Geeks often equate problem-solving skills with intelligence,
It's certainly an oversimplification to say that problem-solving skills are equivalent to general intelligence, but it's also an oversimplification--a much more misleading one, in my opinion--to say that they're only one component of general intelligence, no more or less important than any other.
There are a lot of different types and components of intelligence. Some of them work in parallel--if you have weak analytical skills but strong emotional intelligence, the former won't interfere much with the latter, and the latter won't make up for the former. Some of them work in series, though, and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Problem-solving in particular can be a bottleneck for many, maybe all, other components of intelligence. Imagine using a map to drive around an unfamiliar city. If you have strong spacial awareness but weak problem-solving skills, you're not going to have any more success than someone with the same problem-solving ability and much weaker spacial intelligence.
If Alice has equally low abilities in all forms of intelligence, including problem-solving, and Bob has moderate to high ability in all forms of intelligence except that he's no better at problem-solving than Alice, then functionally, there will be very little difference between them. Improving their problem-solving skills by equal amounts would result in Bob being smarter than Alice, but I don't think it's accurate to say that he already is.
The good news is that problem-solving is a learned skill, so it can be improved at any stage of life. The bad news is that the culture of the industrialized West over the last 50-60 years is uniquely awful at teaching problem-solving. Almost all of our entertainment is intellectually passive. We read books and watch TV and movies instead of telling stories; we listen to music instead of singing or learning to play an instrument; we watch other people playing sports instead of playing them ourselves; we go to museums instead of doing research. The only major form of entertainment that involves problem-solving is game-playing. Board games, card games, etc., are shrinking in popularity. Nearly everyone still engages in them sometimes, but the amount of time the average person spends with them is plummeting. Video games may be starting to pick up the slack, but the sorts of games where problem-solving is a major component are a minority. Guitar Hero and Madden are fun, but there's no problem-solving involved. The games that really have problems to solve are popular only within a small, slow-growing subculture.
Even outside entertainment, we have little opportunity to improve our problem-solving skills. We work for mega-corporations where our jobs are designed to involve as little creativity and flexibility as possible. Decision-makers and problem-solvers are presented as elites who must be consulted whenever anything unusual happens. And as much good as ultra-specialization has done for the world, it has resulted in a situation where people believe that anything outside their own specialty is completely inaccessible--any time we have a problem that we haven't already memorized a solution to, we go immediately to an expert. We never try to solve any problems outside our own specialty, so we never learn how to apply existing skills to new situations.
Well, a minimum wage job isn't really intended to be a LIVING wage job...those jobs are for highschool and college kids...
Except that in a service-oriented luxury economy like we have in the USA (and the rest of the first-world), there are many times more low-skill low-pay jobs than there are high school and college students to work them. But although there aren't enough student workers to fill all or most of those jobs, they are a large enough minority to have an impact on wages. Those kids can underbid adults because their lives are heavily subsidized by parents (usually). When one group of the workers competing for a class of jobs is given an advantage based (almost) entirely on their parentage, then we've created a de facto aristocracy.
Free market principles say that if the adult workers weren't willing to work for wages that low they should simply quit, but in practice the amount of time between quitting and literally starving to death is too short to make a difference. Minimum-wage employers are equivalent to the refrigerator salesman who drives a harder bargain when he knows your old fridge is broken and you need a new one today. The power to make better economic choices is the power to wait for better economic choices, period. If you are unable to wait, you are unable to make choices at all, and your situation is simply slavery with a choice of master.
Those two factors are sides of the same coin. In both cases, the people who have money, and therefore time and power, are using their power to artificially depress the wages of the powerless. I'm not claiming this is a conspiracy, quite the opposite: it's the direct macroeconomic result of perfectly reasonable microeconomic decision-making. True libertarians, who value individual freedom, should be in favor of a living minimum wage to correct for the power imbalance between the rich and the poor. If you believe that money should be the only form of power, you are not a libertarian at all: the word for that position is plutocracy.
