...it's probably stretching things to argue that this is the sole reason that SLC isn't attracting high tech. There are undoubtedly other factors like access to VC, easy connections to overseas flights, and the lack of a network of other tech employers -- you don't want to move to some city to take a job, find out the company sucks or have it go out of business, and discover that they were the only gig in town.
That said, I once worked for a company that was planning to relocate all its scattered operations in one place. SLC was one of the final candidates, and I can tell you that probably 75% of my coworkers said flat-out, "I will quit before I will move there." It wasn't just liquor laws, though I'm sure that was a consideration to some extent. I think it was more the cultural aspect: People wanted to live someplace where a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints was accepted and welcomed. Many of my coworkers were atheists, and many are Jewish, and both those groups said they'd feel very uncomfortable living someplace where the church (any church) had such influence.
...there's also documentation of dolphins engaging in sexual activity with same-sex partners. (I'd call it "homosexual" behavior, except that dolphins aren't Homo like we H. sapiens.) Anyway, that's a bit of trivia to throw at your homophobic friends next time they claim that same-sex activity is "unnatural".
I read some of the ape-language research when I was in college, and I recall being profoundly disappointed. Mass-media coverage had led me to believe (and frankly, I think I just wanted to believe) that chimps etc. might really be able to learn fairly complex speech (sign language) patterns. Alas, the utterances never showed any sign of what we consider linguistic structure, as opposed to simple emission of a handful of memorized symbols. And there is a fundamental difference: Human language operates on many more complex levels than mere regurgitation of symbols. Consider, for example, word order: "Mark ate the bear" vs. "The bear ate Mark". Same words, very different meaning. To the best of my knowledge, research of language in other animals has never shown even this simplest grammatical distinction, let alone subtleties such as tense, intentionality, and so on.
By contrast, I had an experience the other day that reminded me just how amazing human language capabilities are. I was visiting my brother-in-law's place and playing with his 2.5-year-old son. At some point we were kind of tickling each other, and he pouted and said "I don't like anymore, so I going sit my chair" and did just that. I don't have kids, but I was kind of shocked that a 2.5-year-old could put together such a coherent and nuanced thought (even if the grammar wasn't perfect, his intentions were entirely clear). And I can tell you that this utterance is more complicated by an order of magnitude than anything any researcher has ever managed to coax from any non-human primate (again, unless there have been big developments since I last examined this research).
By the way, I'm not arguing that chimps are not very, very smart. They can learn to distinguish themselves in mirrors (I think they are the only species ever to have been shown to be able to do so); they can plan ahead; they can practice deception (which for some reason the academic papers always refer to as "prevarication"). They have complex social structures, some tool use, and some evidence of "culture" (i.e., learned traditions that differ from tribe to tribe and are passed from generation to generation). But they don't appear to have, or be capable of learning, language in anything like we as humans understand it.
It may be that chimps and other non-human apes simply lack the cortical structures required for this -- humans do contain very highly specialized and localized language structures in the brain. The specialization of this circuitry becomes clear when you look at cases of people who have small lesions or other damage affecting a particular point in their language centers: They may lose the ability to speak, but not to understand; they may lose the ability to process nouns, but not verbs; they may lose the ability to process abstract nouns but retain the ability to process concrete nouns. If chimps don't have brain structures that can perform these language functions, it's extremely unlikely we'll ever be able to simply "teach" them language as we understand it. And it's unlikely that evolution would have given them such incredibly specialized brain structures if they weren't using them, which they clearly aren't.
Personally, if I wanted to "uplift" a species, I'd focus less on language and more on tool use. I wonder if you could teach chimps to flake rocks to make simple stone-age knives, and then take those knives and bind them to a shaft to make axes... such things would seem to be within the mechanical and cognitive ability of chimps, and if they could learn those skills and pass them to their children, who knows where that would lead... maybe researchers who did that with chimps in the wild would come back 1,000 years later to discover that they were building simple huts and learning how to tame fire, that critical step on the way to the iron age. Then again, maybe I've just watched 2001 a few too many times.
...philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" model. It's worth noting that this is an extremely controversial position (almost to the point of inciting "religious" arguments) among cognitive scientists, because it essentially claims that computers can never "think" or "understand" in the way that people do. Thought != computation. To me (and apparently many others) that elevates the process of human thought to an almost magical/mystical level. What is it the neurons in our brain do if it's not computational? (Note that I'm not arguing that we are deterministic, however.)
It makes no sense to me that we might be able to understand something that dolphins know.
