Java was a great idea let down by a flawed implementation and a flawed corporate strategy IMHO. What I think is that whilst the language itself isn't really going anywhere fast, the idea behind it will live on.
Probably the biggest problem for the targets that Java was aimed at is the fact that performace wise, most Java sucks compared to a good native code implementation. Sure there has been a lot of progress in improving execution speed, but on the whole, Java is still just as slow and fat as Vladinator's wife. This limits the scope of what applications can be written in it.
As for the language itself, well, it's fairly well written, and probably a matter of taste as to whether or not you like it. Personally, writing things like foo.insertanobjectattheendofthislist(object) doesn't really appeal to my sense of elegence, but some people obviously need reminding exactly what each method does.
And Sun really aren't doing anybody any favours with their constant battling over the ownership and direction of Java. They've managed to piss people off enough so that some people won't touch Java as a matter of principle, which is even more rediculous than the issue of say whitespace in Python. And it seems as though Microsoft have learned the lesson from this that Sun didn't, so I expect C# to go places Java never will. It's a better language design IMHO, and it'll be a genuine standard, not a stick for Sun to beat their competitors with.
This leads to the disgusting mindset demonstrated by Dan Hayes, where he call it *tragic* that some people do the right thing (charity) for the wrong reasons (tax-deductions).
As much as you may enjoy misrepresenting what I said, it generally helps to read what someone writes when replying. I do not think that some using charity to gain tax deductions is tragic, I said that it's tragic that people only give to charities because of this fact, rather than from a wish to help others.
I think the idea of allowing charities to benefit from taxes is a good one, but I think it's a pity that it takes something like that for charities to raise a lot of money.
So you rate money higher than altruism?
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I find this line of reasoning disgusting. A starving child in Africa don't care about the motivation for donating the money to buy food. The only reason the motivation should matter, is the selfish Christian idea that the main purpose of charity is to save the soul of the giver, not to help the receiver.
No, they don't care about the reason for the donation. But how can you claim that it is disgusting for people to want to help people less well off than themselves? And where did Christianity come into all of this? Sorry, but when I give to charity it is because it will help someone else, and the fact that I feel good is incidental.
This Christian mindset causes an unknown amount of tradegy every year, when followers of it fight the use of alternative efficient motivations for giving charity. Only charity given "for the goodness of the heart" is valuable in saving the givers soul.
I'm not saying that using charity as a tax break is a bad thing, just that it is fairly pathetic when it is the only reason that people donate to charity, and if they didn't get something for it they wouldn't bother.
You don't seem to mind people getting money for it, but you do mind people feeling good about it. Why is this? Do you value money over altruism?
BTW: A donation to EFF or FSF is likely to do a lot more good to the poor people than the more direct charities. The EFF and FSF fight the establishing of a new global aristocracy based on ownership of interlectual property, which will prevent the poor country from ever entering the new economy.
Rubbish. There are countries where they still lack the basic infrastructure to support the kind of services that make organisations like these possible. I really don't think donating money to RMS's personal crusade is going to do anything for people desparately in need of food and water in Ethiopia. Free software really isn't that important.
Personal experiance means nothing
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Hello? You do realise that even a basic understanding of statistical techniques will tell you that a sample size of one person means absolutely nothing. Just because your great uncle doesn't want to come home it doesn't follow that all homeless people are quite happy where they are.
And besides, it seems likely that their are issues which mean that your great uncle doesn't want to come home. It's quite unlikely he actually enjoys sleeping on the street.
Firstly, charity is something you should do because you want to, not because it allows you to save some money from the taxman. The idea of charity is not to provide affluent geeks with a ready-made tax break, it's to raise money for good causes.
Secondly, if you're really interested in donating to charity, at least make it one that really helps people in need, not one that at the end of the day, accomplishes very little in the grand scheme of things. There are starving children in Africa, victims of ethnic cleansing in Montenegro, children forced into prostitution across the globe and countless other causes that accomplish real good for millions of people.
I think it's tragic that charity is only considered to be useful as a tax dodge, and that even then it's more "geek chic" to promote the EFF than the hundreds of charities genuinely improving people's lives.
After all, anyone developing software whilst they should be working is wasting their employer's time and resources, and if they're lucky enough not to be sacked then anything they produce is certainly the property of the employer - this is only fair. If you work in McDonalds and you take some ingrediants and make a burger, you sure as hell don't own that burger, why should open source software be any different from that, or even from closed source software. Just because you release the code shouldn't give it some magical status over any other program.
This seems another example of how open source advocates are pushing too hard to gain acceptance of open source and free software as a valid option for programs. Yes, open source should be taken on an equal footing as closed source, but it shouldn't be given any special rights or status, because that makes it appear as though it needs the help to compete with closed source software. And trust me, the more people try and get things like this for open source, the more that stubborn CTOs are going to resist it in favour of the latest technology in Computer Weekly.
