Selling a computer with XP past the Microsoft cutoff date is pretty irresponsible. At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions?
Considering all the business and home people that would like XP Professional rather than Ubuntu. I'd say this a great business decision for Dell.
3) What remnants of an Ark would one expect to find 70000, or even 5000 years after the fact? Conversely, what evidence could be shown that would decisively PROVE OR DISPROVE that the event happened? And I'm talking about scientific evidence here. Not anecdotal faith-based cruft. Not even science-based faith-based cruft, if you please...
I thought the Noah legend was just that the Jews borrowed a preexisting actual story and adding in some morality to the story so there would be point in telling it. If I recall correctly, the current theory was that there was a guy that had a grain ship that he lived on with all his various livestock. Big flash flood/storm happened and washed them out to see. Big storm several days and when storm cleared/moved on. They were in the middle of the sea. What's the answer to where the land went? The entire earth must have flooded. O.k. the guy had a big ship so his concept of the entire earth was where he sailed his craft and who he normally traded with. Obviously, the guy made land fall traded with the natives and became local rich guy. Guy shows up with huge ship with grain/animals of course he is rich in the ancient sense. The guy lives somewhat happily ever after. The world hardly noticed that it was supposedly ended during a storm. Of course "the world" for the villages that the guy normally traded with where ended, but that was due to the damn river flooding and a storm. Oh, yeah the local survivors can blame it on the local deity being mad at them.
Remember POV in these stories is everything. "The World" as the town/village and everything that you are normally exposed to has ended millions of time in our history. It s just now that alot of people are actually being exposed to the concept of the actual entire world rather than the tiny portion of it that they live on be ravaged by war or something that we now have to worry about it. We love to expand what we worry about. 200 years ago we didn't worry about gaint rocks falling from the sky killing everyone.
Well if what we are doing right now is the best we can do, and we are causing global warming, then we are completely screwed. Might as well give up now and save a few billion dollars.
I'm of the opinion that GW is natural and we are just giving it a teeny tiny push. Next they'll blame the next ice age on human activity as well.
Remember evolution; the survivors write the history/religious books. If there is any natural event that wipes out major cities or causes massive political change, I'll bet my 2 cents that there will be some cult that is very successful blaming it all on us and our sins. It's not a natural thing. We are sinning against the planet and/or God/the Goddess/Mother Earth decided to punish us, which wiped out the ancient civilizations. The ancient civs lived in a sinful manor so of course our religious diety struck them down and then chose only the worthy to survive.
Considering human acts the main cause of global warming (or whatever other catastrophe you want) is very comforting. Why ? Because we can do something about it. On the other hand, if humans are not the cause, we have a really big problem. Imagine it is some kind of change on the sun. How do we handle that ? These days, I take a great deal of comfort on the idea we are destroying out planet, our "natural" disaster are due to humans doing this or that.
This is kinda why I really hate all those that are into human caused climate change like a religion. I'm far more worried that all of humanity is only doing say 1-5% of the change. What the hell would we do than? Converting over 100% renewable power and having a 99% recycling rate in everything would be good, but what if that doesn't change a thing and the Earth's climate is still doing wacky anti-human changes?
Oh, well evolution will take over and who ever happens to survive will write the history/religious books.
There were many stories like this before and each time they were twisted to cause cries about dictator Putin and slavish Russians. Are these posted by "message force multipliers"?
I think that we have to rail against Russia, China, North Korea, and Iraq with little actual knowledge of those countries. Those countries will "always" be our public villians or such even if they are more our allies than enemies.
My 10 year old daughter has it in her head that she hates China. I ask her "why what did China ever do to you?" and she just gives me a blank stare and can't come up with anything, but she still dislikes China. When I was growing up mainly in the 80s anything Russian in the movies was nearly automatically the bad guy. (Unless it was the hot Russian girl that liked the US more that Russia.) I couldn't name a single thing that Russia ever did against the US, but our entire country hated there guts. During the whole late 90s, the new bad guys were anyone from the middle east. Those folks are mostly terrorists or support terrorists so its o.k. for you to hate them.
The only place that I really hear people talk against North Korea is on slashdot. I think North Korea is under the mental radar of most of the public around here as just not being worth it to bother to hate. We'd rather hate our neighbor that's going to the wrong cult of Christ than spend time worrying about what anyone in Asia is doing.