I think the answer to this depends on how strictly you mean "understand" or "know". For example, dolphins may well have very different visual systems than humans do. So in a strict sense, we will never understand or know what it is that dolphins really "see". On the other hand, we do possess a wide range of technologies that allow us to simulate or create analogies to many things -- so even though we might not be able to experience sight in the same way that dolphins do, we could perhaps understand or relate to it. Of course, there are some physiological differences that will be really difficult to understand -- what does it feel like to have fins instead of legs? -- but those kind of things are impossible to understand even among humans. Try explaining sight to someone born blind, or how menstruation feels to a man. There's a hardware difference that can't be bridged...
Wow, now you've got me wondering. I had a condition called ambliopeia (sp?), which is often called "lazy eye", although I think my eye was lazy in the sense of having poor acuity, not in the sense of drifting around independently of the good one.
I wonder if it fucked me up for life too? Unfortunately, I have no great music to show for it:-(
First you state "Americans like big cars" then "American [sic] is one of the cleanest countries in the world". Cars are one of the major sources of pollution, about 25% of total.
Uh, maybe 25% of the total NOx emissions or something like that, but hardly 25% of *total* pollutants economy-wide.
Also, even though American cars are big, newish American cars are very, very clean-running. Try visiting someplace like Rome or Athens, both of which are beautiful cities with great historical significance that are just appallingly, unbelievably polluted. (I grew up in L.A. in the 70s and 80s, and lived through plenty of serious smog alerts... and they are *nothing* compared to everyday air pollution in some cities I've traveled to. And I have yet to make it to Asia...)
Sure, gas prices in the U.S. are too low and don't take into account the real costs of hydocarbon fuels. But because driving is so central to people's living and working arrangements in the U.S. -- much more so than virtually anyplace I've ever visited -- that's unlikely to ever change.
Southern California is an example of this. Xenophobia and prejudice are easy to develop under these conditions because in a democratic society, those moving in want things their way, similiar to what they are comfortable with, the way they knew it in their former homelands.
I place the blame for xenophobia and prejudice squarely on the ones exhibiting it, not on people who want to immigrate and retain portions of their original culture. (Incidentally, I lived sourthern California for 17 years, so I'm not at all unfamiliar with this. I knew lots of people who believed there should be English-only laws, but I figure that if people want to conduct their business in Spanish or Vietnamese or Chinese, what moral authority do I have to disallow that?) Now, if people want to maintain their individual culture to such an exclusive extent that they are unwilling to interact with the people who lived there before, they're guilty of the same intolerance, but I tend to believe that's the exception rather than the rule.
I once read an interesting piece once about the origin of the so-called Chinatown districts in many U.S. cities. Turns out that one of the favorite entrepreneurial activities of early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. was laundries, so city councils passed ordinances limiting where laundries were permitted, thus effectively segregating the immigrants without doing anything overtly prejudicial. In other words, the xenophobia was imposed from the outside, not the other way around. I find this particularly ironic given that the U.S. is a country of immigrants in the first place -- it's not as if we have thousands of years of history and a political system built to defend that historical culture.
I was going to say all these things, but not only did you beat me to it, you did it better than I would've. I can't help but adding a couple of supporting points:
Thomas Malthus made the exponential-population argument more than two centuries ago. Paul Ehrlich did it again in 1969, claiming in his best-seller The Population Bomb that "We have already lost the battle. No matter what crash programs are instigated at this time, they will not be enough to prevent a worldwide famine of catastrophic proportions in the next ten years. Billions of people will die." Whoops. (Here is some information on the late Julian Simon, who repeatedly and famously debunked such bogosity.)
Capitalism encourages unsustainable population growth, depletion of natural resources, and the creation of waste products.
Aside from the fact that it's not clear that human population growth is indeed "unsustainable", you could replace "capitalism" with many words, including "life" itself, that would result in equally true statements. Rabbits, rats, and cockroaches, for example, do not practice capitalism (that I know of:-), yet they practice unsustainable population growth (to the extent permitted by the lack of predators), depletion of natural resources (food, oxygen, etc.), and the creation of waste products (turds, CO2, etc.). The same is true even of lowly bacteria, except that their "natural resources" and "waste products" are rather different than ours -- which merely serves demonstrates that one lifeform's "waste products" are another's "natural resources".
Incidentally, I could easily argue that lack of capitalism promotes slavery. The absence of property rights essentially means that others can usurp the fruits of your labors whether you like it or not. It's less direct than literally buying and selling human beings, of course, but it's not at all dissimilar in principle.
