlation does not imply causality. Even if there is a causal relationship, it might be reversed. Maybe poor education doesn't cause people to "breed like rabbits" (a notoriously r-selected species), so much as quality education causes people to "breed like pandas". Spending lots of time and money on schooling and "getting ahead" might well result in less time and money left for dating, marriage, and procreation.
If there are "certain advantages" to humans who breed like rabbits, there are even more disadvantages. Look around you - most of the economically successful educated folk do manage to procreate. They have one or two kids instead of five or six. And they take better care of them, send them to quality schools, live in less dangerous places... Their children, though there are fewer of them, are more successful. It's a good bet that they'll have more great great grandchildren than their impoverished neighbors. Long-term survival is the key.
Weeding out people based on our _current_ criteria would probably end up hurting us in the long run. When the environment changes, we're going to need as many variants of human as can be mustered to ensure our succesful survival as a species.
Humans should eat high protien[sic] high fat and unrefined foods...
Except for the 'unrefined" part, that's what Americans - and much of the rest of the Western world - eats. To their detriment. Protein and fat are certainly necessary, and they taste good to us precisely because we need them in our diet, but humans have outsmarted nature, and many of them now eat far too much of those tasty foods. The cravings nature gave us to ensure that we eat enough of them have resulted in obesity, arteries clogged with fat deposits, and overall poor health. Sure it's possible to become obese as a result of overconsumption of carbohydrates too, but overconsumption of any food will do that. Carbs are not the villain - overconsumption is. And it's often overconsumption of fats and proteins.
Americans should demand that the soil where their crops are grown be replenished.
Yes they should. But this has little or nothing to do with AIDS, HIV, or even nutrition.
The common cold is caused by the same thing that causes AIDS...
That's true in part, only because they're both caused by viruses. But they're very different viruses. HIV is a retrovirus, while the common cold can result from a number of different viruses, including but not limited to picornaviruses.
Our pancreas has three functions, one of which everybody knows insulin production.
I usually dismiss out of hand any post that claims "everybody knows" something. Trust me - they don't. But that's beside the point.
Most people don't know about it's[sic] most important role, and that's the production of T-cells "Tropoblast" cells fight all infection cancer and AIDS included. If your pancreas is too busy cranking out insulin your T-cell count drops, not good.
AIDS causes T-cells to self-destruct. I wouldn't matter if the body is producing them fast and furious, it won't help if they all self-destruct before they can do any good.
Cancer does not typically produce an immune response, as the cancerous cells are the body's own cells, multiplying out of control. So here again, having lots of T-cells wouldn't help.
What did Andy Warhol say? "I'll buy a huge piece of meat, cook it up for dinner, and then right before it's done, I'll break down and have what I wanted for dinner in the first place--bread and jam....all I ever really want is sugar." Andy Warhol, New York Magazine, March 31, 1975. Didn't Andy die of AIDS? Hmmmmm.
Now that's just silly. So Andy Warhol is dead. Correlation does not imply causality. For another, look at all the people in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe who have AIDS. Did they get it from eating too much refined sugar? Not hardly. The Masai of Africa depend on cattle for most of their food, and eat a very high-protein diet (meat and milk) a few grains, and little or no refined sugar or flour. They get AIDS a lot. From a sexually-transmitted virus. NOT from their food.
Outside the nerd community the impact of internet is fairly limited, I think.
Not at all. The impact is enormous. The understanding is limited.
I know several people who are clueless about internet and only have the minimum skill required for reading email.
Right. The internet impacts them, but their understanding of it is limited.
The same thing could be said of other things with immense impacts. The phone system, f'rinstance. It has had an impact on people and businesses all over the world. A great many people have phones, and use them. But only a few devoted phone phreaks and phone-company people really understand how it works. Would you say that "outside the phone phreak community, the impact of the telephone is fairly limited"?
Sometimes I find myself longing for the "old days", when the impact of the internet really was minimal outside of the nerd comunity. When nerds used it to share information, and few people had considered it as yet another medium for selling things. That's a large part of why I'm here ranting instead of shopping over at ebay or amazon. But I digress. If non-nerds hadn't intruded, and started selling things via the internet, a lot of nerds would be working as parking-lot attendants and cashiers to support their computer habits, er, hobbies.