The stories about Putin and his hot gymnast girlfriend got a paper's license revoked. I imagine the internet rules would be as even handed.
I'd think most people would support a leader more with an eye candy girl along side him. Why would they want to hush up that news? Oh, well different country, different culture. They might actually have a sense of privacy in public person's lives over there. We don't have that concept around here.
There are days that I think that the government shouldn't allow insurance companies from refusing to insure anyone. I also think that the behind the scenes numbers of how the insurance companies actually determine their rates and such should be required to be released to the government and the public. (I also think insurance companies shouldn't have get out of jail free cards for "acts of god." What a scam that phrase is. Everything can be an act of god. It's an act of god that I pay taxes and insurance, you shouldn't be allowed to use that to get out of paying claims.)
I'm very mixed on DNA tests and insurance rates. The thing is that even if you are predisposed to everything then you should still be able to find affordable insurance. The insurance companies shouldn't be allowed to refuse to insure that person or use crippling rates to prevent them from having insurance that's what this is supposed to prevent. I doubt it will.
The key point is that 5-10% off that those use the DNA testing will get off on their rates will be just enough to drive most those that what to save a buck to ask their insurance companies about if it's an option. Later on, your cheaper rates may come back to haunt your kids or grand kids though.
On Wednesday they handed over information on pedophiles On Thursday they handed over information on terrorists On Friday they handed over information on file-sharers On Saturday they handed over information on everyone Wednesday was the hardest. Every day after that it got easier and easier.
What are you talking about? Wednesday they had to hand over every one's data because everyone is suspected of being a pedophile, which is now defined as communicating in any form with a minor.
It's called a chilling effect. If this is upheld, it will send the message that if you criticise pseudo-science, you are in danger of being dragged before a court and having all your personal details examined for no good reason. It's an undue burden on speech that many people will not be willing to take just to speak out against some kooks.
This could be a most effective weapon. You don't like our some climate change crap, just send lawyers after 'em. You don't like abortion or do, just send lawyers after the other side! You don't like X just send lawyers after those that support X. The big thing isn't that our system could already stop this. The big thing is that depending on who you are going against and their legal consul you could win... Once enough "winners" exist in case law, well shit. then any one with enough sense to do it right could do it successfully to their chosen target.
I would be surprised if we (United States) ever make it to the Mars/Moon on such a shoestring budget that we have today. Unless we have a dramatic budget shift towards the sciences (and away from wars *cough* *cough*), I see commercial/private interests as our next great funding source for space science and transport. Eventually we will probably have manned moon missions that are completely commercial and privately owned/funded. However NASA's technology right now is lightyears ahead of what any company can do (unless Lockheed Martin and Boeing join the commercial space race). I guess we'll be seeing more philanthropic donations to the space sciences in the future.
The US isn't noted for long term thinking. China is. The US has to have some one else be there doing it to out do before we take a governmental interest.
US companies do have all of NASAs space tech. The problem is that its far too expensive for a business to play around without seeing any short term ROI. Some Japanese businesses have been noted for having long business planning that could make commercial space stuff profitable, but you'd have to have atleast one company/government/person fund their own profitable space stuff before anyone else thinks me too.
Right now, it takes Bill Gates level cash for an individual to play funding a space company/assets. Sure we have a lot of billionaires now, but if was cheap enough that individuals that have less than ten million could get into space, you'd see vastly more development. (It's not there, yet.) When the price drops to where those of us making 30-40K can buy a vacation home or something in space, then you'd see massive space development. It's all about cost.
Being able to do something and being willing to pay for it are two seperate things. Just because the military is pioneering this research doesn't mean they are going to make it available for free to the young men and women they are responsible for maiming. They could just try and make a profit from it.
Furthermore, 300,000 soldiers are coming back from Iraq with some kind of mental disorder. You can't grow a new happy mind in a petri dish.
Calling all/most returning soldiers having mental disorders/problems is very low. (Just because they have a wider world view than you and have different political beliefs is no reason to call them names.)
The military isn't responsible for maiming their own soldiers. It's the enemy that is. So we should just present Iraq or who ever we declare as the enemy with the bill for regen on all our soldiers.
You seem weak in critical thinking, but its far more likely that they'll charge you a nonveteran an arm and a leg for this stuff so veterans can get it for free. (Well "free" to the veterans. You'll be paying out the...) The other choice is we all pay higher taxes for increased V.A. Benefits that now include regen. That'll pass in two heart beats. No republican or democrat would want to ever be the person that voted against radical health improvements for veterans.