GM food is not a good idea yet
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Golden Rice
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Okay, so advances in genetic engineering seem to offer us the chance to do a lot of good for world hunger, but the trouble is that we just don't know what effects this stuff will have on us. When it comes to new medicines we insist upon years and years of scientifically conducted trials before allowing them to be used on people, and even then look at the things that crop up years later.
The wholesale introduction of GM foods into our food chain is just too risky at the moment. It's a new technology and mistakes are part of the learning process, and will inevitably be made. If history has taught us anything, it's that no new advance comes without teething troubles. And given this, the last thing we should do is push for them to be used by the general public - a mistake now could cost millions of lives and contaminate other crops, making them tainted as well.
Things like this seem innocuous enough, but you can't let one thing go through because it "seems harmless". Without investigation it could be even the smallest of changes that goes bad, and when it's something as fundamental as food, we can't afford a single mistake.
GM food is just not ready now. We shouldn't let the greed of a few corporations and the advocacy of tecnology fetishists blind us to the very real potential for disaster.
From having a look at the sample output page on the website, I'm wondering if by using the email addresses of "known spammers", they're leaving themselves open to legal reprisals.
Anyway, a large part of the problem with spammers is that they randomly send spam to as many addresses as possible at a certain site, knowing that at places like hotmail, they're likely to hit valid accounts a fair proportion of the time. There's not a lot you can do about this kind of attack - it doesn't require a database of names to succeed.
Because Nature does not select the best design, just the design that is good enough.
True, but with bacteria Nature can get closer to the ideal due to the high mutation rates and range of environments. And it's not like they're required to be able to cope with multiple environments - all that is needed is for them to be able to do one thing very well.
And sure, one day artificial systems will be designed that are superior. But for now, adapting biological ones makes a lot of sense.
Second, how would they retrieve the sub once it finished it's work. I'd hate to think of these things degrading inside my body, and releasing all their chemicals and left-over bio-products.
They don't retreive it - the flagella only have the energy to keep going for an hour or so, and then they die. I'd assume that they would have thought of this problem - plenty of stuff already gets filtered out of your bloodstream anyway, so I doubt it would be that difficult to design a non-toxic solution.
Also, what if one of the nano-subs gets transferred to another person through an open wound.
Again, because they have such a short lifespan this isn't a problem. They're not going to be able to do any damage - after all the whole reason for this is precision targetting of drugs rather than saturation, so there won't be that many of the things in your body at any one time.
This is the sort of thing I think we'll be hearing a lot more of in coming years - a marraige between our increasing ability to design and manufacture things at a sub-microscopic level and Nature's vast wealth of tried and tested designs for all kinds of systems.
It makes far more sense for scientists to utilise a design that is commonly found in Nature than it is to design their own. After all, evolutionary pressures mean that the propeller design of bacterium like salmonella has undergone a far more rigorous selection procedure than even the most quality-conscious engineering team will ever adhere to. Why waste so much effort in designing a likely-inferior system?
It makes a lot of sense to adapt existing systems to our purposes rather than designing everything from scratch. You can bet that prototypes would be a lot further away than a year without this synthesis of man and Nature. Very interesting indeed.
It seems to me, and probably to many of you as well, that the current rules for how the major presidential candidates obtain their money is just plain rediculous, and leaves them wide open, and more to the point willing, to be, well, fucked up the arse by their corporate pimps to put it bluntly.
When did it all go wrong is what I want to know. At what point did our country change from electing our officials based on the quality of their policies to electing our officials based on the number of fireworks and shiny things in their parades? Because if you ask Joe and Jodie Sixpack in Inbred Trailer Park, Kansas, I can guarantee you they wouldn't be able to tell you a single concrete difference in the policies of Bush and Gore. And if they knew of any of the other candidates, I'd be very surpised, because they don't get the corporate "attention" the main two receive.
And as the need to impress has grown, so has the need to ensure a steady supply of $$$ from corporations with their own agendas. This isn't the cut and thrust of politics, it's the rape of democracy by a 20-stone black man with a Nike logo on his head.
Until candidates receive equal and fixed amounts of money to spend on their campaigns, we'll continue to see a stream of presidents who are already intentured to corporate masters before their inaugurations. And that means democracy is nothing more than a myth, and freedom a fond memory of the past.
so i checked Amazon for the book "The Myth of Native American's" and there were no references to books that remotely fit the description that you gave. if you could please point me in a direction that i could locate this tome, I may give your arguments a little credibility.