But the U.S. doesn't produce good food cheap. They produce food (whether it's good is a value judgement) expensive. Not because the soil is poor, or the technology is lacking, or even because the government is corrupt (it is, but that's beside the point). U.S.-produced food is expensive because people in the U.S. can make more money by not producing food. And I don't mean farmers idling their land in conservation-reserve programs. I mean the children and grandchildren of farmers leaving the farm because there's more money to be made in other lines of work.
Food is cheap in the U.S. not because they grow it so cheap there, but because they import it from third-world countries where farm labor is cheap. Americans aren't stupid - if they can make ten times the money working in an air-conditioned office with vacation and sick pay and health insurance, they will. It's far better than performing hot heavy farm labor with no benefits, and pay that is entirely at the mercy of commodity markets. They'll let third-world people feed them because that costs less. Because third-worlders don't have the option of working in the air-conditioned office.
Maybe I'm missing something, but one thing this island seems to lack (besides natural resources) is a good communication system. Not only is it difficult to get to physically, it sounds like Nauru is difficult to reach by telephone. That would seem to make becoming a center of secret international banking much more difficult. Is there an effort to improve Nauru's communication system in all this? Will the people of Nauru benefit by this, or will all the benefits go to their customers and investors?
The Nauruans got burned once, when they sold all their birdsh1t to foreigners. They got rich quick, then got poor again just as quick. Poorer than when they started, since their island seems to have been deforested in the process. I'd expect them to be cautious going into a venture like this one.
If there is are fortunes to be gained by this, and if the Nauruans can use it to improve their lot and that of their children, more power to them.
Is Katz (and others who have "sounded the alarm" over Mosaic) overreacting? Maybe. But there is value in examining the worst possible outcome of any new tool. It helps to be prepared for the bad things that might emerge as unintended consequences of things like Mosaic, even if they never occur.
It's a bit hasty to assume that it's going to single out the people who are different
No it's not. That's what it's meant to do. The important part is to distinguish between the different-but-harmless person (the geek or goth who listens to loud music or dresses funny), and the different-and-dangerous person (the geek or goth who blows up abortion clinics or shoots up the school). Can Mosaic do that? I don't know.
Mosaic is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. Please use only for good.
Unintended consequences are inevitable. Unforseen consequences are not.
Phish does allow taping at the shows. There's a taper section, lots of mics in the air:)
Having been to a few Phish shows, and having received some of their "phannish" mailings, my understanding is that the taper seats are behind the sound crew, and that tapers (with the required taper tickets) can patch directly into the sound board at any Phish show for which taper tickets are issued. So there would be no need for "mics in the air". I know I've never noticed mics in the air at any of the shows I've attended.
BTW taper tickets don't cost more than regular tickets, but they are in limited supply, and sometimes the view of the stage from the taper section is, shall we say, less than ideal.
I haven't read the "Eve's Herbs" book, but I've read enough anthropology articles to have learned that those contraceptive and abortifacient herbs generally fall into one of two categories. Poisons and placebos. The poisons are effective but very dangerous. They tend to be abortifacients rather than contraceptives, and given the choice I'd take the surgical abortion (if it were my body) rather than the herbal one. The placebos work as contraceptives, only because the "magic" that allows then to work depends on the woman abstaining from sex all or most of the time. It's about as effective as the Catholic Church's infamous "rhythm method", and for about the same reasons. Instead of thermometers and calendars, the herbal method employs plants and plant extracts. But it's still a crapshoot that relies largely on abstainance for its effectiveness.
...once men took over medicine, and the midwife's skills with these herbs were relabeled as witchcraft by the RC Church, this knowledge began to disappear.
That is certainly lamentable, but it's not the only (or even a major)cause of overpopulation. It is probably the cause of much delay in medical knowledge tho'. I often wonder where modern (western) medicine would be today if, instead of persecuting them in the middle ages, the anatomists (mostly men who made their medical discoveries by carving up cadavers) had merged their knowledge with the herbalists (mostly women).
You're feeling fine, but trust me, most of the other ~six billion or so are not. And it's not just because you've got neat technology and they don't.
Erlich and company weren't totally wrong - they just underestimated the impact that technology could have. Human ingenuity may be limitless, but the arable surface of this planet is not. Technology can help us care for all the humans on the planet, but it'll do it by allowing us to have fewer of them to care for. We can have fewer people without having to kill more of them, if we'd just stop making so many. Technology will help make that possible.
Technology gave us fertilizers, pesticides, clear-cutting, and contraceptives. I suggest more use of the latter, so we won't have to use as much of the former to care for all the humans.