The three "expelled" people presented in the movie -- these are the worst stories the filmmakers could find -- involved a professor who failed to get tenure because he wasn't good enough, a woman who had her contract run out and didn't have it renewed, and them someone who said he was "fired" from the Smithsonian, despite actually being an unpaid research assistant whose term ran out.
But that's even better. That's exactly what's needed. See these people were expelled. He didn't get tenure not because he wasn't good enough, just that those judging him didn't find his topic worthwhile. The other two are even better there you could say that they did something that the community would displease of, but instead of being fired, their contracts just renewed when they came up next. That's so much better.
I'm surprised that tenure still exists and that all professors/scientists aren't on yearly contracts. You say or do something that your bosses don't like and you won't be fired; your contract will just not be renewed next year because you weren't performing up to par. For bonus points add in monthly performance reviews that are mostly negative and if that employee ever has others look into then it looks like they deserved to be fired, but were allowed to continue out their term instead of being fired.
we need to confront the real underlying psychological issue here: faith in humanity
Um, do we really? I view both sides of the topic as having too much faith. No one really bothers to think. I know just enough that I'm happy with most of evolution. I still believe in God and that god could ID using evolution/selective breeding whenever/however with most of the desired results that god wants. (Or that God just fucked up, got us and hasn't figured out what we are good for yet.)
I look at the entire climate change issue there. I find those think humans are evil and all our actions cause bad things to happen to mother earth to be guilty of having a bit too much faith in their new religion. I believe that our actions are a percentage of it, but what magic percentage? I typically think all human activities have effected global environment less than 5 percent. The masses have far too much faith in their various high priests that what they are told is right and they should do it without any more thinking involved thank you very much.
Here on slashdot, it's taken as faith that linux, open source, apple, or google is good and closed source, Microsoft, or the government is evil.
I figure that we all have our faith blinders, and we use them differently depending on the crowd that we are in at the moment.
For example the other day when my chemistry teacher told me that material stuff is made of atoms, I really couldn't believe him. I think I should have been given the right back then to discuss with them about my theory that everything is conformed by milk derivatives.
That's really an excellent topic where the students just need alot of faith that the teacher is right, but the teacher usually can't provide anything for the students to use to test it out if they think its false. There are days that I think that we need to throw out everything we teach kids that they aren't given the tools to test for themselves if it actually is that way. You take it on faith that the teachers and book are right.
Actually, this is just Ben Stein's great way of capitalizing on fears and preconceptions of the population. He literally produced a film that caters to the ignorant and the blindly faithful... without even a shred of evidence that he himself believes it....
As a scientist who believes in God, I am appalled at this film, and I think Stein should be ashamed of himself. Maybe if not for asshole exercises such as this, people would calm down and realize that unless you take religious texts literally, they address questions that are incompatible with science, and thus cannot possibly be in conflict with the latter.
I'd never heard of Ben Stein until his name was on slashdot's frontpage. I figure if anyone watches his movie because of the slashdot effect, than he has decent marketing PR for his movie. Does George Lucas believe in the Force & Jedi? Well he does believe in it just enough to bring him truck loads of money. I can't really fault either.
I blame those that start their beliefs based on movies. O.k. I guess there isn't any difference in basing your religion on a movie vs a book so I guess go ahead and start your new movie or video game based religion.
It would be great for wild animal populations, although bad for farmers and fisherman.
Um, not really. We'd be free to pollute the oceans like there was no tomorrow since we weren't raising food there any more. The same applies if we got rid of all the farm land and had farming sky scrappers. If that was viable, we'd be free to pollute all that farm land. Do you really think that we'd do anything else?
Well, this is a sci-fi tech that we could do. I eat beef, pork, chicken, and some times things like shrimp. Can you create artificial plants that tastes and cooks like meat oh and is cheaper than existing meat? If so, I'd buy it.
It's not like, I really know where the meat sold at Walmart comes from. It's in the meat section, is red, and doesn't kill my family when we cook it. If they can only make it cost effective for it to compete in the traditional meat market. Raising cows, pigs, chickens, and fish are billion dollar a year industries. O.k. They might change, but the only reason we'd switch away from them is if you could make your mystery meat cheaper. I'm reminded of this manga: http://www.onemanga.com/BioMeat_-_Nectar/
Is this even legal? Seriously. If someone has money in PayPal, and if that same someone happens to be using a browser that is deemed "unsafe" and is sequentially banned, isn't that like PayPal holding the money hostage? What happens to those who refuse to "upgrade" in order to access their account?