Frankly, I don't support Napster. I know that's an unpopular position among this crowd, but I don't believe that it's ethically justifiable for people to treat themselves to unlimited use of other people's work without their (the artists') permission. Now, that hardly means I'm on the side of the corporations -- in fact, I think that the corporations are quite likely screwing themselves by being anti-Napster. But you know what? I also think it's their choice (and you know, both people and corporations have the right to make stupid choices!) since the songs are technically their property, and I believe that respect for property rights is fundamental to a civil society. Certainly I'm unhappy about the current dominance of the labels rather than the artists (who are the ones doing the real work), and I'm particularly upset by attempts to trample on legitimate "fair use" of copyrighted property. But my frustration doesn't legitimize the way many people seem to be using Napster. There are lots of things in this world that are frustrating, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to just do whatever the f--- I feel like.
Here's a question that has been bugging me for a while. Many of the people I know have vision that's somewhere between below average and really terrible, and for the most part they are more technically oriented than artistic. (I'm not saying that writing code is not creative; I'm talking about visual arts here.) On the other hand, I know a few artists and photographers who have better-than-normal vision. Now, this could just be coincidence, but I keep wondering: Is it possible that there is a correlation, or even a causal relationship, between superior vision and artistic interest/talent? It's certainly plausible to me that people who have better eyes would tend to be more attuned to the nuances that their visual system conveys, and by extension (and with lots of practice!) be better able to become talented artistically.
Does anyone have any evidence that this is, in fact, the case?
...if the optical components of the eye (lens, cornea, the fluid inside the eyeball) are actually transparent to infrared? In principle it should be possible to (someday) genetically engineer receptors that would shift the frequency sensitivity of your rods and/or cones, but that would only be any good if the energy were able to make it to the retina in the first place...
Related question: I know there are animals (notably bees) that can see in the ultraviolet -- and also some that can sense polarity, which I think is really cool too! -- but are there animals that have IR-capable vision? (I seem to recall snakes being able to sense IR, but I can't remember if it was via their eyes or some other organ.)
Interesting you mention this aspect of things. As a child I had OK vision in my right eye and truly terrible vision (to the point of being legally blind) in my left eye. In fact, one of my earliest childhood memories is going to the eye doctor and breaking down in tears because he asked me what direction the "big E" was pointing in -- and I couldn't see a damn thing.
Anyway, I ended up having to wear an eye patch over my good eye for quite some time, in order to force my bad eye (through glasses) to work at all. My opthamologist told me (well, my parents) that if I didn't wear the patch during this critical developmental period (to about 5 or 6 years old, IIRC), the neuronal system behind my bad eye would never develop properly, and I would in effect be uncorrectably blind in that eye for life: even if I got glasses and corrected the focus problems, I would never have grown the circuitry I needed to process that information. Ouch.
As it happens I have an appt at the eye doc on Monday, so we'll see just where I stand these days...
Although "20/10" vision signifies something like "You see at 20 feet what most people see at 10 feet," it means that primarily in the sense of resolution/detail/acuity, not in the sense of magnification. In other words, you could read a sign (or whatever) 2x as far away -- but that's because the letters are not blurring together as much, not because it appears twice as large on your retinas.
And no, you can't "vote with your dollars" and go elsewhere, because there is no elsewhere to go.
How close-minded and utterly uncreative of you. I certainly can, and I damn well will, vote with my dollars. If I don't like the terms that DVD players are being sold under, then maybe I'll buy books instead. If I don't like the terms that CDs are being sold under, maybe I'll go watch more live shows and support my local music industry.
Don't get me wrong: I think this GPS-bombing concept is a truly shitty idea. But if that's what stupid manufacturers want to do, I don't see why it's not within their rights to do so. Owning electronic devices is hardly an inalienable human right. I am under no compulsion to buy their crap.
By the way, you should brush up on your economics. "Charging different prices in different areas" is not synonymous with "fixing prices". In fact, there are cases where charging different prices in different areas (or more generally, to different customers) is good for both buyers and sellers, precisely because some buyers are willing to pay more than others.
Japanese companies have solved the problem of straying senior citizens -- track them by satellite. Local governments in Tokyo and Kikuchi City plan to test the device
...of our worries. GPS is used in applications such as aircraft navigation, marine vessel location, emergency medical evacuation (some cars now have GPS systems that relay coordinates to police and hospitals when your airbags inflate), heavy machinery tracking, surveying, agriculture, and of course countless military applications (which is why it was originally developed). Sure, there are backup systems in place for many of these applications, but the commercial, governmental, and life-safety impact would be a heck of a lot more serious than the fact you can't play your new Britney Spears DVD.
I find believeing that we are only here because of random chance impossible to believe, just look at the work around us - it's incredible, I can't believe it wasn't designed by God.
So you are saying: Something as incredible as the universe around us requires a creator.
Such a creator would be truly incredible, even more incredible than the universe we know. Thus, by your original argument, He/She/It couldn't have come around by random chance. The creator must have been created by a super-creator!
And furthermore, that super-creator must have been created by a super-super-creator.
Houston, we have a problem...