In richer countries, women have access to more forms of birth control and both sexes are reasonably aware of what happens when you roll in the hay without protection
People in third-world countries aren't stupid. They do know where babies come from. They even have access to birth control. Unfortunately, that birth control often is only available in one of two forms: abstainance or (dangerous, do-it-yerself) abortion.
The U.N. has figured this out, which is why their main efforts in reducing the world population are educating women and distributing contraception.
By educating women, they're not just talking about educating them in where babies come from. Believe me, women already know about that. They're educating women in job skills, so they'll have more to do with their lives than just breed more youngsters. They'll also get skills they can apply toward putting food on the table for the kids they do have.
This would seem to be good news. For most of history, the human population has been below one billion. Even if populations were to drop drastically (provided they drop through decreased birth rates, not increased death rates), I see little to worry about. Yes, the average (not to mention the median) age would get older, but with less resources used to feed, shelter, clothe, house and educate the young ('cause there will be less of them) it should be quite easy to care of the old. And the young that are born into this less-crowded world will have more adults to care for them, and less other children competing for resources.
This doesn't mean the end of the human race - just the end of humans running roughshod over each other and everything else on the planet in their blind race to procreate.
Perhaps games like "The War In Heaven" suggest some looming confrontation, an Armageddon-like battle out there the digital ether for the collective souls of geeks.
I doubt it's that serious. Christian gamers like to play games too. Some of them even like to play violent games. So what? Games like this allow them to satisfy those violent urges and keep the moralists off their backs.
"Violent video games are bad."
"But it's demons i'm vaporizing with my deadly, er, heavenly arsenal."
"Oh... that's okay then. Have fun!"
Sure it's subversive. But is it really worse than sneaking underage kids in to see South Park?
Religion and freedom have never really gotten along..."
Never is too strong of a word. They've seldom got along, but is that religion's fault? Done right, religion and freedom are inseparable. People freely choose whether, and how, they'll worship. Coerced belief isn't really belief.
The bad news is that if "The War In Heaven" sells, expect a slew of Christian (and soon, no doubt, Jewish and Muslim) save-the-soul games marketed by greedy Web entrepeneurs who want to appear wholesome while raking in big money. Sunday school might be in for some radical change.
That's bad news? We already have greedy web entrepreneurs raking in big money. If that's bad, it's bad whether or not they're putting a religious veneer over it. I'd expect the strongest opposition to this sort of thing to come from within the religious community. Not from someone who usually calls for more freedom of expression.
Sunday school might be in for some radical change.
Bring on the change! If games like this had been available when I was in Catholic School, I might not be as cynical about religion today.
The good news is that ultimately such developments will drive software censors and moral guardians nuts.
It's already nuts. This just makes it more obvious, for those that weren't bright enough to pick up on it before.
This program came about because politicians are looking for a "cheap fix" to the educational system.
Bingo!
Well..there is none.
Right again! There's no cheap fix. Only an expensive one. It starts with smaller class sizes. But that's expensive, and raising taxes to pay for it (you know another way?) is the kiss of death on election day. It's a lot easier to play on the parents' fears of school shootings (horrible, to be sure, but very unlikely) than to deal with the problem of schools that don't teach students what they need to know (also horrible, and almost inevitable, but no one seems to care).
A person at 65 will stay "old" for the rest of his or her life...
True, as far as it goes. But there's another factor at work. A person at 65 has, maybe, 20 more years during which they can vote, spend money, etc. After that they're dead and no one will care. A 17-year-old has, maybe, 70 years left to do that. If young people treated their votes like they were worth something, politicians would too. "Get 'em young and they'll be yours for life", is how advertizers treat the youth market, because young people do spend money. Political parties would do the same, except too many young people don't vote.
...and has the knowledge of what runs politicians (money) to get things done.
Knowledge is power. But old people don't have a monopoly on knowledge. They may have most of the money, but (1)that's changing fast, and (2)money can't buy a vote. It's about the only thing left that money can't buy.
AARP is a huge lobbying group, that's true. But there's no law saying young people can't lobby too. If they did, you can bet that politicians would listen.
There are pedophiles on the net and in real life. There are people that have very low morals that will stalk children and harm/kill them...
Yes there are, but I'm so tired of hearing about them every time I read a mainstream media piece about the 'net. There are a handful of pedophiles (on the 'net and in "real life"), but there are thousands of companies (on the net and in "real life")that may want to collect information about children. They don't want to sexually abuse the precious moppets, but they do want to exploit them. They want to exploit you and me too, but that doesn't make it okay.
