I suspect that the subset of people that value their privacy, and people that are willing to answer 47 questions on the phone with a stranger about their personal beliefs, are probably not very overlapping, as this poll shows.
Wow, they have really tricked you into believing their revisionist history.
In case you didn't notice, the economic downturn started in 2000.
Companies liked to put "9/11" in their financial reports since it was a convienent excuse for losing so much money. No one much (except you apparently) believed them anyway, since most of those companies were already in financial trouble.
The only industry I could even say was impacted slightly was the airlines. Again, most of them weren't doing so hot anyway.
Oh it happens. I work for a not very large company, between 1 and 50 million in revenue each year. MS came in and said "OK, you can pay us $20,000 a year for 'software assurance' on your copies of MS Office, or we will audit every PC you own, and charge you large fines for every little thing that's not right"...
We paid their protection money. When faced with extortionists like that, sometimes it's easier to just pay.
Most biological evolution is slowed to a near standstill given a stable environment and large populations which are not geographically isolated
I agree, those are large factors too. But we aren't all that connected. Most countries are still largely monocultures, with several large and obvious exceptions.
You might want to rethink your stance on evolution as it related to social governments. A government killing certain large swaths of population is strong selective breeding. I don't know if I'd call that evolution, but it certainly interferes (or skews) any sort of natural evolution.
"Undo?" The only way to undo evolution would be to go back in time.
Disease hits. Disease kills 50% of non-immune population. We apply all our formidable technology to a vaccine. Lets say the remaining 50% consists of 20% immune and 80% non-immune (i.e. now 20% is immune, whereas before 10% was). That 80% nonimmune gets vaccinated.
Now everyone's back to the same baseline. There's no more evolutionary pressure.
Oh boy. Now you are mixing evolution and politics.
You started it. The bottom line is that any time you depart from a pure meritocracy you weaken evolutionary pressures. Socialism and neo-liberalism represent the effort to do away with all meritocracy, and thus are the complete undoing of most evolutionary pressures.
I'm not particularly advocating that position. I'm more pointing out that because that position is widely rejected, human evolution has slowed to a near standstill.
I thought you said laws and technology favored, or at least protected, "retards."
Yes, protected, putting them on roughly equal reproductive footing, wheras they would probably die before reproductive age in nature.
Who is "we," exactly? Last time I checked, birth rates in so called first world countries are quite a bit lower on average than in other places.
We is the entire human race.
And you just said exactly what I said. Third world countries with large lower social classes have higher birth rates. We are saying the same thing.
Really? How about malaria survival in the tropics? How abotu HIV? Turns out that some people with HIV (although somewhat rare) never develope AIDS. Those are just a couple of examples. There is also sexual selection going on.
I'll give you that there are some potential evolutionary forces there. They don't seem very strong. If we find a cure or vacciene for those diseases, it'll undo all the evolution anyway.
I think perhaps you are naively expecting to see blatant evolution happening within your lifetime.
No, I'm realistic enough to know that if any positive evolution became apparent, the liberals would immediately work to end it, and make everyone "equal" again. (Don't take that to mean I'm conservative, I'm not).
We all pretty much reproduce at the same rate. Lower social classes with subsequent lower intelligence and lower suitability generally reproduce slightly more, a weak evolutionary pressure.
There is no natural selection, period. The lack of reproduction by intelligent affluent white people is a choice, not because they were less suitable.
I hate it when I turn off that Nautilus crap, I lose my desktop background every restart. Have to manually set it with the desktop background tool every restart, so I know Nautilus doesn't need to run for it to get set, they were just lazy.
And because we don't have any laws against retards, cripples, or other evolutionary unsuitables from reproducing, and we protect them with our technology, there's no meaningful evolution anymore.
Because it's an encumbered license, you open yourself to SCO-esqe copyright infringement suits.
Sun is much like SCO was a few years back, falling fast and becoming obslete. It's just a matter of time until some "we make money by suing people" company buys Sun's assets.
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Am I the only one that cringes when people say they want to give me a "richer environment"?
Well this poll apparently had 47 questions.
I suspect that the subset of people that value their privacy, and people that are willing to answer 47 questions on the phone with a stranger about their personal beliefs, are probably not very overlapping, as this poll shows.
Wow, they have really tricked you into believing their revisionist history.
In case you didn't notice, the economic downturn started in 2000.
Companies liked to put "9/11" in their financial reports since it was a convienent excuse for losing so much money. No one much (except you apparently) believed them anyway, since most of those companies were already in financial trouble.
The only industry I could even say was impacted slightly was the airlines. Again, most of them weren't doing so hot anyway.
It's not a Dilbert joke, it's been around a lot longer.
There is no such thing as a random telephone poll.
Here's a statistic for you, 100% of people polled by telephone said they were "willing to participate in telephone polls"!