Perhaps the solution is to postulate that the creator needs no super-creator; He/She/It just IS.
That may be the case. But if a creator can just BE, without requiring a creator, then I see no reason to believe that the universe cannot also just BE, without requiring a creator. (Or the Big Bang could just happen, or whatever. IANACosmologist.)
Of course, this doesn't prove anything either way. But it does show that your argument -- the work around us MUST have been designed by a creator -- is itself untenable.
By the way, I think it's great that you are both a Christian and a scientist (though apparently not a Christian Scientist! ) and trying to find ways of reconciling science and religion for yourself.
What if, in their browsing through my data, they delete or destroy important information (thesis data or papers or somesuch)?
Bulletin from the Real World: Nobody is responsible for your data but you. If you have irreplaceable information, you'd better keep your own backups. If you have highly confidential data, you'd better store it encrypted (at the very least) or not transmit it across publicly available systems at all.
University AUPs may indeed be overbroad, but that's no excuse for not practicing safe computing in the first place.
You may be right that you are not respected because of your age. But let me also pose a couple of questions that you should think seriously about.
Is it possible that the reason you're not being respected is not your age per se, but the way you behave? Or that people don't believe what you say not because you're wrong about it, but because of the way you say it? I don't know you at all, of course, but I've had employees before who made similar complaints about not being respected (not necessarily because of age) and simply weren't aware of the things they were doing that undermined their ability to earn respect. Respect isn't just about how well you program, it's about how you conduct yourself with co-workers -- do they perceive you as someone honest, trustworthy, positive, reasonably humble (nobody likes a know-it-all), mature, a team player, open-minded, and so on. Sometimes well-intentioned and competent people have negative traits that they're not aware of, or that they're aware of but don't think influence other people's opinion of them -- for example, they may be predisposed to whining when the work is hard, or they may be condescending when asked to explain how to do something, or make assertions (even if they're correct) without being able to back them up with evidence, or they may finish projects quickly but skimp on quality. Certainly these problems aren't exclusive to youth; I've known 35-year-olds who could make your average 16-year-old seem mature. But in general, people who have been in the workforce for a shorter time may not be as diplomatic and have as much perspective; they may also just not be aware of how much they don't yet know.
Second, you need to do a frank assessment of whether the things you've done are really worthy of respect. This is really important: You don't get awards just for doing what you're expected to do as part of your job. Doing your job, and what your bosses ask you to do, is the minimum criterion for remaining employed. If you want to get promoted, if you want respect, you have to go beyond those expectations.
Third, make sure you really understand the business you are in. A common affliction of developers is to do the thing that seems logical to them, which is not always the thing that's right for the business. If the real power base in your company is the sales force, for example, you need to make sure that you are not screwing up their lives, because they will use that system you set up and be unhappy and complain to your boss that it's not what they wanted, and he will blame you. (I'm sort of oversimplifying here, but I'm sure you get my drift.) You can decry this as stupid office politics if you want, but what it's really about is understanding that different people in the organization have different priorities, and you need to consider how you look through other people's eyes, not just your own.
Again, I don't know you personally, and it's certainly possible that you are a model employee and the people you work for are just a bunch of ignorant buttheads. If that's the case you probably should consider working somewhere else; my pesonal experience has generally been that talented people are in high demand in the tech industry and that those people will get recognized regardless of race, religion, sexual preference... or age. But you should really make sure that the problem is with them and not really with you -- take some time to do an honest assessment of your performance, make sure your expectations are properly calibrated, and then go do great stuff.
Much as I'd agree with the "No coupons etc. just low prices and prompt service" concept, it's been tried before and failed. I don't have the link handy right now, but one of the big U.S. department-store chains -- maybe K-Mart -- attempted this a few years ago. Basically what they discovered is that people don't go there because of everyday low prices. They are drawn by sales and the promise of a discount, even if in the long run they're being irrational by not choosing the "everyday low prices" option. This and other research I've seen leads me to believe that many people are motivated not by the absolute price of goods as much as by the feeling that they're "getting a bargain". (Why else would you be mad if you thought you got a deal one day, and then discovered the next day that your best friend bought the same thing from the same place at the same time and paid less?)
Let's take as fact for a moment that this "loss of memory among the younger generation" effect is real. (The evidence cited in the article certainly isn't compelling on its own, but I'm willing to do this for the sake of argument.) It's not at all clear to me that dependence on electronic devices is any more significant a cause than fundamental social and lifestyle changes. Throughout most of human history, the vast majority of people lived their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplaces. They had little exposure to the larger world through media, travel, long-range communication devices, and so on.