Also, S-corporations exist solely to solve that problem. They are exempt from double-taxation because they're designed for the type of company for which "profit" and "owner's salary" are synonyms. The only reason for a company of that size and type to want to be a C-corp or LLC in the first place is to qualify for legal protection from financial, civil, and criminal liability that goes beyond what a wage-earner would have. Double taxation is how you pay for that protection.
Yes, the choice of axioms is somewhat arbitrary. But all the words you're using in your rhetorical questions are defined in terms of those axioms. The set-theoretic axioms (except for the axiom of choice) are all on the level of obviousness of "not (P or Q) means the same as ((not P) and (not Q))". They're as indisputable as indisputability gets. The words "prime", "two", "plus", etc., are defined in terms of those axioms, and the axioms demonstrate with absolute certainty that two plus two does equal four and there is not highest prime. Geometry is an unusual case where there are several non-equivalent choices of axioms in which you can define things like "parallel" and "triangle", but the definitions are not the same from one axiomization to another. A Euclidean-triangle is a fundamentally different object from a Riemannian-triangle. In either case, set theory or geometry, disagreeing with a proven statement requires redefining the words used in that statement. In other words, disagreeing with a fundamentally different statement, or, not actually disagreeing at all.
Furthermore, to the extremely limited extent that Godel's incompleteness theorem is related to your post at all, it contradicts you. It states that any sufficiently powerful (basically anything you can do number theory in) axiomatic system is either inconsistent (able to prove both P and not-P) or incomplete (able to express statements which cannot be proven or disproven within the system). It is possible to determine which a given system is. Set theory, for example, is consistent but not complete--same for Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry. You can also (at least sometimes) identify which statements are undecidable. So if a known-undecidable statement claims that no set can have a certain property, then the fact of its undecidability tells us that we'll never find a counterexample: that there is no such set. In other words, the nonexistence of that kind of set is true but not provable. Godel formally proved that there is such a thing as mathematical truth beyond mere provability. He proved Platonism: the claim that mathematics is (in some sense) real, not just a game that mathematicians play with symbols on paper.
I thought you could only disprove, not prove math stuff...
Hypotheses in the empirical sciences can be disproven but not proven because they rely on observation--they make predictions, and the more you observe those predictions coming to pass, the more likely the hypothesis seems. But you can never know the difference between a hypothesis that never makes incorrect predictions and one that simply hasn't made any yet.
Mathematics, however, deals with statements that can be verified through rigorous deductive logic: a step-by-step reasoning process in which it is absolutely certain that each step leads to the next. That means that if your starting point is indisputable, your result is too.
I agree about the first Hellboy--visually, it was barely recognizable as a Del Toro film, the plot was an (even more) oversimplified version of the Hollywood Superhero Movie Formula (TM), and it gave us no reason to care about the characters.
But this sequel is a COMPLETELY different film. On every level, from its basic look all the way down to the themes and symbolism (yes, it's a big-budget superhero flick that HAS themes and symbolism), Hellboy II is a more direct successor to Pan's Labyrinth than to the first Hellboy. It not only makes us care about the characters, but its central message is that we should ask ourselves why the characters should care about us. And it makes the audience both hate the villain and still sympathize with the cause he's fighting for.
I'm a projectionist at a movie theater, so I see almost every movie that comes out, and it's a toss-up for me between Hellboy and Wall-E for my favorite film of 2008 so far. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Iron Man are the rest of the top 5.
I'm negating some spent mod points by posting, but I can't let this pass. Like every geeky 13-year-old in the world, I went straight from the movie theater to the bookstore after seeing Jurassic Park, and enjoyed the book immensely. But Timeline was what finally turned me off from Crichton, for two reasons. One, the "science" in it is gobblety-gook. He's using real words, but clearly has no idea what they really mean. It's the same level of bullshit as Star Trek (disclaimer: I like Star Trek), but Trek at least presents its bullshit as bullshit instead of pretending it's real science. And two, the plot is a blatant ripoff of the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which is better-written and contains real science.
There is no benefit for the oil companies to develop and market an alternative technology until all the oil is gone.