I think the "smart" thing to do would be never to keep money at PayPal. I've heard far to things about that "not a bank" yet acting like a bank to me business that I'd ever willing use them for my internet money transfers. If your business demands that I use PayPal, I shop else where. I've always thought smart internet shoppers did the same. There is enough choice online that if a business is doing something slightly annoying that you don't like, then you can go else where. Boycotting does change businesses.
I consider those that get burned on PayPal as paying yet another tax on stupid people. (It's one of those hidden life taxes that anyone can avoid, but if you live life stupidly, then you are going to be paying for it sooner or later.)
Wow. I would much rather voluntarily offer information to a social network than be forced to give my info to the government. Remember that the more power you give the government the easier it is for them to crush resistance when it turns oppressive.
I beat you hated year book photos. Come on the government already knows all this crap. They have access to your address, DL info, tax info, as much census info as you give, and criminal history. The only thing that they don't have easy access to is your educational history.
The more that I see; the more that I'm convinced that no one cares about giving 98% of this informational stuff to the government/school/employer/or their church group. The only group that they don't want easy access to this info is casual friends, internet "friends", and those on the other side of their political side. Society needs to learn what's o.k. to be public easy to find/search and what's morally not right.
I have no moral issues against an ID card. Listening to slash dot rants against it though. Slash dot's view is a religious crusade against accurate ID information as bad as keeping evolution out of schools. Instead of discussing how as a society are going to change, folks here just whine that this change is bad/evil and we should do everything in our power to stop it. Rolls Eyes. You can't stop change.
Haven't you ever wondered what happened to your best friend from Elementary school? Your favorite acquaintances from college? It's not about chat. It is about keeping a link to people that would otherwise get left behind. As (at least in the U.S.) society becomes more mobile there is a strong desire to keep those ties. There's a lot of lonely people out there who treasure reading the blogs, hearing the music, and looking at pictures of former in-the-flesh friends.
This is one of the few good reasons why I think that we need a national ID card with track able numbers that you are supposed to give to contacts so that they can look you up.
You know what I miss most about school? Year books. I see the same people in my work place/building/going to lunch every day, but I don't know any of their names or really what any of them do. There are days that I'd like a city wide year book.
If I was running a national ID card, I'd want them issued ASAP to some one and yearly up date photos taken. If you've given school friends your public traceable number, then they'll have your name, photo, address, and maybe telephone or e-mail address.
Can we not dream that there are artificially intelligent armed to the teeth robots ready to kill us at a moments notice?! If you take that away, what do we have left?! Do not bring your holier than thou facts to our paranoia party. If we believe hard enough that there are crazed, deadly robots on the loose, maybe... one day our dream might come true! So step off Sgt. Buzzkill.
I'm just waiting until some one let's loose the bots and has them conquer and expand out in any direction without thinking ahead of what happens when the bots circle the Earth.
so we simply build it *on top of* new jersey. it's about the right size, plus there's no wildlife anywhere in NJ to displace. as for the locals, who cares? it's fucking new jersey. the power can then be transmitted directly to new york city. i mean, sure theres *supposed* to be enough power to go around, but when has NYC ever fell short on a challenge to guzzle resources?
Why not just build air tight solar domes over every major city. This solves both their energy problems and the rest of the nation's air pollutions problems at the same time.
Is it? have you even checked the likelihood of that happening? As a matter of fact, in an average year, around 50 undersea cables are broken. Given that there are 365 days in a year, what is the chance of two breaking in 'such a short timeframe?' It doesn't happen every day, but it's not really out of the ordinary. Check these things before you try to dream up a conspiracy.
Seriously, when it comes to technology slashdot is collectively pretty intelligent; but when it comes to paranoia and politics, slashdot collectively drops down to the IQ of a two year old.
It's also a conspiracy that my trash isn't collected right when I put it out. Those black op trash collectors only pick up the trash like once a week!
Slashdot Mirror
Selling a computer with XP past the Microsoft cutoff date is pretty irresponsible. At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions?