Things are different today. People are vastly more mobile and better connected. I sometimes get agitated over the fact that it takes me a moment to remember my current phone number, but then I consider the fact that I've lived in ten different apartments in four cities over the past 12 years, and I've had at least four different business phone numbers plus a whole smorgasbord of cell phone numbers, pager numbers, voice-mail access numbers, and various other things that I've committed to memory at some time or another. I just looked at the address book in my PDA, which is far from a complete representation of every person I've ever met in my life, and still it's got over 1,000 entries in it.
In other words, there's just much more stuff to remember than there used to be. A big part of the reason I got my PDA in the first place was that I had a hard time keeping track of all my meetings -- I actually have a really good memory, but when you've got like 20 meetings or teleconferences a week and they are all moving around all the time, it just gets insanely hard to keep that all in your head. So I made the choice to try to keep my head empty of stuff that is intrinsically pretty useless, like phone numbers and appointment dates, and use my brainpower for things that were more interesting.
In the term "runaway greenhouse effect", "runaway" doesn't mean "rapid" or "imminent". It means something more like "self-perpetuating chain-reaction".
The "greenhouse effect" is not itself a bad thing. It merely refers to the fact that some energy reflected off the earth's surface is captured by the atmosphere and re-radiated toward the earth rather than lost into space. Without it, the earth would not be hospitible to life as we know it.
A "runaway" greenhouse effect occurs when temperature warms up beyond equilibrium, to a point where the oceans start to evaporate at a significantly higher rate. Since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, this is the beginning of a nasty feedback loop: as the temperature causes water to evaporate, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise, which causes more water to evaporate... i.e., it becomes a runaway positive-feedback effect. Here is a good description of the ultimate runaway greenhouse doomsday scenario.
Perhaps His reason was to give us big-brained apes a tough astrodynamics challenge and see if we could survive as a species for more than a billion years.
Reminds me of that Love & Rockets song "No New Tale To Tell". The lyrics go "You cannot go against Nature / Because when you do / Go against Nature / It's part of Nature too."
My hat is off to you. While most of us (myself included) sit here and moan and groan about the stupidity of this measure, you have actually put yourself in a position to help shape public policy. I applaud your initiative.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I once worked for a company that was planning to relocate all its scattered operations in one place. SLC was one of the final candidates, and I can tell you that probably 75% of my coworkers said flat-out, "I will quit before I will move there." It wasn't just liquor laws, though I'm sure that was a consideration to some extent. I think it was more the cultural aspect: People wanted to live someplace where a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints was accepted and welcomed. Many of my coworkers were atheists, and many are Jewish, and both those groups said they'd feel very uncomfortable living someplace where the church (any church) had such influence.
...there's also documentation of dolphins engaging in sexual activity with same-sex partners. (I'd call it "homosexual" behavior, except that dolphins aren't Homo like we H. sapiens.) Anyway, that's a bit of trivia to throw at your homophobic friends next time they claim that same-sex activity is "unnatural".
By contrast, I had an experience the other day that reminded me just how amazing human language capabilities are. I was visiting my brother-in-law's place and playing with his 2.5-year-old son. At some point we were kind of tickling each other, and he pouted and said "I don't like anymore, so I going sit my chair" and did just that. I don't have kids, but I was kind of shocked that a 2.5-year-old could put together such a coherent and nuanced thought (even if the grammar wasn't perfect, his intentions were entirely clear). And I can tell you that this utterance is more complicated by an order of magnitude than anything any researcher has ever managed to coax from any non-human primate (again, unless there have been big developments since I last examined this research).
By the way, I'm not arguing that chimps are not very, very smart. They can learn to distinguish themselves in mirrors (I think they are the only species ever to have been shown to be able to do so); they can plan ahead; they can practice deception (which for some reason the academic papers always refer to as "prevarication"). They have complex social structures, some tool use, and some evidence of "culture" (i.e., learned traditions that differ from tribe to tribe and are passed from generation to generation). But they don't appear to have, or be capable of learning, language in anything like we as humans understand it.
It may be that chimps and other non-human apes simply lack the cortical structures required for this -- humans do contain very highly specialized and localized language structures in the brain. The specialization of this circuitry becomes clear when you look at cases of people who have small lesions or other damage affecting a particular point in their language centers: They may lose the ability to speak, but not to understand; they may lose the ability to process nouns, but not verbs; they may lose the ability to process abstract nouns but retain the ability to process concrete nouns. If chimps don't have brain structures that can perform these language functions, it's extremely unlikely we'll ever be able to simply "teach" them language as we understand it. And it's unlikely that evolution would have given them such incredibly specialized brain structures if they weren't using them, which they clearly aren't.