That having been said, I agree somewhat that ...there is something to be said about obtaining without the consent of the parent personal info about a child, much less being able to sell that info across a number of other companies.
Without consent is bad. But who is entitled to give consent? The law (in most states) says an individual must be 18 in order to give consent for sex (unless he/she is married). But a girl can (f'rinstance) consent to an abortion at any age.
Children (not their parents/guardians) should be able to give consent to have information collected from/about them once they reach a certain age. Younger than that, and they're their parents'/guardians' responsibility. What is that magical age? I don't know, but I do know it's younger than 18, and older than 5. YMMV.
How to enforce it? I don't know that either. It seems unenforceable.
The reason there are anti-geezer laws in effect in the United States is that old people are disproportionately represented in government
...and the a big part of the reason that they're disproportionately represented in government is that geezers vote. If young people voted in the same proportions that old people do, their representatives would take more notice of them.
There is a voting age, and people younger than that aren't allowed to vote. But they can still have a say in government. If you can't vote, write to your representatives. Tell them that in n years you will be old enough to vote and that you'll remember how your representatives behave(d). You're not powerless just because you're too young to vote.
That having been said, discrimination (age, race, gender, whatever kind of discrimination) isn't bad because your government says it's bad - it's bad because it's counterproductive.
Slashdot Mirror
H...
E...
T...
H...
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N...
Hethen...
Dance!!!
We can dance if we want to
We can leave M$ behind
'Cause M$ don't dance
And if they don't dance well they're
No friends of mine
We can run what (OS) we want to
It's our gain and it's their loss
And you can run OS2, or Linux or Mac
BSD or DR-DOS
Maybe they're just trying to be polite.
Maybe they really do envy you.
Think about it. You're stressed, your bosses expect the impossible, and the deadline was yesterday. Their job is just the same! Only they probably don't have a valuable skill like yours. They don't get to feel superior to their incompetent bosses, or to the morons who call with questions or complaints.
People think it'd be great if only they could get a high-tech job like yours? Pity them. Think how dreadful their job must be.
Many times they "outsource" the network duties to contracting firms so that they do not have to hire and pay their own employees to do the work. This saves the megacorp lots of money.
It can, but there are other reasons why this happens - it's not as callous and cruel as it sounds.
Consider: contract employees don't get much in the way of benefits (not from the widget company anyway - the contracting firms sometimes have good bennies, as it helps them keep qualified people) but they often cost more, on an hourly basis, than WidgeTron's own employees. 'Cause the contracting firm has to take their cut, and still pay the "netslave" enough that s/he will stay on. It's a tradeoff. And for many companies, what swings the balance is that they want (to borrow a Dilbertism) to "concentrate on their core business". For a widget manufacturer that means manufacturing widgets, not being a cutting-edge IT firm. But they need cutting-edge IT people, so they contract for them from a company whose core business is cutting-edge IT.
It's not good; it's not evil. It just is.
Note the Judge only said Microsoft has a monopoly in the Intel-compatible operating system space.
That's a pretty big space. Big enough for a monopoly. If I may borrow somebody else's analogy, that's like saying Major League Baseball only has a monopoly in the baseball-compatible sports space. There are other sports available - therefore MLB doesn't have a monopoly? I don't think so.
Since it's been clear from the beginning that he's out to get Microsoft, this is hardly surprising.
It has not been clear from the beginning that the judge has been out to get Microsoft. If he had been, this finding of fact would not have been so long in coming.
It [freon] will work as well as most other inhalants. It will indeed get you high.
Only if most other inhalants work by merely causing oxygen deprivation (which is possible, given that oxygen deprivation can make one pleasantly - or unpleasantly - lightheaded). It's been a long time since I took any classes about it, but as I recall, freon is mucho unreactive. It even requires UV to make it react with something very reactive - like ozone in the upper atmosphere. Of course once it does the reaction continues unchecked (a radical chain reaction IIRC). But in any case I have my doubts that freon would react - at the mild temperatures and pressures of a human body - to produce anything toxic or psychoactive. But it would work as well as any other inert substance to keep adequate oxygen from being absorbed into the blood.
This is not to say that it's safe to inhale freon. Oxygen deprivation can kill.
The teacher gave Beamon a score of 100 on the writing assignment, on which she also wrote "outstanding."