It's quite an old book, and not really one that was very popular so I'm not suprised that places like Amazon which cater to the popularist liberal views of the masses don't carry it.
and i distictly remember the bible metioning that "it is easier to pass a a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to get a rich man into heaven".
This is an argument against the arrogance of many who are rich, not against the basic concept of wealth. Find me a statement where it says the equivalent of "if you're rich, you're not going to Heaven" please.
As far as worship of Mary goes, go back and read the introductions to the Gospels (in particulary Luke) where an angel (not the Pope) calls Marry 'Blessed among all women.' There is a large distinction between veneration and worship.
Then how is it that in the Confessional, forgiveness can be granted through the invocation of either the Lord or Mary? Only the Lord can grant forgiveness, yet the Catholic cult seems to place Mary on the same level as the Lord, which is a heresy and a sin.
In the sense that people would rather believe the comforting lies that they've grown up with, yes I suppose it is.
Oh... come on now... this is so clearly a troll... There is absolutely no basis to support this claim... Which peasants fled? from whom? why? what smelly hole did you crawl out of...
There are several historical sources for this information, compiled in a historical book called, IIRC, "The Myth of Native Americans", although I can't remember the names of the authors. Try reading it sometime, it isn't prejudiced by liberal revisionists.
You also said that the country was built on the "christian priciple" that hard work is its own reward... sigh... first of all, its called the "protestant work ethic".
Which is what I called it in my original post.
Its not a christian principle. Its protestant apologetics that allows for individuals to gain wealth, and still feel like they are going to heaven. It was an excuse... Its also a large reason that lutheranism and protestantism caught on as quickly as they did. They allowed people to accumulate wealth without the guilt that the catholic church placed on them. And yes, I realize that the catholic church is ridiculously wealthy, and abused their position causing the reformation.
Wealth creation is not against any of the tenents of Christianity - where does is mention that being wealthy is a sin? The idea that wealth is a sin is a blatent lie spread by atheists and liberals intent on damaging the reputation of Christianity. Wealth creation is in fact fully supported by the Christian faith, have you ever read the parable of the rich man?
And don't talk about Catholics as if they were Christians. They are most definitely not.
I think you're confusing the image of society as marketed to you with the society that actually exists - not to mention a gross overgeneralization of "society" in general. Western? Eastern? European, North American, US-specific, what?
Well American of course, what else would I be talking about?
One of the only good points Jack Valenti has ever made is that if violent media were to blame for violence in society (particularly among the young), then we'd have dramatic increases in violent crime among, say, teens (to follow Valenti's example). After all, who's playing all those violent games and watching all that filth on TV? Are we creating a race of monster kids, an entire generation of lawless, bloodthirsty little ankle-biters? Statistics say no.
No, that wasn't what I was arguing in favor of. I'm not saying that we're producing a generation of extra-violent people, merely that these people hold violence to be a valid way of getting ahead in life. They don't see it in the same negative way that people did a hundred years ago - it's a part of their society and a part of their life.
Whilst they may not be more violent per se, in the long run I'm sure that violent incidents will be higher, and this situation can only get worse if today's trends continue.
My take on the rise of the first-person shooter is that it is a reflection of the increasingly violent society we are living in, where the media attempts to overload us with a constant barrage of sensory stimulus just to attract our jaded and cynical attentions. The FPS is the natural evolution of this idea - rather than being passive it allows people to deal with the stresses of society in a way that is a reflection of its darker side - violence.
This country was founded on the decent Christian ideal that hard work leads to reward - the American dream is a reflection of the Protestant work ethic. But in recent years the rise of technology and the increasing secularisation and liberalisation of society have lead to a culture where people are uncertain, afraid of what they're meant to do, and of what will happen in the future. This situation was exacerbated by Cold War tensions and the "Red menace", and it found its outlet in an increase in violence, paranoia and hedonistic behaviors. With the liberal views of the establishment, these excesses are likely to continue.
Nobody can sustain the contemplative life any more - we are constantly being hit with an overload of sensory information. In the culture where MTV is prevalent, text adventures just don't seem "real" enough. On the other hand, the FPS allows for us to participate in violent situations that may seem carthartic in the short term, but reinforce the violent underpinnings of society in the long run.
So the first-person shooter has come to reign supreme in the gaming world, a reflection of a society that has lost its hope and its faith. Until we, as a nation, start to deal with these underlying societal issues, games of death will continue to be incredibly popular, and the worship of the gun will pervade the national conscioussness.
The nature of the internet and email, allowing people to communicate with others with the shield of anonymity means that people feel none of the need to be polite that governs our conversations in the real world, and instead feel safe in expressing their opinions in abusive, derogatory language that their mothers wouldn't approve of. We see it here every day on/. after all.
