Prozac has changed things but there is this pervasive idea that mood is completely under ones control and that all one needs is determination to snap out of any mood and become the most successful happy person in the world. Happy people tell depressed people naively, "Why don't you just snap out of it?". The problem is is that you can't simulate another persons brain chemistry. You can't even simulate your own brain chemistry from mood to mood. Ever walk by two people yelling and screaming at each other and start thinking, "What's up with them?". Have you ever been those two people yelling and screaming at some point in your life? When we're happy we couldn't imagine how we were sad. When we're sad we couldn't imagine how we could have been happy.
When we eliminate something that wastes the lives of 13% of the population, and if you've ever known someone with an anxiety disorder you'll know how much of their life they waste, won't that improve the human condition more than just about anything else? What's better, is these fixes to mental health improve things throughout society, letting people avoid destructive compulsions and reach their full potential.
This is somewhat offtopic, but the Sidekick II is comparable if not superior. It has been marketed by Paris Hilton, and looks a little bit like a gameboy though which makes it totally unsuitable for use by adults who take themselves too seriously. They'll all get Treos which are far more stylish. I however returned my Treo and paid the cancellation fee so I could get my sidekick back.
A lot of Sun's licensing strategy for Java was intended to keep Microsoft from continuing with Visual J++ and stealing the whole Java standard out from under them via embrace and extend. Microsoft continued to break Java so they got sued and Sun made a whole lot of money off of the settlement. If they had BSD licensed it Microsoft would own the Java standard now just like they own the office document standard, multimedia standard, etc. Because their apps dominate and are purposefully incompatible with all others.
Perhaps the most important benefit of using the Mono architecture is that you gain language independence.
This is by far the most hyped feature of C# but it's also present in Java. If you look at the large incompatibilities between Visual Basic and VB.NET you'll see that.NET is not really that language independent and that each language is really more of a "skined" version of C#.
As far as alternative languages go in Java there are many. Among the most popular are:
JRuby
# interpreter written in 100% pure Java
# Most builtin Ruby classes provided
# Support for interacting with and defining java classes from within ruby
# Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) support
# Distributed under a tri-license (CPL/GPL/LGPL)
Jython (Python) Jython is an implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python written in 100% Pure Java, and seamlessly integrated with the Java platform. It thus allows you to run Python on any Java platform.
Groovy Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java 2 Platform that has many of the features that people like so much in languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk, making them available to Java developers using a Java-like syntax.
There's a lot more smaller projects like JavaScript and Rhino, Jelly, BeanShell, Tcl/Java, Sleep, ObjectScript, Pnuts, Judoscript. Some people event think there are too many alternative languages for the Java Virtual Machine.
Google has some of the best engineers out there. I really hope they don't try to port StarOffice to the web. It'd be like trying to build an IDE like Eclipse on top of Emacs. In other words, more trouble than it's worth. They'd be much better off re-engineering the thing from the ground up to be about the web and to utilize the awesome power of Google's distributed computing resources.
Environmentalism is about making our lives better and our children's lives better.
This is what deep ecologists call the Anthropocentric view and is what distinguishes Shallow Ecology from Deep Ecology.
Wikipedia Reference Marshall's conservation ethics looks only at the worth of the environment in terms of its utility or usefulness to humans. It is the opposite of deep ecology, hence is often refereed to as shallow ecology, and argues for the preservation of the environment on the basis that it has extrinsic value - instrumental to the welfare of human beings. Conservation is therefore a means to an end and purely concerned with mankind and intergenerational considerations. It could be argued that it is this ethic that formed the underlying arguments proposed by Governments at the Kyoto summit in 1997 and three agreements reached in Rio in 1992.
I'm all for shallow ecology. Deep ecology is something different all together and is quite misanthropic.
