Clearly the idea that toy selection in children is all down to social pressure is complete and total nonsense.
Nobody is claiming that, but surely you would admit that the idea that toy selection in children is immune to social pressure is also complete and total nonsense.
Nurturing and homemaking in a tribal environment has absolutely nothing to do with pink princess outfits. All you've pointed out is what we've all known since forever - early human societies had gender roles based on physical attributes that made them more fit for certain things. The question now is whether the gender roles and stereotypes we have, which evolved from those beginnings, make any sense at all. Since very few jobs are physical today in the way that spear hunting would be, and since many women have children late or never, it's fair to suppose that many of the gender roles that now exist are mostly arbitrary and based on convention.
Don't know why I'm bothering replying to an AC, but that whole "spend time around little kids" argument is bullshit. All kids get conditioned to fit into gender roles, from the very earliest age, so we really don't know what "girl things" and "guy things" are, unless you've done a controlled experiment raising a child without any biased social interaction whatsoever.
The biggest thing, though, is that this whole argument that there are girl things and boy things is used to justify exposing children to only things that will make them comply with existing norms. If my parents get a gift for my daughter, for instance, have only ever gotten my daughter dolls, tutus, dress-up clothes, and basically those "girl things" that reinforce the idea that girls are primarily supposed to be pretty to look at and learn how to raise offspring. Her favorite toy lately? Legos. She would not have had those (or any toys that go against girl stereotypes) unless I had gone out of my way to make sure she had them.
So the point is, when you see a young girl playing with dolls, many times those are the only kinds of toys she has ever had. She won't play with trucks because she never has before, and has probably been discouraged in subtle or not-so-subtle ways from doing so. We should allow people to be who they want to be to the greatest degree possible. Which means we ought to give children varied experiences and let them go whichever way they will (and that might mean wanting to be a princess).
Ultimately this whole argument though amounts to victim-blaming, and using the "nature" side of nature-vs-nurture to absolve society from any blame for treating children unequally. If we accept that girls naturally tend to avoid computers, engineering, and science, it means we don't have to acknowledge any pesky problem that might exist, much less the solutions which might be costly or difficult to deal with.
If speech can incite violence (it doesn't ), then provocative clothing can incite rape (it doesn't), and we have to cover our women head to toe.. Let's all try to be a bit consistent here. Otherwise you're inciting the imposition of Islamic law.
This is entirely stupid. As long as you believe that words can influence the actions of people (and the entire advertising industry is based on this belief) then it follows that the right kind of speech can incite violence - stirring up a group of protesters, telling a drunk husband about a cheating wife, racist propaganda to ensure that soldiers kill the opposition, etc, etc. Of course, it doesn't absolve the violent offenders of guilt. But it can add a guilty party as a contributor.
Clothing is usually not speech (although you could think of examples where it ought to qualify). A person dressing provocatively is no more "inciting rape" than a person without a bulletproof vest is "inciting a bullet wound". There are situations where the respective choices might be risky because of the unfortunate reality that there are people out there prone to violent behavior, but people are not required to choose the less risky option.
The thing is, people act like this rape thing is complicated, but there really isn't any question about it. If someone says they don't want to have sex, regardless of what prior signs they have given to the contrary, you don't have sex with them. Even if you are actively having sex, you still must stop if they ask you to, otherwise it is rape.
It's like the difference between boxing and assault. The only difference between the two is that both parties have provided consent. As soon as consent is revoked, it becomes assault. Is that so difficult?
Hey, OP is a nationalistic idiot, but responding with more nonsense generalization doesn't fix things.
I happen to be an American, under 35, with a degree in physics, who occasionally works at particle collider facilities. The average state of scienctific literacy might not be fantastic here, but there's no denying that many of the best minds in physics today are from the U.S.
Most particle accelerators spend a good portion of their time in maintenance, perpetually, and that includes American ones. The cyclotron at Texas A&M, for instance, is closed for the first quarter of the year, every year. And that isn't even a facility that is new and still gearing up - it has been running that way for many decades, yet it still requires that much downtime.