Considering all the business and home people that would like XP Professional rather than Ubuntu. I'd say this a great business decision for Dell.
3) What remnants of an Ark would one expect to find 70000, or even 5000 years after the fact? Conversely, what evidence could be shown that would decisively PROVE OR DISPROVE that the event happened? And I'm talking about scientific evidence here. Not anecdotal faith-based cruft. Not even science-based faith-based cruft, if you please...
I thought the Noah legend was just that the Jews borrowed a preexisting actual story and adding in some morality to the story so there would be point in telling it. If I recall correctly, the current theory was that there was a guy that had a grain ship that he lived on with all his various livestock. Big flash flood/storm happened and washed them out to see. Big storm several days and when storm cleared/moved on. They were in the middle of the sea. What's the answer to where the land went? The entire earth must have flooded. O.k. the guy had a big ship so his concept of the entire earth was where he sailed his craft and who he normally traded with. Obviously, the guy made land fall traded with the natives and became local rich guy. Guy shows up with huge ship with grain/animals of course he is rich in the ancient sense. The guy lives somewhat happily ever after. The world hardly noticed that it was supposedly ended during a storm. Of course "the world" for the villages that the guy normally traded with where ended, but that was due to the damn river flooding and a storm. Oh, yeah the local survivors can blame it on the local deity being mad at them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(mythology)
Remember POV in these stories is everything. "The World" as the town/village and everything that you are normally exposed to has ended millions of time in our history. It s just now that alot of people are actually being exposed to the concept of the actual entire world rather than the tiny portion of it that they live on be ravaged by war or something that we now have to worry about it. We love to expand what we worry about. 200 years ago we didn't worry about gaint rocks falling from the sky killing everyone.
Well if what we are doing right now is the best we can do, and we are causing global warming, then we are completely screwed.
Might as well give up now and save a few billion dollars.
I'm of the opinion that GW is natural and we are just giving it a teeny tiny push.
Next they'll blame the next ice age on human activity as well.
Remember evolution; the survivors write the history/religious books. If there is any natural event that wipes out major cities or causes massive political change, I'll bet my 2 cents that there will be some cult that is very successful blaming it all on us and our sins. It's not a natural thing. We are sinning against the planet and/or God/the Goddess/Mother Earth decided to punish us, which wiped out the ancient civilizations. The ancient civs lived in a sinful manor so of course our religious diety struck them down and then chose only the worthy to survive.
Considering human acts the main cause of global warming (or whatever other catastrophe you want) is very comforting. Why ? Because we can do something about it.
On the other hand, if humans are not the cause, we have a really big problem. Imagine it is some kind of change on the sun. How do we handle that ?
These days, I take a great deal of comfort on the idea we are destroying out planet, our "natural" disaster are due to humans doing this or that.
This is kinda why I really hate all those that are into human caused climate change like a religion. I'm far more worried that all of humanity is only doing say 1-5% of the change. What the hell would we do than? Converting over 100% renewable power and having a 99% recycling rate in everything would be good, but what if that doesn't change a thing and the Earth's climate is still doing wacky anti-human changes?
Oh, well evolution will take over and who ever happens to survive will write the history/religious books.
There were many stories like this before and each time they were twisted to cause cries about dictator Putin and slavish Russians. Are these posted by "message force multipliers"?
I think that we have to rail against Russia, China, North Korea, and Iraq with little actual knowledge of those countries. Those countries will "always" be our public villians or such even if they are more our allies than enemies.
My 10 year old daughter has it in her head that she hates China. I ask her "why what did China ever do to you?" and she just gives me a blank stare and can't come up with anything, but she still dislikes China. When I was growing up mainly in the 80s anything Russian in the movies was nearly automatically the bad guy. (Unless it was the hot Russian girl that liked the US more that Russia.) I couldn't name a single thing that Russia ever did against the US, but our entire country hated there guts. During the whole late 90s, the new bad guys were anyone from the middle east. Those folks are mostly terrorists or support terrorists so its o.k. for you to hate them.
The only place that I really hear people talk against North Korea is on slashdot. I think North Korea is under the mental radar of most of the public around here as just not being worth it to bother to hate. We'd rather hate our neighbor that's going to the wrong cult of Christ than spend time worrying about what anyone in Asia is doing.
The stories about Putin and his hot gymnast girlfriend got a paper's license revoked. I imagine the internet rules would be as even handed.