Personally, if I wanted to "uplift" a species, I'd focus less on language and more on tool use. I wonder if you could teach chimps to flake rocks to make simple stone-age knives, and then take those knives and bind them to a shaft to make axes... such things would seem to be within the mechanical and cognitive ability of chimps, and if they could learn those skills and pass them to their children, who knows where that would lead... maybe researchers who did that with chimps in the wild would come back 1,000 years later to discover that they were building simple huts and learning how to tame fire, that critical step on the way to the iron age. Then again, maybe I've just watched 2001 a few too many times.
There's a good exposition of this topic here.
It makes no sense to me that we might be able to understand something that dolphins know.
I think the answer to this depends on how strictly you mean "understand" or "know". For example, dolphins may well have very different visual systems than humans do. So in a strict sense, we will never understand or know what it is that dolphins really "see". On the other hand, we do possess a wide range of technologies that allow us to simulate or create analogies to many things -- so even though we might not be able to experience sight in the same way that dolphins do, we could perhaps understand or relate to it. Of course, there are some physiological differences that will be really difficult to understand -- what does it feel like to have fins instead of legs? -- but those kind of things are impossible to understand even among humans. Try explaining sight to someone born blind, or how menstruation feels to a man. There's a hardware difference that can't be bridged...
I wonder if it fucked me up for life too? Unfortunately, I have no great music to show for it :-(
Uh, maybe 25% of the total NOx emissions or something like that, but hardly 25% of *total* pollutants economy-wide.
Also, even though American cars are big, newish American cars are very, very clean-running. Try visiting someplace like Rome or Athens, both of which are beautiful cities with great historical significance that are just appallingly, unbelievably polluted. (I grew up in L.A. in the 70s and 80s, and lived through plenty of serious smog alerts... and they are *nothing* compared to everyday air pollution in some cities I've traveled to. And I have yet to make it to Asia...)
Sure, gas prices in the U.S. are too low and don't take into account the real costs of hydocarbon fuels. But because driving is so central to people's living and working arrangements in the U.S. -- much more so than virtually anyplace I've ever visited -- that's unlikely to ever change.
I place the blame for xenophobia and prejudice squarely on the ones exhibiting it, not on people who want to immigrate and retain portions of their original culture. (Incidentally, I lived sourthern California for 17 years, so I'm not at all unfamiliar with this. I knew lots of people who believed there should be English-only laws, but I figure that if people want to conduct their business in Spanish or Vietnamese or Chinese, what moral authority do I have to disallow that?) Now, if people want to maintain their individual culture to such an exclusive extent that they are unwilling to interact with the people who lived there before, they're guilty of the same intolerance, but I tend to believe that's the exception rather than the rule.
I once read an interesting piece once about the origin of the so-called Chinatown districts in many U.S. cities. Turns out that one of the favorite entrepreneurial activities of early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. was laundries, so city councils passed ordinances limiting where laundries were permitted, thus effectively segregating the immigrants without doing anything overtly prejudicial. In other words, the xenophobia was imposed from the outside, not the other way around. I find this particularly ironic given that the U.S. is a country of immigrants in the first place -- it's not as if we have thousands of years of history and a political system built to defend that historical culture.
Thomas Malthus made the exponential-population argument more than two centuries ago. Paul Ehrlich did it again in 1969, claiming in his best-seller The Population Bomb that "We have already lost the battle. No matter what crash programs are instigated at this time, they will not be enough to prevent a worldwide famine of catastrophic proportions in the next ten years. Billions of people will die." Whoops. (Here is some information on the late Julian Simon, who repeatedly and famously debunked such bogosity.)
Capitalism encourages unsustainable population growth, depletion of natural resources, and the creation of waste products.
Aside from the fact that it's not clear that human population growth is indeed "unsustainable", you could replace "capitalism" with many words, including "life" itself, that would result in equally true statements. Rabbits, rats, and cockroaches, for example, do not practice capitalism (that I know of :-), yet they practice unsustainable population growth (to the extent permitted by the lack of predators), depletion of natural resources (food, oxygen, etc.), and the creation of waste products (turds, CO2, etc.). The same is true even of lowly bacteria, except that their "natural resources" and "waste products" are rather different than ours -- which merely serves demonstrates that one lifeform's "waste products" are another's "natural resources".
Incidentally, I could easily argue that lack of capitalism promotes slavery. The absence of property rights essentially means that others can usurp the fruits of your labors whether you like it or not. It's less direct than literally buying and selling human beings, of course, but it's not at all dissimilar in principle.