So stop being a nationalistic douchebag. But who am I kidding, I'm responding to an AC here.
And it is not an American vehicle. The point still stands - there is no way to "separate the two halves" and have a functioning station as you suggested. Even supposing we could get by entirely without Zvezda and Russian boosts, the Russian-owned docking module is the only place that another ship can mate for reboost. Interdependence is inherent to the design, and that is intentional.
How do you boost it then? It needs periodic orbit boosts to compensate for orbit degradation from drag. The only permanent module capable of this is Russian owned (Zvezda), and although there are two vehicles capable of providing some boost capability, neither one is American. For that matter, almost all the docking capability belongs to the Russians as well. So your claims are entirely false.
The singularity in the context of technological progress uses the black hole as a metaphor. It describes a point at which technology becomes self-propelling in a manner that makes it impossible for us to project what life would be like then, in a similar way to how miniaturisation and Moore's law have given us a present that couldn't have been projected in the 1940s.
I think the singularity is fundamentally different. There are very few things today that couldn't have been (or weren't) projected in the 40's. Sure, there were some things where the particulars were mostly wrong (rather than the internet, it would have been an automated library, or a robot that could give you answers, rather than ubiquitous video phones, we just have normal phones that we carry with us everywhere) but basically everything we have today is just the culmination of technological possibility that was seen long, long ago.
The singularity is supposed to go farther I think - like explaining video games to medieval peasants, or something like that. There isn't even the technological context available to convey the function or significance of new developments, if you go back far enough. The singularity is by definition supposed to be things that we can't even imagine, because the world will be so fundamentally different that it operates on a different set of assumptions.
That said, I'm not convinced that a singularity exists, or that there will be a future that is fundamentally unrecognizable to us today - we've imagined a hell of a lot of stuff, and even something that entirely changes human reality (brains in jars living in virtual interfaces, etc) will still differ from today's technology only by interface and increased sophistication.
Something made for interplanetary travel like that would need far more radiation shielding, which basically must drive most of the rest of the spacecraft architecture. The ISS is in one of the most benign orbits out there (not dealing with the Van Allen belts, yet still enjoying the protection of Earth's magnetosphere). As soon as it got beyond LEO, a single solar flare could be enough to give all the inhabitants a lethal dose of radiation.
Believe it or not, there are some fairly smart people working at NASA. And in the aerospace industry in general. Maybe rather than assuming that the people who do this professionally are ignorant, it would be better to assume that there's something they know that you don't.
The ISS will be a 20 year old international experiment at that point, yes the US and Russian halves of the ISS share a common "atmosphere" but mechanically they're completely separate space stations capable of detaching at any time.
False. The US portion of the ISS cannot survive without the Russian parts, and vice versa. This was intentional, to ensure interdependence and continued cooperation.
We've got dramatic and sudden changes forecasted in the use of automation in various industries. The trucking industry alone could change in a few short years with the advent of self-driving vehicles, leaving millions out of work. What kind of social impact do you foresee with these developments - do you think this kind of automation will be a fundamentally different kind of technological advance than our society has previously dealt with?
I imagine that the different circles you run in might have dramatically different responses to the religious emphasis in your recent work. What kind of reactions (wanted and unwanted) have you gotten from your recent move towards Christianity?
You have made a career out of writing books that popularize scientific findings - it seems like this is a task fraught with potential dangers, in terms of representing something that your readers misinterpret and misapply, or perhaps taking a published study and drawing an unwarranted conclusion yourself that attracts the ire of the original researchers. Certainly, much science journalism lately can be criticized for sensationalizing scientific results in the pursuit of better headlines, sometimes at the cost of being deliberately misleading. Can you expound a bit on the issues you've run into as a purveyor of scientific results, and explain how you balance the need for a faithful presentation of the source material with the desire to find something relatable and compelling enough to write a book about?
This article, from an evolutionary psychologist, entirely demonstrates my point. Breasts have evolved to be the way that they are because of sexual selection.