As a proud resident of this area you don't realize that San Francisco is the most communist and unamerican city in the country! Therefore free wi-fi will be a perfect fit. Thank god there is no city union that currently has a hand in providing telecom service or the plan would be totally doomed.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I think deep ecologists are essentially solopsitic in that they act like the whole world was created the day they were born and they somehow must drive their suv around to every corner of the globe to protect it when in reality the whole reason they can think about anything besides what they're going to eat next and where they're going to get fresh water and live beyond the age of 18 is because of thousands of years of people thinking that they were special and above the animals. Now the native americans are wonderful people, but their history makes a great example of why deep ecologists are living in fantasy land. Look at the native americans, no domestic animals, the Europeans come over and since they'd been living with domestic animals for thousands of years they got all the really bad diseases from them and have built up immunity. They show up in the new world with the sniffles, measels, small pox and just through regular contact the diseases spread out and kills 98% of the native population. There are stories of explorers showing up at native american villages and nobody's there and the whole place is filled with skeletons. Now explain that to me in deep ecological terms. Would you rather be a native american living with the land, and not harboring animals, and have a 98% chance of dying after you contracted just about any european disease. Or a European who had tortured and slaughtered animals for years and where destined to inherit the earth because of this? If "nature" (gaia or whatever) is playing favorites which one do you think nature favored?
No actually The Deep Ecology Gaia Earth Mother created us to serve, amuse and feed the AIDS, Ghonorrea, and Herpes viruses and to be plant food when we die.
BTW, the above is not serious, it's just throwing your nonsensical argument back at you.
BTW, I'm a strong atheist, I believe God, Gaia, Flying Spaghetti Monster, and all other logic defying supernatural beings are IMPOSSIBLE.
To all the people who will be offended by the following, remember, if you read it and can understand it YOU ARE NOT A GORILLA and it doesn't apply to you. If you go and translate this into simplified sign language for Koko I am going to be somewhat upset at you and I really don't care what Koko thinks just as long as you are the one who pays for her bananas.
Yipppppppeeee! Now we can grant Gorillas human rights because the only thing that seperates humans from pond scum is that we are cute and that we use tools!!!! Kittens and Puppies are cute so we grant them half human rights, meaning that we don't eat them (Don't tell the Koreans or the Chinese about the not eating doggies thing they might get pissed). Mice are not cute so we can use them for scientific experiments! Gorillas are cute and use tools so we have to give them human rights! Now that we gave them human rights we have to come up with a politically correct name for Gorillas, I think Gorilla is too speciesist. Why don't we call them differently evolved intelligences (DEI). Next week we can sign the Americans with DEI act which requires that all jobs must offer free bananas and not discriminate based on your type of intelligence and that the only requirement for getting a job is that your species has been proven to use tools! We can register them to vote and use hand signals to teach them which party will offer them more bananas. One grunt is Republican, two grunts is Democrat, Eating a banana and/or parading around with an erection while female gorillas are present is considered a green party vote. Next we can pass the DEI human marriage act, give them gorilla reservations and pay them reperations in Bananas, to make amends for the 100s of years that the inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa have been hunting and eating them.
Remember folks. The above does not apply to you. YOU ARE NOT A GORILLA! If you think you are a gorilla please seek mental help immediately.
But seriously folks, Just say NO to bad memes like deep ecology. Humans are special:).
Here we have what could be the biggest medical discovery of our lifetimes. Run around, dance in the street, be happy, throw a party, etc. Alright, Maybe a little skepticism of the discovery should be warranted. This is a little too good to be true.
But No! The whole thing turns into a thread revolving around the technicalities of federal funding of stem cell research. Mainly, why this should be another reason for you to hate George Bush. Which, if you RTFA, this category of research is not affected by the embryonic stem cell funding ban.
This reminds me of the threads where there's some new energy technology breakthrough and the whole thread is spent trying to find a reason why it has to be bad for the environment. If the thread involves anything remotely related to nuclear energy forget about it.
It seems that for some topics there is such a huge amount of misinformation about the subject, especially political hot potatos, that the whole thread has to be spent educating people.