Maybe if emails were filtered to block messages that were too flamey then people would get the chance to "cool down" and really think about what they're doing. Rather than an increasing amount of "internet rage" coming from an exchange of increasingly virulent mail, a rational discourse could be established. After all, in public speaking forums there are rules of conduct to be followed, and where is the difference here?
Why should the online world be subject to knee-jerk reactions and childish name-calling from people too petty to behave in a reasonable way?
At the moment, nothing can beat the sheer interactivity and functionality of pieces of paper bound in a cover. Whilst there is growth in the amount of online literature, the current state of play of the technology we use in browsing the net makes it a lot more convenient just to pick up a book.
Whilst we are hearing a lot about electronic books recently, the failure of companies to decide on a standard, and the failure of the technology to be as robust or as comfortable as books means that for the moment, "open publishing" will remain firmly a minority phenomenon.
It'd have been better if Napster had never existed
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There are a lot of real issues which we, as a society, are involved in at the moment thanks to the "information revolution" to use a Katzian phrase. Definitions of intellectual property may need changing, the concepts of copyright and patent law need adapting, and the issues of freedom on the net is something that we need to think about extremely seriously.
And then there's Napster. Whilst there are many arguments used, both here on/. and in the current court case, to justify what they're doing these arguments are all sophistry designed to avoid the conclusion that Napster is designed to facilitate the piracy of copyrighted materials. We know it, Napster knows it, and the RIAA sure as hell know it. Why are we defending them when they do nothing but harm for other, more worthwhile causes?
Napster has done almost irrepairable harm to the concept of online digital media. The RIAA and MPAA now feel that they have no choice but to defend their artist's rights in every way they can, and hopes for a meaningful solution that pleases everyone dwindles rapidly. And it has become rediculously easy to paint geeks as "pirates", "theives" and "hackers" devoted to bringing down the foundations of our capitalist economy. And by using Napster, you're proving them right.
These colleges will fold and deny Napster to their students, and they'll be justified in doing so. Whatever else they are, these places aren't designed to be platforms for piracy, and the high-speed network connections they provide aren't meant for illegal uses. More to the point, they're a privilige rather than a right. And thanks to Napster, they're a privlige which could be withdrawn. The last thing these establishments need is legal trouble through no fault of their own.
We really need to boycott Napster, it does nothing but harm our image and those causes worth fighting for. Otherwise, Napster will be the excuse used for organisations and government to implement repressive controls over the net the same way Columbine was used to implement repressive controls over firearms.
Re:And how is that money obtained?
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Once upon a time hard work would get you money. Today is who you know, how you market and how much you have.
The Lord have us brains and there is no sin in using them to obtain advantage for oneself. By hard work I did not specifically mean manual labor, merely the will to succeed which is the hallmark of our USian dream.
The idea that the globalist coterie of governments would allow anything of significant value or power to elude their reach is quite simply a rediculous idea. For these people, control is the key to their power, and they cannot allow anything to exist outside of their control.
You can expect to see any organisation trying to acheive something like this hit by the tools of these people - the UN and the WTO - and if that fails, then I'm sure "accidents" will follow. No country will dare to provide a location for these organisations - just look at what has happened in holdout nations like Panama. Freedom was crushed in the name of international trade, and bodies such as the UN and the WTO provide a valuable smokescreen for such activities. Just look at Bosnia or Rwanda - the UN death squads have been operating under the cover of "peacekeeping", eliminating targets that don't fall into line.
Independent orgainsations will not be allowed to happen.
Since America is in fact a landmass and the United States of America does not cover all of it (or even most of it), the term USia is a more accurate usage of language than the typically arrogant "America". A citizen of this nation is "unitedstatsian" or a USian.
It means that following that path seems better to kids as they're growing up. At that age popularity is a very important factor, and by praising atheletic prowess over things like intelligence and hard work it gives out the message that it's not worth bothering about work. Which USian children seem to have taken to heart.
the guy's point was we have no good academic universities and all american schools care about is sports. that is stupid.
No, I was talking in general, there are always going to be exceptions. Do you have any real arguments against it or are you just flaming for wont of a brain? None of your posts in this article seem particularly clueful.
you are also, apparently, stupid. i read all the posts, and most of them are stupid as well.
Aaah, it seems as though you are 14. That explains a lot. "I don't agree with it, it's stupid!" is obviously the argument of choice in debates across the world.
Why is the solution "get scientists from elsewhere" rather than "fix the US education system"?
Because, like everything else in USia, corporate interests are involved. They are quite happy for there to be a shortage of graduates with these skills so they can import cheap labor, and so there's a distinct corporate push towards the image that science is uncool and to be avoided. Which seems to have worked, since USia seems to be the second-most anti-science nation in the world after Iran.