Are you kidding? If they can make oil using an alternate technology for cheaper than they can get oil out of the ground then there is every benefit. They could _bury_ the competition!
Yes and no. It is in the best interests of any one oil company to be the first to switch over to an alternative energy source. But it is also in the best interests of all the oil companies (individually and collectively) for the status quo to continue as long as possible--they control a finite resource, which is destroyed by use and demand for which is increasing.
Essentially, they have two conflicting motives:
Be the first mover.
Don't move until absolutely necessary
To balance those two factors, the oil companies are playing chicken with each other. I suspect all the major players are in fact doing major R&D on renewable energy. When the price of oil increases to the point (I'm guessing $10-15/gallon) that the masses actually consider changing their habits--when the luxury SUV market is the entire SUV market, when the median distance from people's homes to their workplaces is three miles, when mass transit gets enough passengers to become financially self-sufficient--you'll see the big oil producers all roll out their replacement technologies at once.
Bicycles are not a workable solution for a sufficient percentage of the population. Cycling more than a mile or two, or cycling uphill, requires a level of athletic fitness that a good number of people are legitimately medically incapable of. I'm not talking about smokers or overeaters, I'm talking about the asthmatic, the arthritic, the temporarily and permanently disabled, etc.
Take me: I'm 28 years old, 6'6" tall and weigh 205 pounds, with 12% body fat. I can lift half my weight over my head. I can walk or hike five or ten miles with no ill effects. I catch a cold or flu, on average, once every couple of years, and usually recover twice as fast as the person I caught it from. I've never smoked in my life. Not only am I in excellent shape, but I have some genetic advantages over the rest of the population.
I've also had lung surgery three times. I can't do anything aerobic for more than a few minutes before falling down (yes, literally), gasping for breath, in physical pain. At the absolute maximum, I can run or jog about a quarter mile or bicycle about a mile on a flat surface. I can't bicycle uphill at all.
My specific circumstances are unusual, as are any of the other specific circumstances that could make cycling unfeasible. But there are a LOT of those circumstances. Assuming people become as fit as they are capable of being, can 75% of the population use a bicycle for long distances? Almost certainly. Can 90%? Almost certainly not.
You and I agree on a number of things: The world would be better if more people bicycled. A lot of people who could, don't. Buses combine the worst elements of cars and mass transit. And I understand you're not proposing that bicycles completely replace cars. But the fact that you use your bicycle for trips that I would drive does not make you better than me. It means your personal strengths and weaknesses are more suited to this particular problem than mine.
And I can't say for sure without knowing how much you do use those two sports cars, but it's at least plausible that you use more total gas driving them for fun than I do driving my Honda Civic to work.
I'm jealous, your printer must actually work. My experience has been that this is more typical behavior:
If nothing is wrong at all, display "PAPER JAM" on the LCD and cancel all print jobs.
If the letter tray is empty, fail silently, releasing molten toner particles into the delicate inner workings of the printer.
If there is any other problem, including an empty legal tray, display "PC LOAD LETTR" on the LCD (because the LCD is one character shorter than its most common message) and vibrate hard enough to misalign the toner cartridge.
You are correct that there are myriad layers of abstraction to every aspect of human thought. But where reductionists and holists alike go wrong is defining a single layer to be the One True Reality. Holists say that the top layer is real, everything else is just details. Reductionists say that the bottom layer is real, everything else is just imagination. But all these layers exist because they are useful and meaningful. The way to decide an issue is to determine which layer is relevant, not to decree that your favorite layer is the relevant one for every issue.
So ? A policy at whatever place cannot override the law. If I have a policy that says I'm allowed to kill you on my private property, I'm still going away for murder if I do.
That's only vaguely true, and not even vaguely relevant. The owners of private property have every right, legally and ethically, to require visitors to that property to agree to (practically) any terms they want. The visitors are free to leave if they find the terms unacceptable. I can't imagine any US or UK court upholding terms that allow illegal behavior, but for anything short of that, what do you think "private property" means?