I'd think most people would support a leader more with an eye candy girl along side him. Why would they want to hush up that news? Oh, well different country, different culture. They might actually have a sense of privacy in public person's lives over there. We don't have that concept around here.
There are days that I think that the government shouldn't allow insurance companies from refusing to insure anyone. I also think that the behind the scenes numbers of how the insurance companies actually determine their rates and such should be required to be released to the government and the public. (I also think insurance companies shouldn't have get out of jail free cards for "acts of god." What a scam that phrase is. Everything can be an act of god. It's an act of god that I pay taxes and insurance, you shouldn't be allowed to use that to get out of paying claims.)
I'm very mixed on DNA tests and insurance rates. The thing is that even if you are predisposed to everything then you should still be able to find affordable insurance. The insurance companies shouldn't be allowed to refuse to insure that person or use crippling rates to prevent them from having insurance that's what this is supposed to prevent. I doubt it will.
The key point is that 5-10% off that those use the DNA testing will get off on their rates will be just enough to drive most those that what to save a buck to ask their insurance companies about if it's an option. Later on, your cheaper rates may come back to haunt your kids or grand kids though.
On Wednesday they handed over information on pedophiles
On Thursday they handed over information on terrorists
On Friday they handed over information on file-sharers
On Saturday they handed over information on everyone
Wednesday was the hardest. Every day after that it got easier and easier.
What are you talking about? Wednesday they had to hand over every one's data because everyone is suspected of being a pedophile, which is now defined as communicating in any form with a minor.
Isn't it DARPA's job to be working on every sci-fi weapon tech that might work?
It's called a chilling effect. If this is upheld, it will send the message that if you criticise pseudo-science, you are in danger of being dragged before a court and having all your personal details examined for no good reason. It's an undue burden on speech that many people will not be willing to take just to speak out against some kooks.
This could be a most effective weapon. You don't like our some climate change crap, just send lawyers after 'em. You don't like abortion or do, just send lawyers after the other side! You don't like X just send lawyers after those that support X. The big thing isn't that our system could already stop this. The big thing is that depending on who you are going against and their legal consul you could win... Once enough "winners" exist in case law, well shit. then any one with enough sense to do it right could do it successfully to their chosen target.
I would be surprised if we (United States) ever make it to the Mars/Moon on such a shoestring budget that we have today. Unless we have a dramatic budget shift towards the sciences (and away from wars *cough* *cough*), I see commercial/private interests as our next great funding source for space science and transport. Eventually we will probably have manned moon missions that are completely commercial and privately owned/funded. However NASA's technology right now is lightyears ahead of what any company can do (unless Lockheed Martin and Boeing join the commercial space race). I guess we'll be seeing more philanthropic donations to the space sciences in the future.
The US isn't noted for long term thinking. China is. The US has to have some one else be there doing it to out do before we take a governmental interest.
US companies do have all of NASAs space tech. The problem is that its far too expensive for a business to play around without seeing any short term ROI. Some Japanese businesses have been noted for having long business planning that could make commercial space stuff profitable, but you'd have to have atleast one company/government/person fund their own profitable space stuff before anyone else thinks me too.
Right now, it takes Bill Gates level cash for an individual to play funding a space company/assets. Sure we have a lot of billionaires now, but if was cheap enough that individuals that have less than ten million could get into space, you'd see vastly more development. (It's not there, yet.) When the price drops to where those of us making 30-40K can buy a vacation home or something in space, then you'd see massive space development. It's all about cost.
Being able to do something and being willing to pay for it are two seperate things. Just because the military is pioneering this research doesn't mean they are going to make it available for free to the young men and women they are responsible for maiming. They could just try and make a profit from it.
...) The other choice is we all pay higher taxes for increased V.A. Benefits that now include regen. That'll pass in two heart beats. No republican or democrat would want to ever be the person that voted against radical health improvements for veterans.
Furthermore, 300,000 soldiers are coming back from Iraq with some kind of mental disorder. You can't grow a new happy mind in a petri dish.
Calling all/most returning soldiers having mental disorders/problems is very low. (Just because they have a wider world view than you and have different political beliefs is no reason to call them names.)
The military isn't responsible for maiming their own soldiers. It's the enemy that is. So we should just present Iraq or who ever we declare as the enemy with the bill for regen on all our soldiers.