When the thread comes up again, with the same issue, a whole new wave of the uneducated arrives and it starts all over again. This same thing has happed every time stem cells come up, it seems to happen even more on threads where the discovery did not use actual embryonic stem cells.
I met this guy who was a web developer, worked hard, overtime , for crap wages, etc. He got laid off sent out 200 resumes and not getting a single interview. Now he owns a convienience store and rakes in the bucks. He went and sold $900 worth of champagne he bought at Costco for $4000 on New Years Eve! I met a guy who was an ex-molecular biologist doing mortgage brokerage which is glorified undergraduate business school homework and was making $26,000 a month out of his freakin apartment (NO this was not an MLMer trying to sell me shit, an actual good friend of a family member).
As an engineer I wouldn't recommend going into it unless you really like it and you're really good at it. Even if you're good you run into a big wall called marginal income taxes and the alternative minimum tax, if you work for a salary, once you start making six figures.
Going into engineering for the money is far more attractive for people who live in countries where the wage scale is wildly skewed to the point where you can live very well on a regular salary if you're an engineer making $20 an hour because the guy who works at the supermarket or cuts your hair or makes your clothes or cooks for you makes $2 a day (80 times less than what you make) not the $12/hour or even higher union wage they're making here.
I like Emacs and its brethren, however, I don't do software development in Emacs anymore. Full blown IDEs like Eclipse are really worth the power, especially since they are able to semantically understand source code.
However, when I just need to do some basic config file editing I use Jove which is a scaled down version of Emacs that has the same keys as Emacs but loads as quickly as vi.
Emacs works great though when I have to interact in a complex way with the shell. For instance, I find it very useful when used in conjunction with command line SQL clients for Postgres, Mysql, or Oracle. The history and multiple command buffers are great for working with these command line clients. When I work with Oracle DBAs they are often impressed with how powerfully I can use SQLPlus from inside of Emacs.
I agree with you here. I grew less attracted to the Microsoft platform back in the day when I tried to do VC++ development and keep some frameworks I had created maintained over several Microsoft product lifecycles. The feeling I got was that Microsoft is going to change their database API, their inter-object communication API, their web api every year or so without warning. When they do you'll have to read a whole book on the new API, which does mostly the same thing except all the naming conventions are different and it only works on the next version of windows and your development platform. This means that you have to upgrade your development platform, the client, the server, the database server, the app server, the web server, etc. Everytime you do this there is an additional cost. Your framework also broke because there's some naming convention or new gotcha in how the new api works. Microsoft then tells you that you're better off using their implementation instead which lacks cool features of yours but is the standard and is maintained along the upgrade treadmill for you. This library of course costs money. To sum it up, Microsoft's attitude is any system that isn't rewritten from the ground up every year is a legacy system.
Meanwhile over in Java land I've got framework code lying around from 2000 that still works exactly the way I wrote it and upgrades have been painless. Instead of always looking over my shoulder planning for the annual round of api upgrades and breakage and having to read lots of boring technical documentation infused with Microsoft marketing hype each time they re-invent db persistance I can just think about my code and the business I am working on.
Fischer-Tropsch is the future of energy in the U.S. It produces oil from coal and generated $20/barrel oil in plants in South Africa that they used during their period of economic isolation. It is a simple process that converts coal to H2+CO and then into any kind of oil you want. It can also be used to produce fertilizer and plastics. It scales, it's simple and the U.S has the largest coal reserves in the world. This is really our ace in the hole in the upcoming global energy crisis. Expect their to be a coal to oil gold rush in the next 5 years. Apparently some people are catching on. Unfortunately for the environmentalists this is not what you wanted to happen when we started running out of oil but this is by far the most practical realistic solution that will work to give us time to find alternatives.