And in this case, there's nothing remotely illegal about the terms being set. The amusement park operators are simply not allowing certain devices on their property, and offering a (free?) storage service for those disallowed devices. Visitors can leave their smartphones at home, or in the car, or in the park-provided storage. If you don't like those choices, don't go to that park.
The real issues are:
Would you personally visit an amusement park with this policy?
Is this policy a sound business decision?
My answers are no to both, as I assume yours are, but this is ABSOLUTELY NOT a legal/civil liberties issue.
I love (most of) the Final Fantasy games too, but Dragon (Warrior|Quest) has always seemed to expect more intelligence from the user. By comparison, FF games usually feel a bit like they're stuck in tutorial mode. DWIV was my favorite of the NES games, even though it was commercially a disaster in the US, and I know from the magic of emulation that DQV is even better. Hopefully this'll sell well enough that they really will remake DQV and DQVI, which were never released here at all.
It has nothing to do with the fact that the movie "played like 3 episodes"
It has everything to do with the fact that it played like (actually) 4 episodes. I mildly enjoyed BBS in movie format, but seeing the episodes it got split into on Comedy Central, they were all above average and the fourth was superb. Then I went back and watched the DVD again for comparison, and I'm pretty sure what diminished my appreciation for it was that it messes with the traditional narrative structure--it's a twelve-act story, four of which feel like first acts, four like second acts, and four like third acts. You pointed out that it feels less snappy, and that's why.
Playing games with people's unconscious expectations for structure like that can work if you do it carefully and have content-related reasons for it--Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, and Memento come to mind--but that's not the case with BBS. A continuous 88-minute movie is not the format it was designed for, and it shows. I'm going to try to alter my expectations when I watch the rest of the movies and think of them as if I'm watching four straight episodes on VHS with the titles, commercials, and credits edited out--because that's what they are.
Ideas first come when the technology exists to implement them, but don't catch on until the technology exists to implement them well. It's a pattern we've seen over and over. Cars existed for decades before Henry Ford figured out how to make one that non-experts could use. The first automatic transmissions were terrible. Home computers were purely hobbyist items until they became powerful enough to have text-based interfaces, and didn't really take off until graphical user interfaces. The major difference between YouTube and any of a dozen other streaming video sites is that YouTube was smart enough or lucky enough to launch right around the time when the millionth home got broadband. Touchscreens found a niche (point-of-sale systems) where their (numerous and severe) flaws didn't matter, and never strayed from that niche until Apple (etc.) fixed those flaws.
1. What part of "in a closed system" do you not understand? The earth is constantly being bombarded by massive amounts of energy from an outside source--the sun. Every decrease in the earth's entropy is matched by an increase in the sun's (actually, much much more than matched, since the sun shoots out energy in every direction and only about 45 quadrillionths of a percent of it hits the earth).
2. Please look up the terms "photosynthesis" and "gametogenesis." Both are examples of "natural unaided progression from the simple to the complex." And while the micro-evolution you imply that you accept usually isn't an increase in complexity in the colloquial sense of the word, it most certainly is a decrease in entropy and an increase in complexity in the formal sense of the word.
I'm not a biologist--I'm not qualified to present arguments in favor of evolution, so believe what you want. But please don't enter such blatant nonsense into a debate and expect to be taken seriously.
I'm with you. Stephenson does write endings. Pretty good ones. What he doesn't waste his or his readers' time on is epilogues. You'd think now that everyone has read the last Harry Potter book there'd be more appreciation for that.
Not that epilogues are necessarily bad, in fact I like them when they're done well, but writing them is a different skill than what it takes to produce an otherwise-good story. If a writer lacks that skill, I'd rather not have an epilogue at all than suffer through a crappy one.
Correct, but incomplete. The Belgium joke originated on the radio show but never found its way into any of the books until the American publishers had their hissy-fit--a Belgiuming shame, if you ask me. It's one of my favorite parts of Hitchhiker's canon, the way it points out the absurdity of the whole concept of swear words. I always thought the Rory award sequence and the Belgium joke were both improved by being combined, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Geeks often equate problem-solving skills with intelligence,
It's certainly an oversimplification to say that problem-solving skills are equivalent to general intelligence, but it's also an oversimplification--a much more misleading one, in my opinion--to say that they're only one component of general intelligence, no more or less important than any other.