You seem weak in critical thinking, but its far more likely that they'll charge you a nonveteran an arm and a leg for this stuff so veterans can get it for free. (Well "free" to the veterans. You'll be paying out the
The three "expelled" people presented in the movie -- these are the worst stories the filmmakers could find -- involved a professor who failed to get tenure because he wasn't good enough, a woman who had her contract run out and didn't have it renewed, and them someone who said he was "fired" from the Smithsonian, despite actually being an unpaid research assistant whose term ran out.
But that's even better. That's exactly what's needed. See these people were expelled. He didn't get tenure not because he wasn't good enough, just that those judging him didn't find his topic worthwhile. The other two are even better there you could say that they did something that the community would displease of, but instead of being fired, their contracts just renewed when they came up next. That's so much better.
I'm surprised that tenure still exists and that all professors/scientists aren't on yearly contracts. You say or do something that your bosses don't like and you won't be fired; your contract will just not be renewed next year because you weren't performing up to par. For bonus points add in monthly performance reviews that are mostly negative and if that employee ever has others look into then it looks like they deserved to be fired, but were allowed to continue out their term instead of being fired.
we need to confront the real underlying psychological issue here: faith in humanity
Um, do we really? I view both sides of the topic as having too much faith. No one really bothers to think. I know just enough that I'm happy with most of evolution. I still believe in God and that god could ID using evolution/selective breeding whenever/however with most of the desired results that god wants. (Or that God just fucked up, got us and hasn't figured out what we are good for yet.)
I look at the entire climate change issue there. I find those think humans are evil and all our actions cause bad things to happen to mother earth to be guilty of having a bit too much faith in their new religion. I believe that our actions are a percentage of it, but what magic percentage? I typically think all human activities have effected global environment less than 5 percent. The masses have far too much faith in their various high priests that what they are told is right and they should do it without any more thinking involved thank you very much.
Here on slashdot, it's taken as faith that linux, open source, apple, or google is good and closed source, Microsoft, or the government is evil.
I figure that we all have our faith blinders, and we use them differently depending on the crowd that we are in at the moment.
For example the other day when my chemistry teacher told me that material stuff is made of atoms, I really couldn't believe him. I think I should have been given the right back then to discuss with them about my theory that everything is conformed by milk derivatives.
That's really an excellent topic where the students just need alot of faith that the teacher is right, but the teacher usually can't provide anything for the students to use to test it out if they think its false. There are days that I think that we need to throw out everything we teach kids that they aren't given the tools to test for themselves if it actually is that way. You take it on faith that the teachers and book are right.
Actually, this is just Ben Stein's great way of capitalizing on fears and preconceptions of the population. He literally produced a film that caters to the ignorant and the blindly faithful... without even a shred of evidence that he himself believes it. ...
As a scientist who believes in God, I am appalled at this film, and I think Stein should be ashamed of himself. Maybe if not for asshole exercises such as this, people would calm down and realize that unless you take religious texts literally, they address questions that are incompatible with science, and thus cannot possibly be in conflict with the latter.
I'd never heard of Ben Stein until his name was on slashdot's frontpage. I figure if anyone watches his movie because of the slashdot effect, than he has decent marketing PR for his movie. Does George Lucas believe in the Force & Jedi? Well he does believe in it just enough to bring him truck loads of money. I can't really fault either.
I blame those that start their beliefs based on movies. O.k. I guess there isn't any difference in basing your religion on a movie vs a book so I guess go ahead and start your new movie or video game based religion.
It would be great for wild animal populations, although bad for farmers and fisherman.
Um, not really. We'd be free to pollute the oceans like there was no tomorrow since we weren't raising food there any more. The same applies if we got rid of all the farm land and had farming sky scrappers. If that was viable, we'd be free to pollute all that farm land. Do you really think that we'd do anything else?
Well, this is a sci-fi tech that we could do. I eat beef, pork, chicken, and some times things like shrimp. Can you create artificial plants that tastes and cooks like meat oh and is cheaper than existing meat? If so, I'd buy it.
It's not like, I really know where the meat sold at Walmart comes from. It's in the meat section, is red, and doesn't kill my family when we cook it. If they can only make it cost effective for it to compete in the traditional meat market. Raising cows, pigs, chickens, and fish are billion dollar a year industries. O.k. They might change, but the only reason we'd switch away from them is if you could make your mystery meat cheaper. I'm reminded of this manga: http://www.onemanga.com/BioMeat_-_Nectar/
Is this even legal? Seriously. If someone has money in PayPal, and if that same someone happens to be using a browser that is deemed "unsafe" and is sequentially banned, isn't that like PayPal holding the money hostage? What happens to those who refuse to "upgrade" in order to access their account?