Then, perhaps remembering the ongoing post-Columbine assault... [snip largely-irrelevant bit about who the assault is directed at, as that shouldn't matter. It's wrong, regardless of who it's targeting] she thought better of the grade and his story, and turned Beamon in to the principal.
Here's where this really gets sinister. Turning him in to the principal was the entirely wrong thing to do. Turning him in to (or just asking him to visit with) a school guidance counselor would be far more beneficial.
It's the counselor's business to determine who in the school is sufficiently disturbed to really do something destructive to themselves, others, or school property, and who is just being normal (or even harmlessly abnormal) for an adolescent. At least that's what counselors did when I was a student, lo these many years ago.
The counselor, who should be more qualified than the principal in these matters, can then determine whether the police need to get involved.
Calling in the police in this case was even more wrong-headed than calling in the principal. This kid wrote a paper ferchissakes. He didn't detonate a bomb, come to school drunk or high, or assault other students. Those are the kinds of things that principals and police need to put a stop to - not creative writing, however violent or poorly spelled it is.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for pedophiles" crowd buy their votes on censorship.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for drug dealers and terrorists" crowd buy their votes on crypto.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a great way to track all customers and send them offers which will interest them" crowd buy their votes on privacy.
All those things happen - and will continue to happen - whether "we" ignore it or not.
Buy their votes ourselves.
That's only an option because a lot of "us" have money now. "They" used to do Bad Things (buying the favors of politicians is, IMHO, a Bad Thing) that "we" were unable to do. Now some of "us" are in a position to do those same Bad Things. That doesn't make it right.
Politicans are for sale. Deal with it.
Oh I do deal with it. But I don't have to like it, and I don't have to believe it's a Good Thing. It's not. It wasn't when The Opposition was buying all the votes, and it won't be when you and I are buying them. A Good Thing would be if politicians voted their conscience without regard for who was lining their pockets this week.
Surely it's better that it be our dollars doing the buying than those of our opponents.
It's not better. Just different.
Natural selection works best when there's a competition for resources (food, shelter, breeding parters, etc).
No it doesn't. It works all the time, equally well. It tends to work fastest when there's severe shortages of resources (or when there's severe crises like hurricanes, comets striking the Earth, etc.), but fastest isn't necessarily best. K-selected species (look it up) like humans are most viable when conditions are stable. If another mass extinction occurs, humans will be ant food.
People who are poorly educated, stay at home, and breed like rabbits have certain advantages over the ones too busy fighting in the modern day economic survival wars to produce progeny in this environment.
That may be true, or it may not. And keep in mind that correlation does not imply causality. Even if there is a causal relationship, it might be reversed. Maybe poor education doesn't cause people to "breed like rabbits" (a notoriously r-selected species), so much as quality education causes people to "breed like pandas". Spending lots of time and money on schooling and "getting ahead" might well result in less time and money left for dating, marriage, and procreation.
If there are "certain advantages" to humans who breed like rabbits, there are even more disadvantages. Look around you - most of the economically successful educated folk do manage to procreate. They have one or two kids instead of five or six. And they take better care of them, send them to quality schools, live in less dangerous places... Their children, though there are fewer of them, are more successful. It's a good bet that they'll have more great great grandchildren than their impoverished neighbors. Long-term survival is the key.
Weeding out people based on our _current_ criteria would probably end up hurting us in the long run. When the environment changes, we're going to need as many variants of human as can be mustered to ensure our succesful survival as a species.
Darn tootin'!
...in debunking this nonsense
Humans should eat high protien[sic] high fat and unrefined foods...
Except for the 'unrefined" part, that's what Americans - and much of the rest of the Western world - eats. To their detriment. Protein and fat are certainly necessary, and they taste good to us precisely because we need them in our diet, but humans have outsmarted nature, and many of them now eat far too much of those tasty foods. The cravings nature gave us to ensure that we eat enough of them have resulted in obesity, arteries clogged with fat deposits, and overall poor health. Sure it's possible to become obese as a result of overconsumption of carbohydrates too, but overconsumption of any food will do that. Carbs are not the villain - overconsumption is. And it's often overconsumption of fats and proteins.
Americans should demand that the soil where their crops are grown be replenished.
Yes they should. But this has little or nothing to do with AIDS, HIV, or even nutrition.
The common cold is caused by the same thing that causes AIDS...