There are a lot of different types and components of intelligence. Some of them work in parallel--if you have weak analytical skills but strong emotional intelligence, the former won't interfere much with the latter, and the latter won't make up for the former. Some of them work in series, though, and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Problem-solving in particular can be a bottleneck for many, maybe all, other components of intelligence. Imagine using a map to drive around an unfamiliar city. If you have strong spacial awareness but weak problem-solving skills, you're not going to have any more success than someone with the same problem-solving ability and much weaker spacial intelligence.
If Alice has equally low abilities in all forms of intelligence, including problem-solving, and Bob has moderate to high ability in all forms of intelligence except that he's no better at problem-solving than Alice, then functionally, there will be very little difference between them. Improving their problem-solving skills by equal amounts would result in Bob being smarter than Alice, but I don't think it's accurate to say that he already is.
The good news is that problem-solving is a learned skill, so it can be improved at any stage of life. The bad news is that the culture of the industrialized West over the last 50-60 years is uniquely awful at teaching problem-solving. Almost all of our entertainment is intellectually passive. We read books and watch TV and movies instead of telling stories; we listen to music instead of singing or learning to play an instrument; we watch other people playing sports instead of playing them ourselves; we go to museums instead of doing research. The only major form of entertainment that involves problem-solving is game-playing. Board games, card games, etc., are shrinking in popularity. Nearly everyone still engages in them sometimes, but the amount of time the average person spends with them is plummeting. Video games may be starting to pick up the slack, but the sorts of games where problem-solving is a major component are a minority. Guitar Hero and Madden are fun, but there's no problem-solving involved. The games that really have problems to solve are popular only within a small, slow-growing subculture.
Even outside entertainment, we have little opportunity to improve our problem-solving skills. We work for mega-corporations where our jobs are designed to involve as little creativity and flexibility as possible. Decision-makers and problem-solvers are presented as elites who must be consulted whenever anything unusual happens. And as much good as ultra-specialization has done for the world, it has resulted in a situation where people believe that anything outside their own specialty is completely inaccessible--any time we have a problem that we haven't already memorized a solution to, we go immediately to an expert. We never try to solve any problems outside our own specialty, so we never learn how to apply existing skills to new situations.
Well, a minimum wage job isn't really intended to be a LIVING wage job...those jobs are for highschool and college kids...
Except that in a service-oriented luxury economy like we have in the USA (and the rest of the first-world), there are many times more low-skill low-pay jobs than there are high school and college students to work them. But although there aren't enough student workers to fill all or most of those jobs, they are a large enough minority to have an impact on wages. Those kids can underbid adults because their lives are heavily subsidized by parents (usually). When one group of the workers competing for a class of jobs is given an advantage based (almost) entirely on their parentage, then we've created a de facto aristocracy.
Free market principles say that if the adult workers weren't willing to work for wages that low they should simply quit, but in practice the amount of time between quitting and literally starving to death is too short to make a difference. Minimum-wage employers are equivalent to the refrigerator salesman who drives a harder bargain when he knows your old fridge is broken and you need a new one today. The power to make better economic choices is the power to wait for better economic choices, period. If you are unable to wait, you are unable to make choices at all, and your situation is simply slavery with a choice of master.
Those two factors are sides of the same coin. In both cases, the people who have money, and therefore time and power, are using their power to artificially depress the wages of the powerless. I'm not claiming this is a conspiracy, quite the opposite: it's the direct macroeconomic result of perfectly reasonable microeconomic decision-making. True libertarians, who value individual freedom, should be in favor of a living minimum wage to correct for the power imbalance between the rich and the poor. If you believe that money should be the only form of power, you are not a libertarian at all: the word for that position is plutocracy.
Also, S-corporations exist solely to solve that problem. They are exempt from double-taxation because they're designed for the type of company for which "profit" and "owner's salary" are synonyms. The only reason for a company of that size and type to want to be a C-corp or LLC in the first place is to qualify for legal protection from financial, civil, and criminal liability that goes beyond what a wage-earner would have. Double taxation is how you pay for that protection.