Slashdot Mirror
Java was a great idea let down by a flawed implementation and a flawed corporate strategy IMHO. What I think is that whilst the language itself isn't really going anywhere fast, the idea behind it will live on.
Probably the biggest problem for the targets that Java was aimed at is the fact that performace wise, most Java sucks compared to a good native code implementation. Sure there has been a lot of progress in improving execution speed, but on the whole, Java is still just as slow and fat as Vladinator's wife. This limits the scope of what applications can be written in it.
As for the language itself, well, it's fairly well written, and probably a matter of taste as to whether or not you like it. Personally, writing things like foo.insertanobjectattheendofthislist(object) doesn't really appeal to my sense of elegence, but some people obviously need reminding exactly what each method does.
And Sun really aren't doing anybody any favours with their constant battling over the ownership and direction of Java. They've managed to piss people off enough so that some people won't touch Java as a matter of principle, which is even more rediculous than the issue of say whitespace in Python. And it seems as though Microsoft have learned the lesson from this that Sun didn't, so I expect C# to go places Java never will. It's a better language design IMHO, and it'll be a genuine standard, not a stick for Sun to beat their competitors with.
This leads to the disgusting mindset demonstrated by Dan Hayes, where he call it *tragic* that some people do the right thing (charity) for the wrong reasons (tax-deductions).
As much as you may enjoy misrepresenting what I said, it generally helps to read what someone writes when replying. I do not think that some using charity to gain tax deductions is tragic, I said that it's tragic that people only give to charities because of this fact, rather than from a wish to help others.
I think the idea of allowing charities to benefit from taxes is a good one, but I think it's a pity that it takes something like that for charities to raise a lot of money.
I find this line of reasoning disgusting. A starving child in Africa don't care about the motivation for donating the money to buy food. The only reason the motivation should matter, is the selfish Christian idea that the main purpose of charity is to save the soul of the giver, not to help the receiver.
No, they don't care about the reason for the donation. But how can you claim that it is disgusting for people to want to help people less well off than themselves? And where did Christianity come into all of this? Sorry, but when I give to charity it is because it will help someone else, and the fact that I feel good is incidental.
This Christian mindset causes an unknown amount of tradegy every year, when followers of it fight the use of alternative efficient motivations for giving charity. Only charity given "for the goodness of the heart" is valuable in saving the givers soul.
I'm not saying that using charity as a tax break is a bad thing, just that it is fairly pathetic when it is the only reason that people donate to charity, and if they didn't get something for it they wouldn't bother.
You don't seem to mind people getting money for it, but you do mind people feeling good about it. Why is this? Do you value money over altruism?
BTW: A donation to EFF or FSF is likely to do a lot more good to the poor people than the more direct charities. The EFF and FSF fight the establishing of a new global aristocracy based on ownership of interlectual property, which will prevent the poor country from ever entering the new economy.
Rubbish. There are countries where they still lack the basic infrastructure to support the kind of services that make organisations like these possible. I really don't think donating money to RMS's personal crusade is going to do anything for people desparately in need of food and water in Ethiopia. Free software really isn't that important.
Hello? You do realise that even a basic understanding of statistical techniques will tell you that a sample size of one person means absolutely nothing. Just because your great uncle doesn't want to come home it doesn't follow that all homeless people are quite happy where they are.
And besides, it seems likely that their are issues which mean that your great uncle doesn't want to come home. It's quite unlikely he actually enjoys sleeping on the street.
Firstly, charity is something you should do because you want to, not because it allows you to save some money from the taxman. The idea of charity is not to provide affluent geeks with a ready-made tax break, it's to raise money for good causes.
Secondly, if you're really interested in donating to charity, at least make it one that really helps people in need, not one that at the end of the day, accomplishes very little in the grand scheme of things. There are starving children in Africa, victims of ethnic cleansing in Montenegro, children forced into prostitution across the globe and countless other causes that accomplish real good for millions of people.
I think it's tragic that charity is only considered to be useful as a tax dodge, and that even then it's more "geek chic" to promote the EFF than the hundreds of charities genuinely improving people's lives.
After all, anyone developing software whilst they should be working is wasting their employer's time and resources, and if they're lucky enough not to be sacked then anything they produce is certainly the property of the employer - this is only fair. If you work in McDonalds and you take some ingrediants and make a burger, you sure as hell don't own that burger, why should open source software be any different from that, or even from closed source software. Just because you release the code shouldn't give it some magical status over any other program.
This seems another example of how open source advocates are pushing too hard to gain acceptance of open source and free software as a valid option for programs. Yes, open source should be taken on an equal footing as closed source, but it shouldn't be given any special rights or status, because that makes it appear as though it needs the help to compete with closed source software. And trust me, the more people try and get things like this for open source, the more that stubborn CTOs are going to resist it in favour of the latest technology in Computer Weekly.