Occam's Razor, which is a basic tenent of modern scientific thought says that the simplest explanation is the best. It seems that these dark matter explanations get more and more complex. When a theory is very complex it becomes suspect. For instance, when the Earth was though to be the center of the universe, Mars moving backwards in the sky caused much grief to astronomers. They invented all kinds of head spinning mathematics to describe the motion of mars and the other planets. Of course when the Sun was put in the center of the solar system and the laws of gravity were unearthed everything turned out to be far simpler than the theorists, working with broken premises had made it out to be. In the same way, something smells funny with String theory, and multi-dimensional explanations for dark matter, etc. Isn't science about experimentation and testing hypothesises in a laboratory instead of endless mathematical tricks to get theories to fit observations?
Wow, if we can regenerate organs then long distance space travel is much more feasable since people's bodies would repair much faster from solar flares,etc. All that would need to be shielded would be people's brains, they could wear lead lined helmets, etc.
Where is water going to drain away to if the city is below sea level? If a dam breaks and wipes out a city, the water will eventually drain somewhere. This is not the case in New Orleans.
The trick for researchers will be to find ways of getting the life-enhancing results of Klotho while avoiding the drawbacks.
Well let's see. You get diabetes, you are less fertile or you have 35 years less life? Well according to the FDA getting diabetes or becoming infertile makes the benefit of the drug, living 35 years longer, totally unacceptable. I think if people were allowed to make this choice themselves instead of the government they could live with the side effects.
I thought about why measuring intelligence is so taboo. It seems that it's one of the few things that scientists are not allowed to study, not because it violates the law, but because it's simply taboo. It seems that as soon as we are able to devise methods of measuring intelligence, such measurements also became taboo or at best are viewed as curiosities flaunted by the arrogant.
Perhaps that's because correlating these measurements with any kind of social categorization, whether it be race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, eye color, etc ignites a socially unacceptable controversy. If these correlations are taken seriously, it often leads to attempts at eugenics and strengthens discrimination against the group that is deemed "less intelligent". These correlations are not false in that they violate generally accepted statistical practices, it's just that we feel that we're better off not knowing and entertaining the illusion that all are roughly equal.
If our modern atheist society has a religion which facilitates social cohesion than this is probably part of it: That we're all of equal ability and if we just work at it anyone has the same chance of acheiving a goal as anyone else. Intelligence correlations contradict this idea directly and are therefore considered heresy and hence are taboo.
ANYTHING that tastes good, makes us feel good, makes us stronger, gives us a better memory or helps us concentrate or otherwise gives us any kind of advantage over someone not ingesting said drug is dangerous and must have hidden side effects. Some nutjobs might argue that a drug that might improve our memories dramatically and thus advance the productivity and technology of our civilization would be beneficical. However, any drug that does this is bound to be toxic, addictive, and otherwise damaging and even if it kills 1 person out of a million. Even if that one person who dies took thirty times the recommended dosage we must ban it because the only acceptable use of ingestible non-food substances should be to cure disease.
That being said, there is a horrible drug plaguing our streets known as 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine. It is lethal in doses as small as 3.2 grams. It is consumed compulsivley by a growing number of American addicts. It can cause psychomoter agitation, rambling flow of though and speech, tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia. Large evil megacorps are trying to poison our childrens lives with them by getting them addicted to it early and it is even being distributed in schools by their dealers! Some people even say it helps them concentrate and lets them stay up longer but these benefits pale in comparison to the evils of this psychotropic drug. The Deaths piling up because of this drug should lead us to ban it immediately! We should also ban a substance often taken in conjunction with this awful drug known as DHMO.
I think when the Palladium platform is released, it will eventually be hacked or otherwise subverted by rootkit hackers. The rootkits will use the DRM restrictions of Palladium to prevent any tool from removing the rootkit. People who's computers get infected by these Palladium rootkits will be forced to throw entire computers out.