That's true in part, only because they're both caused by viruses. But they're very different viruses. HIV is a retrovirus, while the common cold can result from a number of different viruses, including but not limited to picornaviruses.
Our pancreas has three functions, one of which everybody knows insulin production.
I usually dismiss out of hand any post that claims "everybody knows" something. Trust me - they don't. But that's beside the point.
Most people don't know about it's[sic] most important role, and that's the production of T-cells "Tropoblast" cells fight all infection cancer and AIDS included. If your pancreas is too busy cranking out insulin your T-cell count drops, not good.
AIDS causes T-cells to self-destruct. I wouldn't matter if the body is producing them fast and furious, it won't help if they all self-destruct before they can do any good.
Cancer does not typically produce an immune response, as the cancerous cells are the body's own cells, multiplying out of control. So here again, having lots of T-cells wouldn't help.
What did Andy Warhol say? "I'll buy a huge piece of meat, cook it up for dinner, and then right before it's done, I'll break down and have what I wanted for dinner in the first place--bread and jam....all I ever really want is sugar." Andy Warhol, New York Magazine, March 31, 1975. Didn't Andy die of AIDS? Hmmmmm.
Now that's just silly. So Andy Warhol is dead. Correlation does not imply causality. For another, look at all the people in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe who have AIDS. Did they get it from eating too much refined sugar? Not hardly. The Masai of Africa depend on cattle for most of their food, and eat a very high-protein diet (meat and milk) a few grains, and little or no refined sugar or flour. They get AIDS a lot. From a sexually-transmitted virus. NOT from their food.
Outside the nerd community the impact of internet is fairly limited, I think.
Not at all. The impact is enormous. The understanding is limited.
I know several people who are clueless about
internet and only have the minimum skill required for reading email.
Right. The internet impacts them, but their understanding of it is limited.
The same thing could be said of other things with immense impacts. The phone system, f'rinstance. It has had an impact on people and businesses all over the world. A great many people have phones, and use them. But only a few devoted phone phreaks and phone-company people really understand how it works. Would you say that "outside the phone phreak community, the impact of the telephone is fairly limited"?
Sometimes I find myself longing for the "old days", when the impact of the internet really was minimal outside of the nerd comunity. When nerds used it to share information, and few people had considered it as yet another medium for selling things. That's a large part of why I'm here ranting instead of shopping over at ebay or amazon. But I digress. If non-nerds hadn't intruded, and started selling things via the internet, a lot of nerds would be working as parking-lot attendants and cashiers to support their computer habits, er, hobbies.
If the US can produce good food cheap, let them.
But the U.S. doesn't produce good food cheap. They produce food (whether it's good is a value judgement) expensive. Not because the soil is poor, or the technology is lacking, or even because the government is corrupt (it is, but that's beside the point). U.S.-produced food is expensive because people in the U.S. can make more money by not producing food. And I don't mean farmers idling their land in conservation-reserve programs. I mean the children and grandchildren of farmers leaving the farm because there's more money to be made in other lines of work.
Food is cheap in the U.S. not because they grow it so cheap there, but because they import it from third-world countries where farm labor is cheap. Americans aren't stupid - if they can make ten times the money working in an air-conditioned office with vacation and sick pay and health insurance, they will. It's far better than performing hot heavy farm labor with no benefits, and pay that is entirely at the mercy of commodity markets. They'll let third-world people feed them because that costs less. Because third-worlders don't have the option of working in the air-conditioned office.
Yet.
Maybe I'm missing something, but one thing this island seems to lack (besides natural resources) is a good communication system. Not only is it difficult to get to physically, it sounds like Nauru is difficult to reach by telephone. That would seem to make becoming a center of secret international banking much more difficult. Is there an effort to improve Nauru's communication system in all this? Will the people of Nauru benefit by this, or will all the benefits go to their customers and investors?
The Nauruans got burned once, when they sold all their birdsh1t to foreigners. They got rich quick, then got poor again just as quick. Poorer than when they started, since their island seems to have been deforested in the process. I'd expect them to be cautious going into a venture like this one.
If there is are fortunes to be gained by this, and if the Nauruans can use it to improve their lot and that of their children, more power to them.
Is Katz (and others who have "sounded the alarm" over Mosaic) overreacting? Maybe. But there is value in examining the worst possible outcome of any new tool. It helps to be prepared for the bad things that might emerge as unintended consequences of things like Mosaic, even if they never occur.