Okay, so advances in genetic engineering seem to offer us the chance to do a lot of good for world hunger, but the trouble is that we just don't know what effects this stuff will have on us. When it comes to new medicines we insist upon years and years of scientifically conducted trials before allowing them to be used on people, and even then look at the things that crop up years later.
The wholesale introduction of GM foods into our food chain is just too risky at the moment. It's a new technology and mistakes are part of the learning process, and will inevitably be made. If history has taught us anything, it's that no new advance comes without teething troubles. And given this, the last thing we should do is push for them to be used by the general public - a mistake now could cost millions of lives and contaminate other crops, making them tainted as well.
Things like this seem innocuous enough, but you can't let one thing go through because it "seems harmless". Without investigation it could be even the smallest of changes that goes bad, and when it's something as fundamental as food, we can't afford a single mistake.
GM food is just not ready now. We shouldn't let the greed of a few corporations and the advocacy of tecnology fetishists blind us to the very real potential for disaster.
From having a look at the sample output page on the website, I'm wondering if by using the email addresses of "known spammers", they're leaving themselves open to legal reprisals.
Anyway, a large part of the problem with spammers is that they randomly send spam to as many addresses as possible at a certain site, knowing that at places like hotmail, they're likely to hit valid accounts a fair proportion of the time. There's not a lot you can do about this kind of attack - it doesn't require a database of names to succeed.
Because Nature does not select the best design, just the design that is good enough.
True, but with bacteria Nature can get closer to the ideal due to the high mutation rates and range of environments. And it's not like they're required to be able to cope with multiple environments - all that is needed is for them to be able to do one thing very well.
And sure, one day artificial systems will be designed that are superior. But for now, adapting biological ones makes a lot of sense.
Second, how would they retrieve the sub once it finished it's work. I'd hate to think of these things degrading inside my body, and releasing all their chemicals and left-over bio-products.
They don't retreive it - the flagella only have the energy to keep going for an hour or so, and then they die. I'd assume that they would have thought of this problem - plenty of stuff already gets filtered out of your bloodstream anyway, so I doubt it would be that difficult to design a non-toxic solution.
Also, what if one of the nano-subs gets transferred to another person through an open wound.
Again, because they have such a short lifespan this isn't a problem. They're not going to be able to do any damage - after all the whole reason for this is precision targetting of drugs rather than saturation, so there won't be that many of the things in your body at any one time.
This is the sort of thing I think we'll be hearing a lot more of in coming years - a marraige between our increasing ability to design and manufacture things at a sub-microscopic level and Nature's vast wealth of tried and tested designs for all kinds of systems.
It makes far more sense for scientists to utilise a design that is commonly found in Nature than it is to design their own. After all, evolutionary pressures mean that the propeller design of bacterium like salmonella has undergone a far more rigorous selection procedure than even the most quality-conscious engineering team will ever adhere to. Why waste so much effort in designing a likely-inferior system?
It makes a lot of sense to adapt existing systems to our purposes rather than designing everything from scratch. You can bet that prototypes would be a lot further away than a year without this synthesis of man and Nature. Very interesting indeed.
It seems to me, and probably to many of you as well, that the current rules for how the major presidential candidates obtain their money is just plain rediculous, and leaves them wide open, and more to the point willing, to be, well, fucked up the arse by their corporate pimps to put it bluntly.
When did it all go wrong is what I want to know. At what point did our country change from electing our officials based on the quality of their policies to electing our officials based on the number of fireworks and shiny things in their parades? Because if you ask Joe and Jodie Sixpack in Inbred Trailer Park, Kansas, I can guarantee you they wouldn't be able to tell you a single concrete difference in the policies of Bush and Gore. And if they knew of any of the other candidates, I'd be very surpised, because they don't get the corporate "attention" the main two receive.
And as the need to impress has grown, so has the need to ensure a steady supply of $$$ from corporations with their own agendas. This isn't the cut and thrust of politics, it's the rape of democracy by a 20-stone black man with a Nike logo on his head.
Until candidates receive equal and fixed amounts of money to spend on their campaigns, we'll continue to see a stream of presidents who are already intentured to corporate masters before their inaugurations. And that means democracy is nothing more than a myth, and freedom a fond memory of the past.
so i checked Amazon for the book "The Myth of Native American's" and there were no references to books that remotely fit the description that you gave. if you could please point me in a direction that i could locate this tome, I may give your arguments a little credibility.
It's quite an old book, and not really one that was very popular so I'm not suprised that places like Amazon which cater to the popularist liberal views of the masses don't carry it.
and i distictly remember the bible metioning that "it is easier to pass a a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to get a rich man into heaven".