Slashdot Mirror
Prozac has changed things but there is this pervasive idea that mood is completely under ones control and that all one needs is determination to snap out of any mood and become the most successful happy person in the world. Happy people tell depressed people naively, "Why don't you just snap out of it?". The problem is is that you can't simulate another persons brain chemistry. You can't even simulate your own brain chemistry from mood to mood. Ever walk by two people yelling and screaming at each other and start thinking, "What's up with them?". Have you ever been those two people yelling and screaming at some point in your life? When we're happy we couldn't imagine how we were sad. When we're sad we couldn't imagine how we could have been happy.
When we eliminate something that wastes the lives of 13% of the population, and if you've ever known someone with an anxiety disorder you'll know how much of their life they waste, won't that improve the human condition more than just about anything else? What's better, is these fixes to mental health improve things throughout society, letting people avoid destructive compulsions and reach their full potential.
This is somewhat offtopic, but the Sidekick II is comparable if not superior. It has been marketed by Paris Hilton, and looks a little bit like a gameboy though which makes it totally unsuitable for use by adults who take themselves too seriously. They'll all get Treos which are far more stylish. I however returned my Treo and paid the cancellation fee so I could get my sidekick back.
A lot of Sun's licensing strategy for Java was intended to keep Microsoft from continuing with Visual J++ and stealing the whole Java standard out from under them via embrace and extend. Microsoft continued to break Java so they got sued and Sun made a whole lot of money off of the settlement. If they had BSD licensed it Microsoft would own the Java standard now just like they own the office document standard, multimedia standard, etc. Because their apps dominate and are purposefully incompatible with all others.
This is by far the most hyped feature of C# but it's also present in Java. If you look at the large incompatibilities between Visual Basic and VB.NET you'll see that .NET is not really that language independent and that each language is really more of a "skined" version of C#.
As far as alternative languages go in Java there are many. Among the most popular are: JRuby
# interpreter written in 100% pure Java
# Most builtin Ruby classes provided
# Support for interacting with and defining java classes from within ruby
# Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) support
# Distributed under a tri-license (CPL/GPL/LGPL)
Jython (Python)
Jython is an implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python written in 100% Pure Java, and seamlessly integrated with the Java platform. It thus allows you to run Python on any Java platform.
Groovy
Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java 2 Platform that has many of the features that people like so much in languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk, making them available to Java developers using a Java-like syntax.
There's a lot more smaller projects like JavaScript and Rhino, Jelly, BeanShell, Tcl/Java, Sleep, ObjectScript, Pnuts, Judoscript. Some people event think there are too many alternative languages for the Java Virtual Machine.
Google has some of the best engineers out there. I really hope they don't try to port StarOffice to the web. It'd be like trying to build an IDE like Eclipse on top of Emacs. In other words, more trouble than it's worth. They'd be much better off re-engineering the thing from the ground up to be about the web and to utilize the awesome power of Google's distributed computing resources.
Environmentalism is about making our lives better and our children's lives better.
This is what deep ecologists call the Anthropocentric view and is what distinguishes Shallow Ecology from Deep Ecology.
Wikipedia Reference
Marshall's conservation ethics looks only at the worth of the environment in terms of its utility or usefulness to humans. It is the opposite of deep ecology, hence is often refereed to as shallow ecology, and argues for the preservation of the environment on the basis that it has extrinsic value - instrumental to the welfare of human beings. Conservation is therefore a means to an end and purely concerned with mankind and intergenerational considerations. It could be argued that it is this ethic that formed the underlying arguments proposed by Governments at the Kyoto summit in 1997 and three agreements reached in Rio in 1992.
I'm all for shallow ecology. Deep ecology is something different all together and is quite misanthropic.