Frankly, I don't support Napster. I know that's an unpopular position among this crowd, but I don't believe that it's ethically justifiable for people to treat themselves to unlimited use of other people's work without their (the artists') permission. Now, that hardly means I'm on the side of the corporations -- in fact, I think that the corporations are quite likely screwing themselves by being anti-Napster. But you know what? I also think it's their choice (and you know, both people and corporations have the right to make stupid choices!) since the songs are technically their property, and I believe that respect for property rights is fundamental to a civil society. Certainly I'm unhappy about the current dominance of the labels rather than the artists (who are the ones doing the real work), and I'm particularly upset by attempts to trample on legitimate "fair use" of copyrighted property. But my frustration doesn't legitimize the way many people seem to be using Napster. There are lots of things in this world that are frustrating, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to just do whatever the f--- I feel like.
Does anyone have any evidence that this is, in fact, the case?
Related question: I know there are animals (notably bees) that can see in the ultraviolet -- and also some that can sense polarity, which I think is really cool too! -- but are there animals that have IR-capable vision? (I seem to recall snakes being able to sense IR, but I can't remember if it was via their eyes or some other organ.)
Anyway, I ended up having to wear an eye patch over my good eye for quite some time, in order to force my bad eye (through glasses) to work at all. My opthamologist told me (well, my parents) that if I didn't wear the patch during this critical developmental period (to about 5 or 6 years old, IIRC), the neuronal system behind my bad eye would never develop properly, and I would in effect be uncorrectably blind in that eye for life: even if I got glasses and corrected the focus problems, I would never have grown the circuitry I needed to process that information. Ouch.
As it happens I have an appt at the eye doc on Monday, so we'll see just where I stand these days...
Although "20/10" vision signifies something like "You see at 20 feet what most people see at 10 feet," it means that primarily in the sense of resolution/detail/acuity, not in the sense of magnification. In other words, you could read a sign (or whatever) 2x as far away -- but that's because the letters are not blurring together as much, not because it appears twice as large on your retinas.
How close-minded and utterly uncreative of you. I certainly can, and I damn well will, vote with my dollars. If I don't like the terms that DVD players are being sold under, then maybe I'll buy books instead. If I don't like the terms that CDs are being sold under, maybe I'll go watch more live shows and support my local music industry.
Don't get me wrong: I think this GPS-bombing concept is a truly shitty idea. But if that's what stupid manufacturers want to do, I don't see why it's not within their rights to do so. Owning electronic devices is hardly an inalienable human right. I am under no compulsion to buy their crap.
By the way, you should brush up on your economics. "Charging different prices in different areas" is not synonymous with "fixing prices". In fact, there are cases where charging different prices in different areas (or more generally, to different customers) is good for both buyers and sellers, precisely because some buyers are willing to pay more than others.
Japanese companies have solved the problem of straying senior citizens -- track them by satellite. Local governments in Tokyo and Kikuchi City plan to test the device
Read about it here.
...of our worries. GPS is used in applications such as aircraft navigation, marine vessel location, emergency medical evacuation (some cars now have GPS systems that relay coordinates to police and hospitals when your airbags inflate), heavy machinery tracking, surveying, agriculture, and of course countless military applications (which is why it was originally developed). Sure, there are backup systems in place for many of these applications, but the commercial, governmental, and life-safety impact would be a heck of a lot more serious than the fact you can't play your new Britney Spears DVD.
So you are saying: Something as incredible as the universe around us requires a creator.
Such a creator would be truly incredible, even more incredible than the universe we know. Thus, by your original argument, He/She/It couldn't have come around by random chance. The creator must have been created by a super-creator!
And furthermore, that super-creator must have been created by a super-super-creator.
Houston, we have a problem...
Perhaps the solution is to postulate that the creator needs no super-creator; He/She/It just IS.
That may be the case. But if a creator can just BE, without requiring a creator, then I see no reason to believe that the universe cannot also just BE, without requiring a creator. (Or the Big Bang could just happen, or whatever. IANACosmologist.)
Of course, this doesn't prove anything either way. But it does show that your argument -- the work around us MUST have been designed by a creator -- is itself untenable.
By the way, I think it's great that you are both a Christian and a scientist (though apparently not a Christian Scientist! ) and trying to find ways of reconciling science and religion for yourself.
Bulletin from the Real World: Nobody is responsible for your data but you. If you have irreplaceable information, you'd better keep your own backups. If you have highly confidential data, you'd better store it encrypted (at the very least) or not transmit it across publicly available systems at all.
University AUPs may indeed be overbroad, but that's no excuse for not practicing safe computing in the first place.
...you could make a sport of it, like Rollerball, and even sell tickets...