This is an argument against the arrogance of many who are rich, not against the basic concept of wealth. Find me a statement where it says the equivalent of "if you're rich, you're not going to Heaven" please.
As far as worship of Mary goes, go back and read the introductions to the Gospels (in particulary Luke) where an angel (not the Pope) calls Marry 'Blessed among all women.' There is a large distinction between veneration and worship.
Then how is it that in the Confessional, forgiveness can be granted through the invocation of either the Lord or Mary? Only the Lord can grant forgiveness, yet the Catholic cult seems to place Mary on the same level as the Lord, which is a heresy and a sin.
Oh yeh, this is flamebait.
In the sense that people would rather believe the comforting lies that they've grown up with, yes I suppose it is.
Oh... come on now... this is so clearly a troll... There is absolutely no basis to support this claim... Which peasants fled? from whom? why? what smelly hole did you crawl out of...
There are several historical sources for this information, compiled in a historical book called, IIRC, "The Myth of Native Americans", although I can't remember the names of the authors. Try reading it sometime, it isn't prejudiced by liberal revisionists.
You also said that the country was built on the "christian priciple" that hard work is its own reward... sigh... first of all, its called the "protestant work ethic".
Which is what I called it in my original post.
Its not a christian principle. Its protestant apologetics that allows for individuals to gain wealth, and still feel like they are going to heaven. It was an excuse... Its also a large reason that lutheranism and protestantism caught on as quickly as they did. They allowed people to accumulate wealth without the guilt that the catholic church placed on them. And yes, I realize that the catholic church is ridiculously wealthy, and abused their position causing the reformation.
Wealth creation is not against any of the tenents of Christianity - where does is mention that being wealthy is a sin? The idea that wealth is a sin is a blatent lie spread by atheists and liberals intent on damaging the reputation of Christianity. Wealth creation is in fact fully supported by the Christian faith, have you ever read the parable of the rich man?
And don't talk about Catholics as if they were Christians. They are most definitely not.
I think you're confusing the image of society as marketed to you with the society that actually exists - not to mention a gross overgeneralization of "society" in general. Western? Eastern? European, North American, US-specific, what?
Well American of course, what else would I be talking about?
One of the only good points Jack Valenti has ever made is that if violent media were to blame for violence in society (particularly among the young), then we'd have dramatic increases in violent crime among, say, teens (to follow Valenti's example). After all, who's playing all those violent games and watching all that filth on TV? Are we creating a race of monster kids, an entire generation of lawless, bloodthirsty little ankle-biters? Statistics say no.
No, that wasn't what I was arguing in favor of. I'm not saying that we're producing a generation of extra-violent people, merely that these people hold violence to be a valid way of getting ahead in life. They don't see it in the same negative way that people did a hundred years ago - it's a part of their society and a part of their life.
Whilst they may not be more violent per se, in the long run I'm sure that violent incidents will be higher, and this situation can only get worse if today's trends continue.
My take on the rise of the first-person shooter is that it is a reflection of the increasingly violent society we are living in, where the media attempts to overload us with a constant barrage of sensory stimulus just to attract our jaded and cynical attentions. The FPS is the natural evolution of this idea - rather than being passive it allows people to deal with the stresses of society in a way that is a reflection of its darker side - violence.
This country was founded on the decent Christian ideal that hard work leads to reward - the American dream is a reflection of the Protestant work ethic. But in recent years the rise of technology and the increasing secularisation and liberalisation of society have lead to a culture where people are uncertain, afraid of what they're meant to do, and of what will happen in the future. This situation was exacerbated by Cold War tensions and the "Red menace", and it found its outlet in an increase in violence, paranoia and hedonistic behaviors. With the liberal views of the establishment, these excesses are likely to continue.
Nobody can sustain the contemplative life any more - we are constantly being hit with an overload of sensory information. In the culture where MTV is prevalent, text adventures just don't seem "real" enough. On the other hand, the FPS allows for us to participate in violent situations that may seem carthartic in the short term, but reinforce the violent underpinnings of society in the long run.
So the first-person shooter has come to reign supreme in the gaming world, a reflection of a society that has lost its hope and its faith. Until we, as a nation, start to deal with these underlying societal issues, games of death will continue to be incredibly popular, and the worship of the gun will pervade the national conscioussness.
The nature of the internet and email, allowing people to communicate with others with the shield of anonymity means that people feel none of the need to be polite that governs our conversations in the real world, and instead feel safe in expressing their opinions in abusive, derogatory language that their mothers wouldn't approve of. We see it here every day on /. after all.