It's a bit hasty to assume that it's going to single out the people who are different
No it's not. That's what it's meant to do. The important part is to distinguish between the different-but-harmless person (the geek or goth who listens to loud music or dresses funny), and the different-and-dangerous person (the geek or goth who blows up abortion clinics or shoots up the school). Can Mosaic do that? I don't know.
Mosaic is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. Please use only for good.
Unintended consequences are inevitable. Unforseen consequences are not.
Phish does allow taping at the shows. There's a taper section, lots of mics in the air :)
Having been to a few Phish shows, and having received some of their "phannish" mailings, my understanding is that the taper seats are behind the sound crew, and that tapers (with the required taper tickets) can patch directly into the sound board at any Phish show for which taper tickets are issued. So there would be no need for "mics in the air". I know I've never noticed mics in the air at any of the shows I've attended.
BTW taper tickets don't cost more than regular tickets, but they are in limited supply, and sometimes the view of the stage from the taper section is, shall we say, less than ideal.
I haven't read the "Eve's Herbs" book, but I've read enough anthropology articles to have learned that those contraceptive and abortifacient herbs generally fall into one of two categories. Poisons and placebos. The poisons are effective but very dangerous. They tend to be abortifacients rather than contraceptives, and given the choice I'd take the surgical abortion (if it were my body) rather than the herbal one. The placebos work as contraceptives, only because the "magic" that allows then to work depends on the woman abstaining from sex all or most of the time. It's about as effective as the Catholic Church's infamous "rhythm method", and for about the same reasons. Instead of thermometers and calendars, the herbal method employs plants and plant extracts. But it's still a crapshoot that relies largely on abstainance for its effectiveness.
...once men took over medicine, and the midwife's skills with these herbs were relabeled as witchcraft by the RC Church, this knowledge began to disappear.
That is certainly lamentable, but it's not the only (or even a major)cause of overpopulation. It is probably the cause of much delay in medical knowledge tho'. I often wonder where modern (western) medicine would be today if, instead of persecuting them in the middle ages, the anatomists (mostly men who made their medical discoveries by carving up cadavers) had merged their knowledge with the herbalists (mostly women).
Six Billion And Feeling Fine.
You're feeling fine, but trust me, most of the other ~six billion or so are not. And it's not just because you've got neat technology and they don't.
Erlich and company weren't totally wrong - they just underestimated the impact that technology could have. Human ingenuity may be limitless, but the arable surface of this planet is not. Technology can help us care for all the humans on the planet, but it'll do it by allowing us to have fewer of them to care for. We can have fewer people without having to kill more of them, if we'd just stop making so many. Technology will help make that possible.
Technology gave us fertilizers, pesticides, clear-cutting, and contraceptives. I suggest more use of the latter, so we won't have to use as much of the former to care for all the humans.
Creativity, not procreativity!
In richer countries, women have access to more forms of birth control and both sexes are reasonably aware of what happens when you roll in the hay without protection
People in third-world countries aren't stupid. They do know where babies come from. They even have access to birth control. Unfortunately, that birth control often is only available in one of two forms: abstainance or (dangerous, do-it-yerself) abortion.
The U.N. has figured this out, which is why their main efforts in reducing the world population are educating women and distributing contraception.
By educating women, they're not just talking about educating them in where babies come from. Believe me, women already know about that. They're educating women in job skills, so they'll have more to do with their lives than just breed more youngsters. They'll also get skills they can apply toward putting food on the table for the kids they do have.
This would seem to be good news. For most of history, the human population has been below one billion. Even if populations were to drop drastically (provided they drop through decreased birth rates, not increased death rates), I see little to worry about. Yes, the average (not to mention the median) age would get older, but with less resources used to feed, shelter, clothe, house and educate the young ('cause there will be less of them) it should be quite easy to care of the old. And the young that are born into this less-crowded world will have more adults to care for them, and less other children competing for resources.
This doesn't mean the end of the human race - just the end of humans running roughshod over each other and everything else on the planet in their blind race to procreate.
Creativity, not procreativity!
Holy sh1t - where'd all those extra paragraph breaks come from? I coulda swore they weren't there when I previewed this...
Yeah there is another way. End the friggin drug war.
Sad to say, that's an even worse kiss of death on election day.
Perhaps games like "The War In Heaven" suggest some looming confrontation, an Armageddon-like battle out there the digital ether for the collective souls of geeks.