As a proud resident of this area you don't realize that San Francisco is the most communist and unamerican city in the country! Therefore free wi-fi will be a perfect fit. Thank god there is no city union that currently has a hand in providing telecom service or the plan would be totally doomed.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I think deep ecologists are essentially solopsitic in that they act like the whole world was created the day they were born and they somehow must drive their suv around to every corner of the globe to protect it when in reality the whole reason they can think about anything besides what they're going to eat next and where they're going to get fresh water and live beyond the age of 18 is because of thousands of years of people thinking that they were special and above the animals. Now the native americans are wonderful people, but their history makes a great example of why deep ecologists are living in fantasy land. Look at the native americans, no domestic animals, the Europeans come over and since they'd been living with domestic animals for thousands of years they got all the really bad diseases from them and have built up immunity. They show up in the new world with the sniffles, measels, small pox and just through regular contact the diseases spread out and kills 98% of the native population. There are stories of explorers showing up at native american villages and nobody's there and the whole place is filled with skeletons. Now explain that to me in deep ecological terms. Would you rather be a native american living with the land, and not harboring animals, and have a 98% chance of dying after you contracted just about any european disease. Or a European who had tortured and slaughtered animals for years and where destined to inherit the earth because of this? If "nature" (gaia or whatever) is playing favorites which one do you think nature favored?
No actually The Deep Ecology Gaia Earth Mother created us to serve, amuse and feed the AIDS, Ghonorrea, and Herpes viruses and to be plant food when we die.
BTW, the above is not serious, it's just throwing your nonsensical argument back at you.
BTW, I'm a strong atheist, I believe God, Gaia, Flying Spaghetti Monster, and all other logic defying supernatural beings are IMPOSSIBLE.
Let's blow some Karma!
:).
To all the people who will be offended by the following, remember, if you read it and can understand it YOU ARE NOT A GORILLA and it doesn't apply to you. If you go and translate this into simplified sign language for Koko I am going to be somewhat upset at you and I really don't care what Koko thinks just as long as you are the one who pays for her bananas.
Yipppppppeeee! Now we can grant Gorillas human rights because the only thing that seperates humans from pond scum is that we are cute and that we use tools!!!! Kittens and Puppies are cute so we grant them half human rights, meaning that we don't eat them (Don't tell the Koreans or the Chinese about the not eating doggies thing they might get pissed). Mice are not cute so we can use them for scientific experiments! Gorillas are cute and use tools so we have to give them human rights! Now that we gave them human rights we have to come up with a politically correct name for Gorillas, I think Gorilla is too speciesist. Why don't we call them differently evolved intelligences (DEI). Next week we can sign the Americans with DEI act which requires that all jobs must offer free bananas and not discriminate based on your type of intelligence and that the only requirement for getting a job is that your species has been proven to use tools! We can register them to vote and use hand signals to teach them which party will offer them more bananas. One grunt is Republican, two grunts is Democrat, Eating a banana and/or parading around with an erection while female gorillas are present is considered a green party vote. Next we can pass the DEI human marriage act, give them gorilla reservations and pay them reperations in Bananas, to make amends for the 100s of years that the inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa have been hunting and eating them.
Remember folks. The above does not apply to you. YOU ARE NOT A GORILLA! If you think you are a gorilla please seek mental help immediately.
But seriously folks, Just say NO to bad memes like
deep ecology. Humans are special
Here we have what could be the biggest medical discovery of our lifetimes. Run around, dance in the street, be happy, throw a party, etc. Alright, Maybe a little skepticism of the discovery should be warranted. This is a little too good to be true.
But No! The whole thing turns into a thread revolving around the technicalities of federal funding of stem cell research. Mainly, why this should be another reason for you to hate George Bush. Which, if you RTFA, this category of research is not affected by the embryonic stem cell funding ban.
This reminds me of the threads where there's some new energy technology breakthrough and the whole thread is spent trying to find a reason why it has to be bad for the environment. If the thread involves anything remotely related to nuclear energy forget about it.
It seems that for some topics there is such a huge amount of misinformation about the subject, especially political hot potatos, that the whole thread has to be spent educating people.
When the thread comes up again, with the same issue, a whole new wave of the uneducated arrives and it starts all over again. This same thing has happed every time stem cells come up, it seems to happen even more on threads where the discovery did not use actual embryonic stem cells.