Is it possible that the reason you're not being respected is not your age per se, but the way you behave? Or that people don't believe what you say not because you're wrong about it, but because of the way you say it? I don't know you at all, of course, but I've had employees before who made similar complaints about not being respected (not necessarily because of age) and simply weren't aware of the things they were doing that undermined their ability to earn respect. Respect isn't just about how well you program, it's about how you conduct yourself with co-workers -- do they perceive you as someone honest, trustworthy, positive, reasonably humble (nobody likes a know-it-all), mature, a team player, open-minded, and so on. Sometimes well-intentioned and competent people have negative traits that they're not aware of, or that they're aware of but don't think influence other people's opinion of them -- for example, they may be predisposed to whining when the work is hard, or they may be condescending when asked to explain how to do something, or make assertions (even if they're correct) without being able to back them up with evidence, or they may finish projects quickly but skimp on quality. Certainly these problems aren't exclusive to youth; I've known 35-year-olds who could make your average 16-year-old seem mature. But in general, people who have been in the workforce for a shorter time may not be as diplomatic and have as much perspective; they may also just not be aware of how much they don't yet know.
Second, you need to do a frank assessment of whether the things you've done are really worthy of respect. This is really important: You don't get awards just for doing what you're expected to do as part of your job. Doing your job, and what your bosses ask you to do, is the minimum criterion for remaining employed. If you want to get promoted, if you want respect, you have to go beyond those expectations.
Third, make sure you really understand the business you are in. A common affliction of developers is to do the thing that seems logical to them, which is not always the thing that's right for the business. If the real power base in your company is the sales force, for example, you need to make sure that you are not screwing up their lives, because they will use that system you set up and be unhappy and complain to your boss that it's not what they wanted, and he will blame you. (I'm sort of oversimplifying here, but I'm sure you get my drift.) You can decry this as stupid office politics if you want, but what it's really about is understanding that different people in the organization have different priorities, and you need to consider how you look through other people's eyes, not just your own.
Again, I don't know you personally, and it's certainly possible that you are a model employee and the people you work for are just a bunch of ignorant buttheads. If that's the case you probably should consider working somewhere else; my pesonal experience has generally been that talented people are in high demand in the tech industry and that those people will get recognized regardless of race, religion, sexual preference... or age. But you should really make sure that the problem is with them and not really with you -- take some time to do an honest assessment of your performance, make sure your expectations are properly calibrated, and then go do great stuff.
Much as I'd agree with the "No coupons etc. just low prices and prompt service" concept, it's been tried before and failed. I don't have the link handy right now, but one of the big U.S. department-store chains -- maybe K-Mart -- attempted this a few years ago. Basically what they discovered is that people don't go there because of everyday low prices. They are drawn by sales and the promise of a discount, even if in the long run they're being irrational by not choosing the "everyday low prices" option. This and other research I've seen leads me to believe that many people are motivated not by the absolute price of goods as much as by the feeling that they're "getting a bargain". (Why else would you be mad if you thought you got a deal one day, and then discovered the next day that your best friend bought the same thing from the same place at the same time and paid less?)
Things are different today. People are vastly more mobile and better connected. I sometimes get agitated over the fact that it takes me a moment to remember my current phone number, but then I consider the fact that I've lived in ten different apartments in four cities over the past 12 years, and I've had at least four different business phone numbers plus a whole smorgasbord of cell phone numbers, pager numbers, voice-mail access numbers, and various other things that I've committed to memory at some time or another. I just looked at the address book in my PDA, which is far from a complete representation of every person I've ever met in my life, and still it's got over 1,000 entries in it.
In other words, there's just much more stuff to remember than there used to be. A big part of the reason I got my PDA in the first place was that I had a hard time keeping track of all my meetings -- I actually have a really good memory, but when you've got like 20 meetings or teleconferences a week and they are all moving around all the time, it just gets insanely hard to keep that all in your head. So I made the choice to try to keep my head empty of stuff that is intrinsically pretty useless, like phone numbers and appointment dates, and use my brainpower for things that were more interesting.
The "greenhouse effect" is not itself a bad thing. It merely refers to the fact that some energy reflected off the earth's surface is captured by the atmosphere and re-radiated toward the earth rather than lost into space. Without it, the earth would not be hospitible to life as we know it.
A "runaway" greenhouse effect occurs when temperature warms up beyond equilibrium, to a point where the oceans start to evaporate at a significantly higher rate. Since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, this is the beginning of a nasty feedback loop: as the temperature causes water to evaporate, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise, which causes more water to evaporate... i.e., it becomes a runaway positive-feedback effect. Here is a good description of the ultimate runaway greenhouse doomsday scenario.
Perhaps His reason was to give us big-brained apes a tough astrodynamics challenge and see if we could survive as a species for more than a billion years.
Reminds me of that Love & Rockets song "No New Tale To Tell". The lyrics go "You cannot go against Nature / Because when you do / Go against Nature / It's part of Nature too."
My hat is off to you. While most of us (myself included) sit here and moan and groan about the stupidity of this measure, you have actually put yourself in a position to help shape public policy. I applaud your initiative.