The point is that you select a mate based on what will best help your own genes to propagate. Males will be inclined to look for a woman that is
1: sexually mature (has breasts and wider hips than waist)
2: able to carry and deliver a child and feed the child until it is able to eat something besides breastmilk.
If you don't satisfy those minimal criteria, your genes aren't getting passed on. So by the only measure that matters in evolution, you haven't reproduced. The artificial methods you've suggested (bottles, etc) didn't exist during the vast majority of human history. They have nothing to do with it.
Now, we know that the features we've discussed are not actually reliable indicators of fitness (large-chested women can have trouble breastfeeding, and small-chested women can produce plenty of milk) but they key in to those things that a male will be biologically inclined to look at when choosing a mate. The reason that sex in advertising is so pernicious is because it taps into deep, instinctual biological impulses we have.
From the article: "The sex appeal of rounded female buttocks and plump breasts is both universal and unique to the human primate" - this is cited in more depth there, but the point is that you are arguing against human nature. Again, the answer is not to pretend that sexual body parts aren't what they are. It is to stop this weird culture of sexual obsession combined with prudery, accept that sex is just a part of life like any other, and be adults about the whole thing.
Feeding a child is only about 9 months removed from having sex. You can't have (typically, biologically speaking) one without the other. So I'm saying it is inherently associated with reproduction. It isn't a stretch to say that men would be biologically predisposed to "sexualize" breasts because of an instinct to look for a partner that could feed a child (not that it matters in reality, I'm well aware that cup size has little to do with milk production).
I guess the question would be this - is there any body part that is rightly considered "sexual"? If you don't believe so, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Wait, what? Something that has sexual characteristics can also perform other functions. I'm not sure what analogy you're trying to get at with the bathroom thing... I don't get offended when someone urinates in the restroom, and I don't get offended when someone breastfeeds in public or wherever. Those are both non-sexual behaviors with body parts that also have sexual functionality. I would probably find it inappropriate if someone was using those body parts to arouse themselves in public.
The point is, a body part that has a non-sexual function can still very well be an inherent part of the sexual process. So I'm saying that just because breastfeeding is not directly sexual, doesn't mean that breasts don't have an inherent sexual aspect due to our biology. And I would argue that they do, for a large variety of reasons - not least because when we are referring to the "sex" of a person we really mean whether they possess the physical features associated with being male or the physical features associated with being a woman. Anything on that short list of physical indicators is rightly called a sexual organ.
I'm not saying that breastfeeding in public is sexual. I'm just saying it is fine to accept the sexual aspects of breasts while simultaneously affirming the utility in child rearing. It isn't either/or.
Sexual selection is often about the features that suggest an individual is about being able to provide, care for, and protect offspring. Large breasts and a narrow waist both suggest capability in this area. Just like broad shoulders and height suggest so for a man.
The thing is, feeding a baby is an inherent part of the reproduction of the species, just as intercourse is. Breasts are the only organ that is exclusively related to reproduction - they serve literally no other purpose, and are an active hindrance in many other ways.
You haven't addressed that contention, so all the examples of other traits considered don't really impact my argument.
Breasts have no purpose except attracting a mate, and feeding offspring, both of which are closely related to sexual activity. It's like saying that people shouldn't associate penises with sex, because they are used for other things too. I agree that many cultures are too uptight about teh boobs, but I don't think that is because they have wrongfully associated breasts with sex. I think it's because sex is still taboo in many places, and also because females are treated as sex objects more than men are.
We don't need a campaign of public breastfeeding or more nudity to solve the problem, we just need more gender equality and general comfort with sexuality. I agree with you that advertising is way over the line and a big contributor to the problem though.
Lastly, an otherwise pretty decent post was ruined when you decided to get holier-than-thou on anybody who ever eats a burger. People who might otherwise listen to you will stop as soon as you get pretentious and judgmental about perfectly normal eating habits.
I presume that reason is water weight, in the case of steam turbines, and the lack of free atmosphere to work with in the case of stirling engines.
A Stirling engine doesn't require an atmosphere - all the gases are sealed inside and they are "external combustion" engines - just apply a heat source to one side, allow the other side to radiate heat, and away you go.
