That doesn't seem very fair. Maybe from Google's elevated position private companies can compete with governments but in reality almost any government can outcompete a company if it really puts its mind to the job, never mind a megastate like China. So the winners are out five million because they don't have the resources of a fifth of the world's population to call on - what was the thinking there?
These should be kept seperate from normal medical facilities and under the same sort of scrutiny as Fort Knox. I don't trust a single one of those bastards.:D
The application of our intelligence has become its own evolution, enabling greater survivability for individuals and the species as a whole. As for destructive evolution, its pretty simple. An asteroid wipes out 90% of life on the planet, what emerges is different - destructive. Knowledge and understanding built up over generations granting advantages for everyone - constructive. How that knowledge is applied determines the future of the species.
What's really really obvious is that if you take a human and raise them in isolation or in a primitive tribe, they might have a much lower IQ than if the exact same human was raised by the finest minds and educators in the modern world. This is a nonsensical study in particular since we have no clear definition of what "intelligence" is (hint: its not IQ). Basically he's just equating intelligence to those who weren't eaten by a tiger or killed in wars, avoided plagues, and generally got lucky long enough to procreate. I don't know about you but that's strikes me as tripe.
We have at this point taken control of our own evolution in terms of intelligence and are developing it seperately from the law of the jungle, constructive rather than destructive evolution.
No, that would run contrary to the "manifest destiny/god made it so/just born better" motivations behind this sorting. Can't have people pointing out that wealthy and educated people have advantages over poor and uneducated folks now can we, that would highlight the problems that really need to be addressed.
Even if being polygamous is/were natural, so is crushing your foe's skull with a large rock. The great advantage humans have is we don't have to follow our instincts.
Actually it takes a great deal of hard work to train most people to kill, the overwhelming majority just won't do it naturally, look it up. And did you really just compare an open lifestyle with crushing someone's skull?
And some girls get to have two boyfriends. Really, its no big deal, if people were meant to be monogamous we wouldn't need marriage in the first place. I mean of course it served a purpose in the medieval past as regards child protection and so on, but these days its a most peculair institution. If two (or three or four) people love one another they don't need legal contracts to petrify the emotion.
As for sex, come on. Why do love and sex have to be the same thing? Cats have sex, dogs have sex, animals have sex constantly without ever having to form lifelong bonds. Its an activity, no different to any sport. People should enjoy themselves as they see fit without having to swear fidelity or mutual ownership, jealousy is a poisonous emotion.
It strikes me, someone who thinks the process of turning fossil fuels into energy and other useful products is "fantastically convoluted", wouldn't be developing a technological civilization. It's just not that hard.
No, but its harder than just using electric vehicles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle The notes on the early development of electric rail networks in Switzerland are interesting in the context of this speculation. The long and the short of it is that while the convenience element may be arguable, the fact that an advanced civilisation could emerge almost entirely without using oil is not to my mind in question.
We are an example of a civilization that has mined enough metal to be noticed on a geological scale. And because that metal doesn't go away, there'll be sedimentary layers with unusual characteristics (such as unusually high or low metal and organics concentrations) for millions of years to come.
I would dispute this, given the amount of tectonic shifting the earth has experienced in its lifetime a few tens of millions of years, along with ice ages and the general bump and grind of eternity, would smear any concentrations thinly across large areas. Mountain ranges turn to hills on these timescales.
And even if they didn't the chances of finding such a concentration are practically nil, we just don't excavate deeply enough in enough places. We're still turning up whole settlements from only a few thousand years ago entirely by accident. After a while, archareologoy and geology become the same thing.
As for us digging out enough to be noticed, we've only taken a tiny, tiny portion of a tiny sliver from the very uppermost layer of the earth's crust. I don't think it would be noticed over long periods of time. Reports of having only x amount of copper left are talking about the capacity of existing mines, not the total amount of copper left in the world.