I think the "smart" thing to do would be never to keep money at PayPal. I've heard far to things about that "not a bank" yet acting like a bank to me business that I'd ever willing use them for my internet money transfers. If your business demands that I use PayPal, I shop else where. I've always thought smart internet shoppers did the same. There is enough choice online that if a business is doing something slightly annoying that you don't like, then you can go else where. Boycotting does change businesses.
I consider those that get burned on PayPal as paying yet another tax on stupid people. (It's one of those hidden life taxes that anyone can avoid, but if you live life stupidly, then you are going to be paying for it sooner or later.)
Wow. I would much rather voluntarily offer information to a social network than be forced to give my info to the government. Remember that the more power you give the government the easier it is for them to crush resistance when it turns oppressive.
I beat you hated year book photos. Come on the government already knows all this crap. They have access to your address, DL info, tax info, as much census info as you give, and criminal history. The only thing that they don't have easy access to is your educational history.
The more that I see; the more that I'm convinced that no one cares about giving 98% of this informational stuff to the government/school/employer/or their church group. The only group that they don't want easy access to this info is casual friends, internet "friends", and those on the other side of their political side. Society needs to learn what's o.k. to be public easy to find/search and what's morally not right.
I have no moral issues against an ID card. Listening to slash dot rants against it though. Slash dot's view is a religious crusade against accurate ID information as bad as keeping evolution out of schools. Instead of discussing how as a society are going to change, folks here just whine that this change is bad/evil and we should do everything in our power to stop it. Rolls Eyes. You can't stop change.
Haven't you ever wondered what happened to your best friend from Elementary school? Your favorite acquaintances from college? It's not about chat. It is about keeping a link to people that would otherwise get left behind. As (at least in the U.S.) society becomes more mobile there is a strong desire to keep those ties. There's a lot of lonely people out there who treasure reading the blogs, hearing the music, and looking at pictures of former in-the-flesh friends.
This is one of the few good reasons why I think that we need a national ID card with track able numbers that you are supposed to give to contacts so that they can look you up.
You know what I miss most about school? Year books. I see the same people in my work place/building/going to lunch every day, but I don't know any of their names or really what any of them do. There are days that I'd like a city wide year book.
If I was running a national ID card, I'd want them issued ASAP to some one and yearly up date photos taken. If you've given school friends your public traceable number, then they'll have your name, photo, address, and maybe telephone or e-mail address.
Can we not dream that there are artificially intelligent armed to the teeth robots ready to kill us at a moments notice?! If you take that away, what do we have left?! Do not bring your holier than thou facts to our paranoia party. If we believe hard enough that there are crazed, deadly robots on the loose, maybe... one day our dream might come true! So step off Sgt. Buzzkill.
I'm just waiting until some one let's loose the bots and has them conquer and expand out in any direction without thinking ahead of what happens when the bots circle the Earth.
so we simply build it *on top of* new jersey. it's about the right size, plus there's no wildlife anywhere in NJ to displace. as for the locals, who cares? it's fucking new jersey. the power can then be transmitted directly to new york city. i mean, sure theres *supposed* to be enough power to go around, but when has NYC ever fell short on a challenge to guzzle resources?
Why not just build air tight solar domes over every major city. This solves both their energy problems and the rest of the nation's air pollutions problems at the same time.
And adjusted their carburetor. Now it only gets 30 Miles per gallon.
Don't you mean the EPA showed up and made them meet air quality controls?
Is it? have you even checked the likelihood of that happening? As a matter of fact, in an average year, around 50 undersea cables are broken. Given that there are 365 days in a year, what is the chance of two breaking in 'such a short timeframe?' It doesn't happen every day, but it's not really out of the ordinary. Check these things before you try to dream up a conspiracy.
Seriously, when it comes to technology slashdot is collectively pretty intelligent; but when it comes to paranoia and politics, slashdot collectively drops down to the IQ of a two year old.
It's also a conspiracy that my trash isn't collected right when I put it out. Those black op trash collectors only pick up the trash like once a week!