Yes, the choice of axioms is somewhat arbitrary. But all the words you're using in your rhetorical questions are defined in terms of those axioms. The set-theoretic axioms (except for the axiom of choice) are all on the level of obviousness of "not (P or Q) means the same as ((not P) and (not Q))". They're as indisputable as indisputability gets. The words "prime", "two", "plus", etc., are defined in terms of those axioms, and the axioms demonstrate with absolute certainty that two plus two does equal four and there is not highest prime. Geometry is an unusual case where there are several non-equivalent choices of axioms in which you can define things like "parallel" and "triangle", but the definitions are not the same from one axiomization to another. A Euclidean-triangle is a fundamentally different object from a Riemannian-triangle. In either case, set theory or geometry, disagreeing with a proven statement requires redefining the words used in that statement. In other words, disagreeing with a fundamentally different statement, or, not actually disagreeing at all.
Furthermore, to the extremely limited extent that Godel's incompleteness theorem is related to your post at all, it contradicts you. It states that any sufficiently powerful (basically anything you can do number theory in) axiomatic system is either inconsistent (able to prove both P and not-P) or incomplete (able to express statements which cannot be proven or disproven within the system). It is possible to determine which a given system is. Set theory, for example, is consistent but not complete--same for Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry. You can also (at least sometimes) identify which statements are undecidable. So if a known-undecidable statement claims that no set can have a certain property, then the fact of its undecidability tells us that we'll never find a counterexample: that there is no such set. In other words, the nonexistence of that kind of set is true but not provable. Godel formally proved that there is such a thing as mathematical truth beyond mere provability. He proved Platonism: the claim that mathematics is (in some sense) real, not just a game that mathematicians play with symbols on paper.
I thought you could only disprove, not prove math stuff...
Hypotheses in the empirical sciences can be disproven but not proven because they rely on observation--they make predictions, and the more you observe those predictions coming to pass, the more likely the hypothesis seems. But you can never know the difference between a hypothesis that never makes incorrect predictions and one that simply hasn't made any yet.
Mathematics, however, deals with statements that can be verified through rigorous deductive logic: a step-by-step reasoning process in which it is absolutely certain that each step leads to the next. That means that if your starting point is indisputable, your result is too.
Both games show striking similarities to Linden Lab's creation.
You mean: "Both games, like Linden Labs' creation, show striking similarities to the Metaverse of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash."
Exchange is more than a mail server.
You misspelled "less".
(joking, not trolling)
I agree about the first Hellboy--visually, it was barely recognizable as a Del Toro film, the plot was an (even more) oversimplified version of the Hollywood Superhero Movie Formula (TM), and it gave us no reason to care about the characters.
But this sequel is a COMPLETELY different film. On every level, from its basic look all the way down to the themes and symbolism (yes, it's a big-budget superhero flick that HAS themes and symbolism), Hellboy II is a more direct successor to Pan's Labyrinth than to the first Hellboy. It not only makes us care about the characters, but its central message is that we should ask ourselves why the characters should care about us. And it makes the audience both hate the villain and still sympathize with the cause he's fighting for.
I'm a projectionist at a movie theater, so I see almost every movie that comes out, and it's a toss-up for me between Hellboy and Wall-E for my favorite film of 2008 so far. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Iron Man are the rest of the top 5.
I'm negating some spent mod points by posting, but I can't let this pass. Like every geeky 13-year-old in the world, I went straight from the movie theater to the bookstore after seeing Jurassic Park, and enjoyed the book immensely. But Timeline was what finally turned me off from Crichton, for two reasons. One, the "science" in it is gobblety-gook. He's using real words, but clearly has no idea what they really mean. It's the same level of bullshit as Star Trek (disclaimer: I like Star Trek), but Trek at least presents its bullshit as bullshit instead of pretending it's real science. And two, the plot is a blatant ripoff of the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which is better-written and contains real science.