They would probably leave it lying around because the fantastically convoluted process needed to turn the goop into actual mobility would strike them as really stupidly unneccessary. I mean we used horses for thousands of years, then a century of gasoline, then many more years of electrics barring the invention of magical transport beams or something. Oil is a hiccup, a bizarre cul de sac, its really not hard to imagine a civilisation sidestepping it completely. As for metal mining, even assuming a civilisation could extract enough metal for it to be noticeable after geological time periods in a tectonically active world, that metal doesn't go up in smoke, unlike gasoline.
The main evidence against this idea is that there's still oil in the ground, and no indication it was deliberately placed there for us. It would seem that a previous culture would need energy as badly as we do, and oil didn't take us that much technology (initially) to get at and start consuming.
You're assuming that oil and petroleum use are neccessary steps for civilisation to arise. Who's to say that a hypothetical civilisation wouldn't have skipped the few decades of gasoline and just gone straight to wind farms plus electric engines? By comparison the effort involved in finding, drilling, pumping, refining, transporting through giant pipes or container ships, storing, pumping again, then setting oil on fire in elaborate internal combustion engines would seem pretty stupid to an outside observer. Just hook up some windmills and wires, done.
This doesn't address the question of where the stars came from in the first place. We don't have even a tiny tiny slice of the big picture yet, so any announcements about the impending doom of the universe are premature to put it mildly, even on astronomical scales.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah go European style, that's what a twinkie should be.
Please. I'd bet half the trolls on the internet are minors. Kids say and do things just because they are forbidden, its normal.
That doesn't seem very fair. Maybe from Google's elevated position private companies can compete with governments but in reality almost any government can outcompete a company if it really puts its mind to the job, never mind a megastate like China. So the winners are out five million because they don't have the resources of a fifth of the world's population to call on - what was the thinking there?
I wouldn't be able to do NEARLY as much to an e-reader as I can with a paperback.
Great, how much can you do with eleven thousand paperbacks. Because that's how many I have in my e-reader.
You could be using it to make apps for sale to people with equally expensive phones!
These should be kept seperate from normal medical facilities and under the same sort of scrutiny as Fort Knox. I don't trust a single one of those bastards. :D
But godzilla doesn't have any tentacles!
I'd expect a few libel suits in lieu.
The application of our intelligence has become its own evolution, enabling greater survivability for individuals and the species as a whole. As for destructive evolution, its pretty simple. An asteroid wipes out 90% of life on the planet, what emerges is different - destructive. Knowledge and understanding built up over generations granting advantages for everyone - constructive. How that knowledge is applied determines the future of the species.
How so? The mind is a muscle like any other, without stimulation of various sorts it will atrophy. http://www.iqtestexperts.com/iq-improve.php
What's really really obvious is that if you take a human and raise them in isolation or in a primitive tribe, they might have a much lower IQ than if the exact same human was raised by the finest minds and educators in the modern world. This is a nonsensical study in particular since we have no clear definition of what "intelligence" is (hint: its not IQ). Basically he's just equating intelligence to those who weren't eaten by a tiger or killed in wars, avoided plagues, and generally got lucky long enough to procreate. I don't know about you but that's strikes me as tripe.
We have at this point taken control of our own evolution in terms of intelligence and are developing it seperately from the law of the jungle, constructive rather than destructive evolution.
No, that would run contrary to the "manifest destiny/god made it so/just born better" motivations behind this sorting. Can't have people pointing out that wealthy and educated people have advantages over poor and uneducated folks now can we, that would highlight the problems that really need to be addressed.
When you find a search engine that does that, let us know!
Check out these bad boys:
http://oberondesign.com/e-reader-covers/nook.html
I just pray the next gen ereaders keep the exact same size as the Nook so I dont have to buy another one!
Its got nothing to do with morals. Businesses won't operate in China if they can be shut down on a whim, much too risky.
Even if being polygamous is/were natural, so is crushing your foe's skull with a large rock. The great advantage humans have is we don't have to follow our instincts.
Actually it takes a great deal of hard work to train most people to kill, the overwhelming majority just won't do it naturally, look it up. And did you really just compare an open lifestyle with crushing someone's skull?