I'm not saying it is perfect - I'm saying that the model successfully ushered in the information age and built us the foundation of all modern technology. Which is no small achievement. You'll remember that the original contention was that a heavily regulated monopoly will never produce innovation - and Bell Labs demonstrably proves that about as false as anything could.
Fundamentally, I'm a believer in the free market, and the capabilities of industry, and the benefits of thoughtful regulation. When it comes to innovation, I think Bell Labs really was the best of both worlds - maybe it didn't lead to the cheapest service, but it was a hell of a lot more reliable than modern internet or cell service, and it's not as though the current telcos are any better when it comes to prices or customer service.
I don't disagree with what you say, but we have an obvious problem here - I'd say the majority of recent political campaigning is explicitly designed to incite hatred of the other team. There's some evidence to suggest it has had violent consequences as well, depending on how you lean on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.
So, on balance, do you think you would get more innovation out of a hyper-behemoth regulated monopoly that had cash to spare, or would you rather have a bunch of non-regulated companies that had to compete to create new things?
That's the question, isn't it? I guess the only answer that really makes sense is "it depends". I wish that people would take more account of how the Bell Labs model actually worked pretty damn well - imagine if we did take a similar approach to many existing monopolies, and demanded that because of their tremendous power they had to submit to oversight, had to constrain profits to certain levels, and had to license/sell developments at a reasonable cost. I think this is a "third way" besides breaking them up into tiny chunks that can actually be more beneficial. The thing is, competition is great because it introduces pressure to keep prices low and creates an incentive to come up with a clever competitive advantage, but there's also an inherent duplication of effort in competition that you avoid with a monopoly.
The issue is, something like this could be a best-of-both-worlds approach, but it does things that would piss off the left (protect a big powerful corporation) and piss off the right more (give the government lots of power over that corporation). So chances of it actually happening much? Very low. I for one am optimistic that we could see a good outcome from this telecom change though.
Slashdot Mirror
No mod points, but this is insightful and refreshingly honest.
Clearly the idea that toy selection in children is all down to social pressure is complete and total nonsense.
Nobody is claiming that, but surely you would admit that the idea that toy selection in children is immune to social pressure is also complete and total nonsense.
Nurturing and homemaking in a tribal environment has absolutely nothing to do with pink princess outfits. All you've pointed out is what we've all known since forever - early human societies had gender roles based on physical attributes that made them more fit for certain things. The question now is whether the gender roles and stereotypes we have, which evolved from those beginnings, make any sense at all. Since very few jobs are physical today in the way that spear hunting would be, and since many women have children late or never, it's fair to suppose that many of the gender roles that now exist are mostly arbitrary and based on convention.
Don't know why I'm bothering replying to an AC, but that whole "spend time around little kids" argument is bullshit. All kids get conditioned to fit into gender roles, from the very earliest age, so we really don't know what "girl things" and "guy things" are, unless you've done a controlled experiment raising a child without any biased social interaction whatsoever.
The biggest thing, though, is that this whole argument that there are girl things and boy things is used to justify exposing children to only things that will make them comply with existing norms. If my parents get a gift for my daughter, for instance, have only ever gotten my daughter dolls, tutus, dress-up clothes, and basically those "girl things" that reinforce the idea that girls are primarily supposed to be pretty to look at and learn how to raise offspring. Her favorite toy lately? Legos. She would not have had those (or any toys that go against girl stereotypes) unless I had gone out of my way to make sure she had them.
So the point is, when you see a young girl playing with dolls, many times those are the only kinds of toys she has ever had. She won't play with trucks because she never has before, and has probably been discouraged in subtle or not-so-subtle ways from doing so. We should allow people to be who they want to be to the greatest degree possible. Which means we ought to give children varied experiences and let them go whichever way they will (and that might mean wanting to be a princess).
Ultimately this whole argument though amounts to victim-blaming, and using the "nature" side of nature-vs-nurture to absolve society from any blame for treating children unequally. If we accept that girls naturally tend to avoid computers, engineering, and science, it means we don't have to acknowledge any pesky problem that might exist, much less the solutions which might be costly or difficult to deal with.