I doubt it's that serious. Christian gamers like to play games too. Some of them even like to play violent games. So what? Games like this allow them to satisfy those violent urges and keep the moralists off their backs.
"Violent video games are bad."
"But it's demons i'm vaporizing with my deadly, er, heavenly arsenal."
"Oh... that's okay then. Have fun!"
Sure it's subversive. But is it really worse than sneaking underage kids in to see South Park?
Religion and freedom have never really gotten along..."
Never is too strong of a word. They've seldom got along, but is that religion's fault? Done right, religion and freedom are inseparable. People freely choose whether, and how, they'll worship. Coerced belief isn't really belief.
The bad news is that if "The War In Heaven" sells, expect a slew of Christian (and soon, no doubt, Jewish and Muslim) save-the-soul games marketed by greedy Web entrepeneurs who want to appear wholesome while raking in big money. Sunday school might be in for some radical change.
That's bad news? We already have greedy web entrepreneurs raking in big money. If that's bad, it's bad whether or not they're putting a religious veneer over it. I'd expect the strongest opposition to this sort of thing to come from within the religious community. Not from someone who usually calls for more freedom of expression.
Sunday school might be in for some radical change.
Bring on the change! If games like this had been available when I was in Catholic School, I might not be as cynical about religion today.
The good news is that ultimately such developments will drive software censors and moral guardians nuts.
It's already nuts. This just makes it more obvious, for those that weren't bright enough to pick up on it before.
This program came about because politicians are looking for a "cheap fix" to the educational system.
Bingo!
Well..there is none.
Right again! There's no cheap fix. Only an expensive one. It starts with smaller class sizes. But that's expensive, and raising taxes to pay for it (you know another way?) is the kiss of death on election day. It's a lot easier to play on the parents' fears of school shootings (horrible, to be sure, but very unlikely) than to deal with the problem of schools that don't teach students what they need to know (also horrible, and almost inevitable, but no one seems to care).
A person at 65 will stay "old" for the rest of his or her life...
...and has the knowledge of what runs politicians (money) to get things done.
True, as far as it goes. But there's another factor at work. A person at 65 has, maybe, 20 more years during which they can vote, spend money, etc. After that they're dead and no one will care. A 17-year-old has, maybe, 70 years left to do that. If young people treated their votes like they were worth something, politicians would too. "Get 'em young and they'll be yours for life", is how advertizers treat the youth market, because young people do spend money. Political parties would do the same, except too many young people don't vote.
Knowledge is power. But old people don't have a monopoly on knowledge. They may have most of the money, but (1)that's changing fast, and (2)money can't buy a vote. It's about the only thing left that money can't buy.
AARP is a huge lobbying group, that's true. But there's no law saying young people can't lobby too. If they did, you can bet that politicians would listen.
There are pedophiles on the net and in real life. There are people that have very low morals that will stalk children and harm/kill them...
...there is something to be said about obtaining without the consent of the parent personal info about a child, much less being able to sell that info across a number of other companies.
Yes there are, but I'm so tired of hearing about them every time I read a mainstream media piece about the 'net. There are a handful of pedophiles (on the 'net and in "real life"), but there are thousands of companies (on the net and in "real life")that may want to collect information about children. They don't want to sexually abuse the precious moppets, but they do want to exploit them. They want to exploit you and me too, but that doesn't make it okay.
That having been said, I agree somewhat that
Without consent is bad. But who is entitled to give consent? The law (in most states) says an individual must be 18 in order to give consent for sex (unless he/she is married). But a girl can (f'rinstance) consent to an abortion at any age.
Children (not their parents/guardians) should be able to give consent to have information collected from/about them once they reach a certain age. Younger than that, and they're their parents'/guardians' responsibility. What is that magical age? I don't know, but I do know it's younger than 18, and older than 5. YMMV.
How to enforce it? I don't know that either. It seems unenforceable.
The reason there are anti-geezer laws in effect in the United States is that old people are disproportionately represented in government
...and the a big part of the reason that they're disproportionately represented in government is that geezers vote. If young people voted in the same proportions that old people do, their representatives would take more notice of them.
There is a voting age, and people younger than that aren't allowed to vote. But they can still have a say in government. If you can't vote, write to your representatives. Tell them that in n years you will be old enough to vote and that you'll remember how your representatives behave(d). You're not powerless just because you're too young to vote.
That having been said, discrimination (age, race, gender, whatever kind of discrimination) isn't bad because your government says it's bad - it's bad because it's counterproductive.