Yes and no. It is in the best interests of any one oil company to be the first to switch over to an alternative energy source. But it is also in the best interests of all the oil companies (individually and collectively) for the status quo to continue as long as possible--they control a finite resource, which is destroyed by use and demand for which is increasing.
Essentially, they have two conflicting motives:
- Be the first mover.
- Don't move until absolutely necessary
To balance those two factors, the oil companies are playing chicken with each other. I suspect all the major players are in fact doing major R&D on renewable energy. When the price of oil increases to the point (I'm guessing $10-15/gallon) that the masses actually consider changing their habits--when the luxury SUV market is the entire SUV market, when the median distance from people's homes to their workplaces is three miles, when mass transit gets enough passengers to become financially self-sufficient--you'll see the big oil producers all roll out their replacement technologies at once.Bicycles are not a workable solution for a sufficient percentage of the population. Cycling more than a mile or two, or cycling uphill, requires a level of athletic fitness that a good number of people are legitimately medically incapable of. I'm not talking about smokers or overeaters, I'm talking about the asthmatic, the arthritic, the temporarily and permanently disabled, etc.
Take me: I'm 28 years old, 6'6" tall and weigh 205 pounds, with 12% body fat. I can lift half my weight over my head. I can walk or hike five or ten miles with no ill effects. I catch a cold or flu, on average, once every couple of years, and usually recover twice as fast as the person I caught it from. I've never smoked in my life. Not only am I in excellent shape, but I have some genetic advantages over the rest of the population.
I've also had lung surgery three times. I can't do anything aerobic for more than a few minutes before falling down (yes, literally), gasping for breath, in physical pain. At the absolute maximum, I can run or jog about a quarter mile or bicycle about a mile on a flat surface. I can't bicycle uphill at all.
My specific circumstances are unusual, as are any of the other specific circumstances that could make cycling unfeasible. But there are a LOT of those circumstances. Assuming people become as fit as they are capable of being, can 75% of the population use a bicycle for long distances? Almost certainly. Can 90%? Almost certainly not.
You and I agree on a number of things: The world would be better if more people bicycled. A lot of people who could, don't. Buses combine the worst elements of cars and mass transit. And I understand you're not proposing that bicycles completely replace cars. But the fact that you use your bicycle for trips that I would drive does not make you better than me. It means your personal strengths and weaknesses are more suited to this particular problem than mine.
And I can't say for sure without knowing how much you do use those two sports cars, but it's at least plausible that you use more total gas driving them for fun than I do driving my Honda Civic to work.
Does knowing this before everyone else make me cool?
This is Slashdot. We're geeks. That's how we define cool.
I'm jealous, your printer must actually work. My experience has been that this is more typical behavior:
If nothing is wrong at all, display "PAPER JAM" on the LCD and cancel all print jobs.
If the letter tray is empty, fail silently, releasing molten toner particles into the delicate inner workings of the printer.
If there is any other problem, including an empty legal tray, display "PC LOAD LETTR" on the LCD (because the LCD is one character shorter than its most common message) and vibrate hard enough to misalign the toner cartridge.
No, if he had been upfront and not committed fraud, they would have noticed and not given him the money in the first place.
You are correct that there are myriad layers of abstraction to every aspect of human thought. But where reductionists and holists alike go wrong is defining a single layer to be the One True Reality. Holists say that the top layer is real, everything else is just details. Reductionists say that the bottom layer is real, everything else is just imagination. But all these layers exist because they are useful and meaningful. The way to decide an issue is to determine which layer is relevant, not to decree that your favorite layer is the relevant one for every issue.
That's only vaguely true, and not even vaguely relevant. The owners of private property have every right, legally and ethically, to require visitors to that property to agree to (practically) any terms they want. The visitors are free to leave if they find the terms unacceptable. I can't imagine any US or UK court upholding terms that allow illegal behavior, but for anything short of that, what do you think "private property" means?
And in this case, there's nothing remotely illegal about the terms being set. The amusement park operators are simply not allowing certain devices on their property, and offering a (free?) storage service for those disallowed devices. Visitors can leave their smartphones at home, or in the car, or in the park-provided storage. If you don't like those choices, don't go to that park.