If speech can incite violence (it doesn't ), then provocative clothing can incite rape (it doesn't), and we have to cover our women head to toe.. Let's all try to be a bit consistent here. Otherwise you're inciting the imposition of Islamic law.
This is entirely stupid. As long as you believe that words can influence the actions of people (and the entire advertising industry is based on this belief) then it follows that the right kind of speech can incite violence - stirring up a group of protesters, telling a drunk husband about a cheating wife, racist propaganda to ensure that soldiers kill the opposition, etc, etc. Of course, it doesn't absolve the violent offenders of guilt. But it can add a guilty party as a contributor.
Clothing is usually not speech (although you could think of examples where it ought to qualify). A person dressing provocatively is no more "inciting rape" than a person without a bulletproof vest is "inciting a bullet wound". There are situations where the respective choices might be risky because of the unfortunate reality that there are people out there prone to violent behavior, but people are not required to choose the less risky option.
The thing is, people act like this rape thing is complicated, but there really isn't any question about it. If someone says they don't want to have sex, regardless of what prior signs they have given to the contrary, you don't have sex with them. Even if you are actively having sex, you still must stop if they ask you to, otherwise it is rape.
It's like the difference between boxing and assault. The only difference between the two is that both parties have provided consent. As soon as consent is revoked, it becomes assault. Is that so difficult?
Hey, OP is a nationalistic idiot, but responding with more nonsense generalization doesn't fix things.
I happen to be an American, under 35, with a degree in physics, who occasionally works at particle collider facilities. The average state of scienctific literacy might not be fantastic here, but there's no denying that many of the best minds in physics today are from the U.S.
Most particle accelerators spend a good portion of their time in maintenance, perpetually, and that includes American ones. The cyclotron at Texas A&M, for instance, is closed for the first quarter of the year, every year. And that isn't even a facility that is new and still gearing up - it has been running that way for many decades, yet it still requires that much downtime.
So stop being a nationalistic douchebag. But who am I kidding, I'm responding to an AC here.
The ATV has boosted the ISS numerous times.
And it is not an American vehicle. The point still stands - there is no way to "separate the two halves" and have a functioning station as you suggested. Even supposing we could get by entirely without Zvezda and Russian boosts, the Russian-owned docking module is the only place that another ship can mate for reboost. Interdependence is inherent to the design, and that is intentional.
How do you boost it then? It needs periodic orbit boosts to compensate for orbit degradation from drag. The only permanent module capable of this is Russian owned (Zvezda), and although there are two vehicles capable of providing some boost capability, neither one is American. For that matter, almost all the docking capability belongs to the Russians as well. So your claims are entirely false.
The singularity in the context of technological progress uses the black hole as a metaphor. It describes a point at which technology becomes self-propelling in a manner that makes it impossible for us to project what life would be like then, in a similar way to how miniaturisation and Moore's law have given us a present that couldn't have been projected in the 1940s.
I think the singularity is fundamentally different. There are very few things today that couldn't have been (or weren't) projected in the 40's. Sure, there were some things where the particulars were mostly wrong (rather than the internet, it would have been an automated library, or a robot that could give you answers, rather than ubiquitous video phones, we just have normal phones that we carry with us everywhere) but basically everything we have today is just the culmination of technological possibility that was seen long, long ago.
The singularity is supposed to go farther I think - like explaining video games to medieval peasants, or something like that. There isn't even the technological context available to convey the function or significance of new developments, if you go back far enough. The singularity is by definition supposed to be things that we can't even imagine, because the world will be so fundamentally different that it operates on a different set of assumptions.
That said, I'm not convinced that a singularity exists, or that there will be a future that is fundamentally unrecognizable to us today - we've imagined a hell of a lot of stuff, and even something that entirely changes human reality (brains in jars living in virtual interfaces, etc) will still differ from today's technology only by interface and increased sophistication.