And some girls get to have two boyfriends. Really, its no big deal, if people were meant to be monogamous we wouldn't need marriage in the first place. I mean of course it served a purpose in the medieval past as regards child protection and so on, but these days its a most peculair institution. If two (or three or four) people love one another they don't need legal contracts to petrify the emotion.
As for sex, come on. Why do love and sex have to be the same thing? Cats have sex, dogs have sex, animals have sex constantly without ever having to form lifelong bonds. Its an activity, no different to any sport. People should enjoy themselves as they see fit without having to swear fidelity or mutual ownership, jealousy is a poisonous emotion.
It strikes me, someone who thinks the process of turning fossil fuels into energy and other useful products is "fantastically convoluted", wouldn't be developing a technological civilization. It's just not that hard.
No, but its harder than just using electric vehicles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle The notes on the early development of electric rail networks in Switzerland are interesting in the context of this speculation. The long and the short of it is that while the convenience element may be arguable, the fact that an advanced civilisation could emerge almost entirely without using oil is not to my mind in question.
We are an example of a civilization that has mined enough metal to be noticed on a geological scale. And because that metal doesn't go away, there'll be sedimentary layers with unusual characteristics (such as unusually high or low metal and organics concentrations) for millions of years to come.
I would dispute this, given the amount of tectonic shifting the earth has experienced in its lifetime a few tens of millions of years, along with ice ages and the general bump and grind of eternity, would smear any concentrations thinly across large areas. Mountain ranges turn to hills on these timescales.
And even if they didn't the chances of finding such a concentration are practically nil, we just don't excavate deeply enough in enough places. We're still turning up whole settlements from only a few thousand years ago entirely by accident. After a while, archareologoy and geology become the same thing.
As for us digging out enough to be noticed, we've only taken a tiny, tiny portion of a tiny sliver from the very uppermost layer of the earth's crust. I don't think it would be noticed over long periods of time. Reports of having only x amount of copper left are talking about the capacity of existing mines, not the total amount of copper left in the world.
You can make plastic from potatoes, ref also bioplastics: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-Potato-Plastic!/
Fertiliser and more: http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.ie/2007/11/314-peak-oil-and-fertilizer-no-problem.html
A hypothetical civilisation that didn't bother with oil would have had little difficulty finding substitutes, in my opinion.
They would probably leave it lying around because the fantastically convoluted process needed to turn the goop into actual mobility would strike them as really stupidly unneccessary. I mean we used horses for thousands of years, then a century of gasoline, then many more years of electrics barring the invention of magical transport beams or something. Oil is a hiccup, a bizarre cul de sac, its really not hard to imagine a civilisation sidestepping it completely. As for metal mining, even assuming a civilisation could extract enough metal for it to be noticeable after geological time periods in a tectonically active world, that metal doesn't go up in smoke, unlike gasoline.
The main evidence against this idea is that there's still oil in the ground, and no indication it was deliberately placed there for us. It would seem that a previous culture would need energy as badly as we do, and oil didn't take us that much technology (initially) to get at and start consuming.
You're assuming that oil and petroleum use are neccessary steps for civilisation to arise. Who's to say that a hypothetical civilisation wouldn't have skipped the few decades of gasoline and just gone straight to wind farms plus electric engines? By comparison the effort involved in finding, drilling, pumping, refining, transporting through giant pipes or container ships, storing, pumping again, then setting oil on fire in elaborate internal combustion engines would seem pretty stupid to an outside observer. Just hook up some windmills and wires, done.
I guess that's why Jobs came up with ipods.
This doesn't address the question of where the stars came from in the first place. We don't have even a tiny tiny slice of the big picture yet, so any announcements about the impending doom of the universe are premature to put it mildly, even on astronomical scales.
What is a "creator of user generated content"? Should that be "aggregator"?
Move to all mail voting, or in Ca at least I understand you can apply for permanent vote by mail status.
The Suffragettes would be terribly upset, we'd never hear the end of it.