I met this guy who was a web developer, worked hard, overtime , for crap wages, etc. He got laid off sent out 200 resumes and not getting a single interview. Now he owns a convienience store and rakes in the bucks. He went and sold $900 worth of champagne he bought at Costco for $4000 on New Years Eve! I met a guy who was an ex-molecular biologist doing mortgage brokerage which is glorified undergraduate business school homework and was making $26,000 a month out of his freakin apartment (NO this was not an MLMer trying to sell me shit, an actual good friend of a family member).
As an engineer I wouldn't recommend going into it unless you really like it and you're really good at it. Even if you're good you run into a big wall called marginal income taxes and the alternative minimum tax, if you work for a salary, once you start making six figures.
Going into engineering for the money is far more attractive for people who live in countries where the wage scale is wildly skewed to the point where you can live very well on a regular salary if you're an engineer making $20 an hour because the guy who works at the supermarket or cuts your hair or makes your clothes or cooks for you makes $2 a day (80 times less than what you make) not the $12/hour or even higher union wage they're making here.
I like Emacs and its brethren, however, I don't do software development in Emacs anymore. Full blown IDEs like Eclipse are really worth the power, especially since they are able to semantically understand source code.
However, when I just need to do some basic config file editing I use Jove which is a scaled down version of Emacs that has the same keys as Emacs but loads as quickly as vi.
Emacs works great though when I have to interact in a complex way with the shell. For instance, I find it very useful when used in conjunction with command line SQL clients for Postgres, Mysql, or Oracle. The history and multiple command buffers are great for working with these command line clients. When I work with Oracle DBAs they are often impressed with how powerfully I can use SQLPlus from inside of Emacs.
I agree with you here. I grew less attracted to the Microsoft platform back in the day when I tried to do VC++ development and keep some frameworks I had created maintained over several Microsoft product lifecycles. The feeling I got was that Microsoft is going to change their database API, their inter-object communication API, their web api every year or so without warning. When they do you'll have to read a whole book on the new API, which does mostly the same thing except all the naming conventions are different and it only works on the next version of windows and your development platform. This means that you have to upgrade your development platform, the client, the server, the database server, the app server, the web server, etc. Everytime you do this there is an additional cost. Your framework also broke because there's some naming convention or new gotcha in how the new api works. Microsoft then tells you that you're better off using their implementation instead which lacks cool features of yours but is the standard and is maintained along the upgrade treadmill for you. This library of course costs money. To sum it up, Microsoft's attitude is any system that isn't rewritten from the ground up every year is a legacy system.
Meanwhile over in Java land I've got framework code lying around from 2000 that still works exactly the way I wrote it and upgrades have been painless. Instead of always looking over my shoulder planning for the annual round of api upgrades and breakage and having to read lots of boring technical documentation infused with Microsoft marketing hype each time they re-invent db persistance I can just think about my code and the business I am working on.
Step 1: Develop small lightweight multi gigawatt fusion power source that can do the earth to mars trip and back with 20lbs of fuel.
Step 2: Create system for electric propulsion in outer space with close to 90% efficiency.
Step 3: Colonize mars.
Fischer-Tropsch is the future of energy in the U.S. It produces oil from coal and generated $20/barrel oil in plants in South Africa that they used during their period of economic isolation. It is a simple process that converts coal to H2+CO and then into any kind of oil you want. It can also be used to produce fertilizer and plastics. It scales, it's simple and the U.S has the largest coal reserves in the world. This is really our ace in the hole in the upcoming global energy crisis. Expect their to be a coal to oil gold rush in the next 5 years. Apparently some people are catching on. Unfortunately for the environmentalists this is not what you wanted to happen when we started running out of oil but this is by far the most practical realistic solution that will work to give us time to find alternatives.