This is especially relevant here, since those that value their privacy are less likely to participate in telephone polls.
You have got to be kidding.
You are saying a 150 meg JVM is somehow smaller than C code that can run on machines with a few kilobytes of ram?
I'd quit any company that had a large unionization movement starting within it. It's that simple.
Running all your code in an emulator for a platform that doesn't exist... Yeah that sound like a great idea!
hahahahahahahahaha
That's pretty good.
1960 called, they wanted to remind you about big O notation, and how throwing raw power at something algorithmically shitty won't help much.
Dillo is shit. At least use a good simple browser as an example, like elinks.
Oh it happens. I work for a not very large company, between 1 and 50 million in revenue each year. MS came in and said "OK, you can pay us $20,000 a year for 'software assurance' on your copies of MS Office, or we will audit every PC you own, and charge you large fines for every little thing that's not right"...
We paid their protection money. When faced with extortionists like that, sometimes it's easier to just pay.
Most biological evolution is slowed to a near standstill given a stable environment and large populations which are not geographically isolated
I agree, those are large factors too. But we aren't all that connected. Most countries are still largely monocultures, with several large and obvious exceptions.
You might want to rethink your stance on evolution as it related to social governments. A government killing certain large swaths of population is strong selective breeding. I don't know if I'd call that evolution, but it certainly interferes (or skews) any sort of natural evolution.
"Undo?" The only way to undo evolution would be to go back in time.
Disease hits. Disease kills 50% of non-immune population. We apply all our formidable technology to a vaccine. Lets say the remaining 50% consists of 20% immune and 80% non-immune (i.e. now 20% is immune, whereas before 10% was). That 80% nonimmune gets vaccinated.
Now everyone's back to the same baseline. There's no more evolutionary pressure.
Oh boy. Now you are mixing evolution and politics.
You started it. The bottom line is that any time you depart from a pure meritocracy you weaken evolutionary pressures. Socialism and neo-liberalism represent the effort to do away with all meritocracy, and thus are the complete undoing of most evolutionary pressures.
I'm not particularly advocating that position. I'm more pointing out that because that position is widely rejected, human evolution has slowed to a near standstill.
I thought you said laws and technology favored, or at least protected, "retards."
Yes, protected, putting them on roughly equal reproductive footing, wheras they would probably die before reproductive age in nature.
Who is "we," exactly? Last time I checked, birth rates in so called first world countries are quite a bit lower on average than in other places.
We is the entire human race.
And you just said exactly what I said. Third world countries with large lower social classes have higher birth rates. We are saying the same thing.
Really? How about malaria survival in the tropics? How abotu HIV? Turns out that some people with HIV (although somewhat rare) never develope AIDS. Those are just a couple of examples. There is also sexual selection going on.
I'll give you that there are some potential evolutionary forces there. They don't seem very strong. If we find a cure or vacciene for those diseases, it'll undo all the evolution anyway.
I think perhaps you are naively expecting to see blatant evolution happening within your lifetime.
No, I'm realistic enough to know that if any positive evolution became apparent, the liberals would immediately work to end it, and make everyone "equal" again. (Don't take that to mean I'm conservative, I'm not).
You don't understand. I don't want to run nautilus. Period. I just want the other parts of Gnome.
There's nothing favoring retards.
We all pretty much reproduce at the same rate. Lower social classes with subsequent lower intelligence and lower suitability generally reproduce slightly more, a weak evolutionary pressure.
There is no natural selection, period. The lack of reproduction by intelligent affluent white people is a choice, not because they were less suitable.
I hate it when I turn off that Nautilus crap, I lose my desktop background every restart. Have to manually set it with the desktop background tool every restart, so I know Nautilus doesn't need to run for it to get set, they were just lazy.
Exactly.
And because we don't have any laws against retards, cripples, or other evolutionary unsuitables from reproducing, and we protect them with our technology, there's no meaningful evolution anymore.
We aren't evolving in a good way anyway.
The least suited of our population reproduces the most. We are devolving.
It was odd though how some of the most interesting stuff in that conference just kind of flashed by in four seconds of video
Buying time on large CG render farms is expensive, they can only afford so much of it.
Such is the risk of socialized services. The best option is to get the government completely out of it.
Because it's an encumbered license, you open yourself to SCO-esqe copyright infringement suits.
Sun is much like SCO was a few years back, falling fast and becoming obslete. It's just a matter of time until some "we make money by suing people" company buys Sun's assets.
who in the public is going to take the time to review 1,000 patent applications a week, search for prior art, and send the relevant art to the USPTO
Yeah, that's like expecting thousands of people to write a complete OS and all the applications for it. It'll never happen.
Heh. We've had USPTO patent workers post here before. It's no secret that some of the people in the patent office read Slashdot.