Something made for interplanetary travel like that would need far more radiation shielding, which basically must drive most of the rest of the spacecraft architecture. The ISS is in one of the most benign orbits out there (not dealing with the Van Allen belts, yet still enjoying the protection of Earth's magnetosphere). As soon as it got beyond LEO, a single solar flare could be enough to give all the inhabitants a lethal dose of radiation.
Believe it or not, there are some fairly smart people working at NASA. And in the aerospace industry in general. Maybe rather than assuming that the people who do this professionally are ignorant, it would be better to assume that there's something they know that you don't.
The ISS will be a 20 year old international experiment at that point, yes the US and Russian halves of the ISS share a common "atmosphere" but mechanically they're completely separate space stations capable of detaching at any time.
False. The US portion of the ISS cannot survive without the Russian parts, and vice versa. This was intentional, to ensure interdependence and continued cooperation.
We've got dramatic and sudden changes forecasted in the use of automation in various industries. The trucking industry alone could change in a few short years with the advent of self-driving vehicles, leaving millions out of work. What kind of social impact do you foresee with these developments - do you think this kind of automation will be a fundamentally different kind of technological advance than our society has previously dealt with?
I imagine that the different circles you run in might have dramatically different responses to the religious emphasis in your recent work. What kind of reactions (wanted and unwanted) have you gotten from your recent move towards Christianity?
You have made a career out of writing books that popularize scientific findings - it seems like this is a task fraught with potential dangers, in terms of representing something that your readers misinterpret and misapply, or perhaps taking a published study and drawing an unwarranted conclusion yourself that attracts the ire of the original researchers. Certainly, much science journalism lately can be criticized for sensationalizing scientific results in the pursuit of better headlines, sometimes at the cost of being deliberately misleading. Can you expound a bit on the issues you've run into as a purveyor of scientific results, and explain how you balance the need for a faithful presentation of the source material with the desire to find something relatable and compelling enough to write a book about?
This article, from an evolutionary psychologist, entirely demonstrates my point. Breasts have evolved to be the way that they are because of sexual selection.
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
The point is that you select a mate based on what will best help your own genes to propagate. Males will be inclined to look for a woman that is 1: sexually mature (has breasts and wider hips than waist) 2: able to carry and deliver a child and feed the child until it is able to eat something besides breastmilk.
If you don't satisfy those minimal criteria, your genes aren't getting passed on. So by the only measure that matters in evolution, you haven't reproduced. The artificial methods you've suggested (bottles, etc) didn't exist during the vast majority of human history. They have nothing to do with it.
Now, we know that the features we've discussed are not actually reliable indicators of fitness (large-chested women can have trouble breastfeeding, and small-chested women can produce plenty of milk) but they key in to those things that a male will be biologically inclined to look at when choosing a mate. The reason that sex in advertising is so pernicious is because it taps into deep, instinctual biological impulses we have.
From the article: "The sex appeal of rounded female buttocks and plump breasts is both universal and unique to the human primate" - this is cited in more depth there, but the point is that you are arguing against human nature. Again, the answer is not to pretend that sexual body parts aren't what they are. It is to stop this weird culture of sexual obsession combined with prudery, accept that sex is just a part of life like any other, and be adults about the whole thing.
Feeding a child is only about 9 months removed from having sex. You can't have (typically, biologically speaking) one without the other. So I'm saying it is inherently associated with reproduction. It isn't a stretch to say that men would be biologically predisposed to "sexualize" breasts because of an instinct to look for a partner that could feed a child (not that it matters in reality, I'm well aware that cup size has little to do with milk production).
I guess the question would be this - is there any body part that is rightly considered "sexual"? If you don't believe so, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Wait, what? Something that has sexual characteristics can also perform other functions. I'm not sure what analogy you're trying to get at with the bathroom thing... I don't get offended when someone urinates in the restroom, and I don't get offended when someone breastfeeds in public or wherever. Those are both non-sexual behaviors with body parts that also have sexual functionality. I would probably find it inappropriate if someone was using those body parts to arouse themselves in public.