Occam's Razor, which is a basic tenent of modern scientific thought says that the simplest explanation is the best. It seems that these dark matter explanations get more and more complex. When a theory is very complex it becomes suspect. For instance, when the Earth was though to be the center of the universe, Mars moving backwards in the sky caused much grief to astronomers. They invented all kinds of head spinning mathematics to describe the motion of mars and the other planets. Of course when the Sun was put in the center of the solar system and the laws of gravity were unearthed everything turned out to be far simpler than the theorists, working with broken premises had made it out to be. In the same way, something smells funny with String theory, and multi-dimensional explanations for dark matter, etc. Isn't science about experimentation and testing hypothesises in a laboratory instead of endless mathematical tricks to get theories to fit observations?
Wow, if we can regenerate organs then long distance space travel is much more feasable since people's bodies would repair much faster from solar flares,etc. All that would need to be shielded would be people's brains, they could wear lead lined helmets, etc.
and once the water drains away
Where is water going to drain away to if the city is below sea level? If a dam breaks and wipes out a city, the water will eventually drain somewhere. This is not the case in New Orleans.
If it had a version of napster running on it that the RIAA couldn't disrupt or bust people for using it might even get some use.
The trick for researchers will be to find ways of getting the life-enhancing results of Klotho while avoiding the drawbacks.
Well let's see. You get diabetes, you are less fertile or you have 35 years less life? Well according to the FDA getting diabetes or becoming infertile makes the benefit of the drug, living 35 years longer, totally unacceptable. I think if people were allowed to make this choice themselves instead of the government they could live with the side effects.
I thought about why measuring intelligence is so taboo. It seems that it's one of the few things that scientists are not allowed to study, not because it violates the law, but because it's simply taboo. It seems that as soon as we are able to devise methods of measuring intelligence, such measurements also became taboo or at best are viewed as curiosities flaunted by the arrogant.
Perhaps that's because correlating these measurements with any kind of social categorization, whether it be race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, eye color, etc ignites a socially unacceptable controversy. If these correlations are taken seriously, it often leads to attempts at eugenics and strengthens discrimination against the group that is deemed "less intelligent". These correlations are not false in that they violate generally accepted statistical practices, it's just that we feel that we're better off not knowing and entertaining the illusion that all are roughly equal.
If our modern atheist society has a religion which facilitates social cohesion than this is probably part of it: That we're all of equal ability and if we just work at it anyone has the same chance of acheiving a goal as anyone else. Intelligence correlations contradict this idea directly and are therefore considered heresy and hence are taboo.
ANYTHING that tastes good, makes us feel good, makes us stronger, gives us a better memory or helps us concentrate or otherwise gives us any kind of advantage over someone not ingesting said drug is dangerous and must have hidden side effects. Some nutjobs might argue that a drug that might improve our memories dramatically and thus advance the productivity and technology of our civilization would be beneficical. However, any drug that does this is bound to be toxic, addictive, and otherwise damaging and even if it kills 1 person out of a million. Even if that one person who dies took thirty times the recommended dosage we must ban it because the only acceptable use of ingestible non-food substances should be to cure disease.
That being said, there is a horrible drug plaguing our streets known as 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine. It is lethal in doses as small as 3.2 grams. It is consumed compulsivley by a growing number of American addicts. It can cause psychomoter agitation, rambling flow of though and speech, tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia. Large evil megacorps are trying to poison our childrens lives with them by getting them addicted to it early and it is even being distributed in schools by their dealers! Some people even say it helps them concentrate and lets them stay up longer but these benefits pale in comparison to the evils of this psychotropic drug. The Deaths piling up because of this drug should lead us to ban it immediately! We should also ban a substance often taken in conjunction with this awful drug known as DHMO.
I think when the Palladium platform is released, it will eventually be hacked or otherwise subverted by rootkit hackers. The rootkits will use the DRM restrictions of Palladium to prevent any tool from removing the rootkit. People who's computers get infected by these Palladium rootkits will be forced to throw entire computers out.