The real issues are:
- Would you personally visit an amusement park with this policy?
- Is this policy a sound business decision?
My answers are no to both, as I assume yours are, but this is ABSOLUTELY NOT a legal/civil liberties issue.I love (most of) the Final Fantasy games too, but Dragon (Warrior|Quest) has always seemed to expect more intelligence from the user. By comparison, FF games usually feel a bit like they're stuck in tutorial mode. DWIV was my favorite of the NES games, even though it was commercially a disaster in the US, and I know from the magic of emulation that DQV is even better. Hopefully this'll sell well enough that they really will remake DQV and DQVI, which were never released here at all.
It has nothing to do with the fact that the movie "played like 3 episodes"
It has everything to do with the fact that it played like (actually) 4 episodes. I mildly enjoyed BBS in movie format, but seeing the episodes it got split into on Comedy Central, they were all above average and the fourth was superb. Then I went back and watched the DVD again for comparison, and I'm pretty sure what diminished my appreciation for it was that it messes with the traditional narrative structure--it's a twelve-act story, four of which feel like first acts, four like second acts, and four like third acts. You pointed out that it feels less snappy, and that's why.
Playing games with people's unconscious expectations for structure like that can work if you do it carefully and have content-related reasons for it--Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, and Memento come to mind--but that's not the case with BBS. A continuous 88-minute movie is not the format it was designed for, and it shows. I'm going to try to alter my expectations when I watch the rest of the movies and think of them as if I'm watching four straight episodes on VHS with the titles, commercials, and credits edited out--because that's what they are.
Clap... Clap... Clap... Clap...
Ideas first come when the technology exists to implement them, but don't catch on until the technology exists to implement them well. It's a pattern we've seen over and over. Cars existed for decades before Henry Ford figured out how to make one that non-experts could use. The first automatic transmissions were terrible. Home computers were purely hobbyist items until they became powerful enough to have text-based interfaces, and didn't really take off until graphical user interfaces. The major difference between YouTube and any of a dozen other streaming video sites is that YouTube was smart enough or lucky enough to launch right around the time when the millionth home got broadband. Touchscreens found a niche (point-of-sale systems) where their (numerous and severe) flaws didn't matter, and never strayed from that niche until Apple (etc.) fixed those flaws.
It's simply the normal life cycle for technology.
1. What part of "in a closed system" do you not understand? The earth is constantly being bombarded by massive amounts of energy from an outside source--the sun. Every decrease in the earth's entropy is matched by an increase in the sun's (actually, much much more than matched, since the sun shoots out energy in every direction and only about 45 quadrillionths of a percent of it hits the earth).
2. Please look up the terms "photosynthesis" and "gametogenesis." Both are examples of "natural unaided progression from the simple to the complex." And while the micro-evolution you imply that you accept usually isn't an increase in complexity in the colloquial sense of the word, it most certainly is a decrease in entropy and an increase in complexity in the formal sense of the word.
I'm not a biologist--I'm not qualified to present arguments in favor of evolution, so believe what you want. But please don't enter such blatant nonsense into a debate and expect to be taken seriously.
So this article simultaneously is and is not a Monty Python reference?
Neural networks are weird creatures
Creatures are weird neural networks, too.
I'm with you. Stephenson does write endings. Pretty good ones. What he doesn't waste his or his readers' time on is epilogues. You'd think now that everyone has read the last Harry Potter book there'd be more appreciation for that.
Not that epilogues are necessarily bad, in fact I like them when they're done well, but writing them is a different skill than what it takes to produce an otherwise-good story. If a writer lacks that skill, I'd rather not have an epilogue at all than suffer through a crappy one.
Correct, but incomplete. The Belgium joke originated on the radio show but never found its way into any of the books until the American publishers had their hissy-fit--a Belgiuming shame, if you ask me. It's one of my favorite parts of Hitchhiker's canon, the way it points out the absurdity of the whole concept of swear words. I always thought the Rory award sequence and the Belgium joke were both improved by being combined, anyway.