The point is, a body part that has a non-sexual function can still very well be an inherent part of the sexual process. So I'm saying that just because breastfeeding is not directly sexual, doesn't mean that breasts don't have an inherent sexual aspect due to our biology. And I would argue that they do, for a large variety of reasons - not least because when we are referring to the "sex" of a person we really mean whether they possess the physical features associated with being male or the physical features associated with being a woman. Anything on that short list of physical indicators is rightly called a sexual organ.
I'm not saying that breastfeeding in public is sexual. I'm just saying it is fine to accept the sexual aspects of breasts while simultaneously affirming the utility in child rearing. It isn't either/or.
Sexual selection is often about the features that suggest an individual is about being able to provide, care for, and protect offspring. Large breasts and a narrow waist both suggest capability in this area. Just like broad shoulders and height suggest so for a man.
The thing is, feeding a baby is an inherent part of the reproduction of the species, just as intercourse is. Breasts are the only organ that is exclusively related to reproduction - they serve literally no other purpose, and are an active hindrance in many other ways.
You haven't addressed that contention, so all the examples of other traits considered don't really impact my argument.
Breasts have no purpose except attracting a mate, and feeding offspring, both of which are closely related to sexual activity. It's like saying that people shouldn't associate penises with sex, because they are used for other things too. I agree that many cultures are too uptight about teh boobs, but I don't think that is because they have wrongfully associated breasts with sex. I think it's because sex is still taboo in many places, and also because females are treated as sex objects more than men are.
We don't need a campaign of public breastfeeding or more nudity to solve the problem, we just need more gender equality and general comfort with sexuality. I agree with you that advertising is way over the line and a big contributor to the problem though.
Lastly, an otherwise pretty decent post was ruined when you decided to get holier-than-thou on anybody who ever eats a burger. People who might otherwise listen to you will stop as soon as you get pretentious and judgmental about perfectly normal eating habits.
I presume that reason is water weight, in the case of steam turbines, and the lack of free atmosphere to work with in the case of stirling engines.
A Stirling engine doesn't require an atmosphere - all the gases are sealed inside and they are "external combustion" engines - just apply a heat source to one side, allow the other side to radiate heat, and away you go.
Is there an Internet Law that says "Whatever the real cause of the problem, there is always someone who will blame Microsoft"?
Welcome to slashdot. You must be new here.
I'm not saying it is perfect - I'm saying that the model successfully ushered in the information age and built us the foundation of all modern technology. Which is no small achievement. You'll remember that the original contention was that a heavily regulated monopoly will never produce innovation - and Bell Labs demonstrably proves that about as false as anything could.
Fundamentally, I'm a believer in the free market, and the capabilities of industry, and the benefits of thoughtful regulation. When it comes to innovation, I think Bell Labs really was the best of both worlds - maybe it didn't lead to the cheapest service, but it was a hell of a lot more reliable than modern internet or cell service, and it's not as though the current telcos are any better when it comes to prices or customer service.
I don't disagree with what you say, but we have an obvious problem here - I'd say the majority of recent political campaigning is explicitly designed to incite hatred of the other team. There's some evidence to suggest it has had violent consequences as well, depending on how you lean on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.
So, on balance, do you think you would get more innovation out of a hyper-behemoth regulated monopoly that had cash to spare, or would you rather have a bunch of non-regulated companies that had to compete to create new things?
That's the question, isn't it? I guess the only answer that really makes sense is "it depends". I wish that people would take more account of how the Bell Labs model actually worked pretty damn well - imagine if we did take a similar approach to many existing monopolies, and demanded that because of their tremendous power they had to submit to oversight, had to constrain profits to certain levels, and had to license/sell developments at a reasonable cost. I think this is a "third way" besides breaking them up into tiny chunks that can actually be more beneficial. The thing is, competition is great because it introduces pressure to keep prices low and creates an incentive to come up with a clever competitive advantage, but there's also an inherent duplication of effort in competition that you avoid with a monopoly.
The issue is, something like this could be a best-of-both-worlds approach, but it does things that would piss off the left (protect a big powerful corporation) and piss off the right more (give the government lots of power over that corporation). So chances of it actually happening much? Very low. I for one am optimistic that we could see a good outcome from this telecom change though.