Maybe if emails were filtered to block messages that were too flamey then people would get the chance to "cool down" and really think about what they're doing. Rather than an increasing amount of "internet rage" coming from an exchange of increasingly virulent mail, a rational discourse could be established. After all, in public speaking forums there are rules of conduct to be followed, and where is the difference here?
Why should the online world be subject to knee-jerk reactions and childish name-calling from people too petty to behave in a reasonable way?
At the moment, nothing can beat the sheer interactivity and functionality of pieces of paper bound in a cover. Whilst there is growth in the amount of online literature, the current state of play of the technology we use in browsing the net makes it a lot more convenient just to pick up a book.
Who do you think gets more "hits": Project Gutenberg or the Library of Congress? It's not the former I'm guessing...
Whilst we are hearing a lot about electronic books recently, the failure of companies to decide on a standard, and the failure of the technology to be as robust or as comfortable as books means that for the moment, "open publishing" will remain firmly a minority phenomenon.
There are a lot of real issues which we, as a society, are involved in at the moment thanks to the "information revolution" to use a Katzian phrase. Definitions of intellectual property may need changing, the concepts of copyright and patent law need adapting, and the issues of freedom on the net is something that we need to think about extremely seriously.
And then there's Napster. Whilst there are many arguments used, both here on /. and in the current court case, to justify what they're doing these arguments are all sophistry designed to avoid the conclusion that Napster is designed to facilitate the piracy of copyrighted materials. We know it, Napster knows it, and the RIAA sure as hell know it. Why are we defending them when they do nothing but harm for other, more worthwhile causes?
Napster has done almost irrepairable harm to the concept of online digital media. The RIAA and MPAA now feel that they have no choice but to defend their artist's rights in every way they can, and hopes for a meaningful solution that pleases everyone dwindles rapidly. And it has become rediculously easy to paint geeks as "pirates", "theives" and "hackers" devoted to bringing down the foundations of our capitalist economy. And by using Napster, you're proving them right.
These colleges will fold and deny Napster to their students, and they'll be justified in doing so. Whatever else they are, these places aren't designed to be platforms for piracy, and the high-speed network connections they provide aren't meant for illegal uses. More to the point, they're a privilige rather than a right. And thanks to Napster, they're a privlige which could be withdrawn. The last thing these establishments need is legal trouble through no fault of their own.
We really need to boycott Napster, it does nothing but harm our image and those causes worth fighting for. Otherwise, Napster will be the excuse used for organisations and government to implement repressive controls over the net the same way Columbine was used to implement repressive controls over firearms.
Once upon a time hard work would get you money. Today is who you know, how you market and how much you have.
The Lord have us brains and there is no sin in using them to obtain advantage for oneself. By hard work I did not specifically mean manual labor, merely the will to succeed which is the hallmark of our USian dream.
The idea that the globalist coterie of governments would allow anything of significant value or power to elude their reach is quite simply a rediculous idea. For these people, control is the key to their power, and they cannot allow anything to exist outside of their control.
You can expect to see any organisation trying to acheive something like this hit by the tools of these people - the UN and the WTO - and if that fails, then I'm sure "accidents" will follow. No country will dare to provide a location for these organisations - just look at what has happened in holdout nations like Panama. Freedom was crushed in the name of international trade, and bodies such as the UN and the WTO provide a valuable smokescreen for such activities. Just look at Bosnia or Rwanda - the UN death squads have been operating under the cover of "peacekeeping", eliminating targets that don't fall into line.
Independent orgainsations will not be allowed to happen.
Since America is in fact a landmass and the United States of America does not cover all of it (or even most of it), the term USia is a more accurate usage of language than the typically arrogant "America". A citizen of this nation is "unitedstatsian" or a USian.
and over-compensated, so what?
It means that following that path seems better to kids as they're growing up. At that age popularity is a very important factor, and by praising atheletic prowess over things like intelligence and hard work it gives out the message that it's not worth bothering about work. Which USian children seem to have taken to heart.
the guy's point was we have no good academic universities and all american schools care about is sports. that is stupid.
No, I was talking in general, there are always going to be exceptions. Do you have any real arguments against it or are you just flaming for wont of a brain? None of your posts in this article seem particularly clueful.
you are also, apparently, stupid. i read all the posts, and most of them are stupid as well.
Aaah, it seems as though you are 14. That explains a lot. "I don't agree with it, it's stupid!" is obviously the argument of choice in debates across the world.
Thanks for playing, but please try again.
Why is the solution "get scientists from elsewhere" rather than "fix the US education system"?
Because, like everything else in USia, corporate interests are involved. They are quite happy for there to be a shortage of graduates with these skills so they can import cheap labor, and so there's a distinct corporate push towards the image that science is uncool and to be avoided. Which seems to have worked, since USia seems to be the second-most anti-science nation in the world after Iran.