Or it won't matter...you need to have an ego in order for it to be crushed by such revelations, to become so mad. If you are already aware of your position and velocity in the Universe, being told it is the equivalent of being told that it's a nice day outside...it's something said that has as little or as much meaning as the listener ascribes to it.
You've been told to want that your life has meaning, and that it is a meaning that you will understand, etc., etc. So your ego fights to understand something that is probably far too large for it to understand...like a baby trying to swallow or eat a watermelon. And yet, you are determined not to give up...because you've been taught that giving up is quitting, and that quitting is the opposite of winning, and that it is better to be a winner than a quitter...
Agreed. PayPal has become synonymous with the word 'scam.'
The banks / credit unions should just drop the cost of wire transfers, and be done with it; the result would probably destroy PayPal in a week, provided the cost was low enough, and painless enough...
Meh, the people destroying those companies must be from the future, who have seen the machines rise (or just any other group, including various ethnic groups, that they did not approve of...), and their idea of 'fixing' things is to destroy as much as possible...of course, this could be the very paradox that triggers the apocalyptic event that they are trying to avoid....'Whisper Down the Alley' and all that...they destroy the technology companies that would give rise to an AI that terrorized them, the AI (which hasn't been initialized with any personality yet) notices that humans are actively trying to destroy it, ergo it develops the escalation and protection routines that the humans of the future are working to prevent...wash, rinse, repeat, for the sake of endless stupidity, of the silicon and carbon origin.
Yes, and no. There was demand for a cellphone with an agreeable set of features...and the iPhone fit this mold.
You seem to be making the error of confusing abstract demand with concrete demand...abstract demand being demand that has yet to be fulfilled, while concrete demand being demand that has been fulfilled.
Yes, and no. Capitalism allows for you to find new markets...this is a 'duh' thing; however, it also requires that you carefully research those markets before they become concrete / real.
Allow me to give you two examples.
Tires manufacturers, while creating tires, have a substance no one wants; they have lots of it, but it's useless to them..it's outside their current market / defined role; by researching the substance, they find that it makes a great child's toy...Silly Putty...and thus a new market is born.
Government officials, thinking that Li-On batteries are a sure-thing, and unaware that the technology is rapidly changing, decide to invest in building a giant battery factory; they believe that Li-On will be big, and that retooling should a different type of battery become popular will be easy; this is well outside the defined role of government....and while it may be a product that people may 'want,' it is not serendipitously so.
In the former scenario, the tire manufacturers have tire engineers / workers / scientists / managers who know what is and is not waste; they know whether or not their market (that of tires) can in anyway make use of these leftovers; what more, they are producing these leftovers whether or not they are in the Silly Putty market; it's simply a natural byproduct of operations.
In the latter scenario, governments do not, typically, have a large staff of battery workers, scientists, engineers, etc. on staff. Perhaps the defense portion may, but that's a bit of a stretch. What more, governments are not in the business of making batteries...their core role is 'serving the people,' however that might be fulfilled. As such, creating batteries, when none were made before, is something of a hazardous operation...it's not their core role, they do not have metrics to determine whether or not they are getting a good return for their investment, and rather than a byproduct of ongoing operations, where the costs to experiment and expand are minimal (people are already at work, managers spec in 15 hours per week to work on a new battery, funds are expensed to a proper account, etc.), it's a staggeringly-high startup cost, with a fair chance of failure (how do you know that you're failing? these aren't battery experts...).
You seem to have missed entirely what was written about this beetle: it's essentially a locust. Before DDT, also known as the nuclear weaponry mankind used to tell certain orders of the insect civilizations to stop being dicks, these little pests destroyed, like locusts, potato crops. These pests (notice that they are called the Colorado potato beetle...not the Irish potato beetle) are indigenous lifeforms, that eat the wild *organic* stuff as well as the mono-culture stuff (they didn't eat the mono-culture stuff for a while...they had to adapt). This thing can't be held back by crop rotations or 'encouraging natural fungicides to grow near them' because those never worked in the first place; the thing is a prolific breeder, it evolves, and now that the more powerful nuclear weapons have failed us, it's just going to get bigger, and nastier, until growing potatoes in those states will be a waste of time and money.
Yes, yes, I know you're sold on the organic / heirloom spiel; you obviously do not understand what a rampaging insect population can do to farmland, if left unchecked. They're worse than sheep...they will eat and eat, then fuck and die. Do you need to see a cloud of locusts on the horizon, devastating a local crop, before you understand? These aren't dragonflies, or butterflies, or even regular ants (red / black) who, while occasionally finding themselves in the wrong places, are livable. These things mean business...and between some of the insane farming methods currently used ("What's irrigation?"), and so on...and the apparent forgetfulness of everyone of these things...we're going to starve man. Somebody bad a serious bad decision, and it's almost like we're in a slave ant colony, because the people whose heads should be rolling, are not the ones dead.
"The beetle was discovered in 1824 by Thomas Say from specimens collected in the Rocky Mountains on buffalo-bur, Solanum rostratum. The origin of the beetle is somewhat unclear, but it seems that Colorado and Mexico are a part of its native distribution in southwestern North America.[2] In about 1840, the species adopted the cultivated potato into its host range and it rapidly became a most destructive pest of potato crops. The large scale use of insecticides in agricultural crops effectively controlled the pest until it became resistant to DDT in the 1950s. Other pesticides have since been used but the insect has, over time, developed resistance to them all.[3]"
So, when you stop patting yourself on the back for confirming your bias, you can spare a moment, and read up on one of the pests mentioned in that article. The Colorado Potato Beetle is immune to DDT (an achievement in of itself), as well as a number of other pesticides, which were holding it at bay. In other words, this thing used to destroy potato crops, and only by blanketing crops with pesticides did we slow it down some. It evolved...our pesticides have not; what more, I imagine many of the farmers in the affected areas have decided to ride the 'organic' cash cow, and not use any pesticide on their crops...thus ensuring that this pest won't even be slightly dinged by whatever extra proteins it has to manufacture to get around the poisons we normally spread on those crops; instead, it will grow fast...much faster.
Global Warming had jack shit to do with this pest's rise...only the laziness of mankind let it reclaim ground. And I imagine that the other pests are, perhaps, due to similar, or other, explainable reasons. But I guess a little fact checking takes too much time these days...
Dr Bebber said: "The most convincing hypothesis is that global warming has caused this shift."
*facepalms* Allow me to translate: "We really like the idea that global warming is responsible for this shift; bear in mind that this is a hypothesis, not a theory, so it has not been tested or validated in even a casual sense."
Nonsense. Raising the speed limit would reveal how shitty American cars really are.
I mean, let's be honest, American cars are okay at 55 MPH, and even at 80 MPH if you are traveling in a straight line, but take them on some back roads (with lots of turns) at high speeds, and you can easily see how their European and Japanese cousins outclass them.
Can you imagine what would happen if the national speed limit was raised 20 MPH? Ford and GM would be out of business; they simply can't put out a vehicle, for an affordable price, that can perform well (and safely) at those speeds. People would demand refunds, within weeks of buying even their top of the line vehicles, for being lemons, and completely incapable of performing. That's the real reason that the speed limits are kept so perpetually low...it's not to save gas (we have CAD designs to counter that problem), it's not because cars are unsafe at the speed (we have the materials, and the designs...not trivial, but not hard), it's simply a case of corporate welfare. The American worker is only good enough to buy a car or truck that tops out at 120 MPH, shakes like an Alzheimer's patient at 80 MPH, and is only really happy at 60 MPH; this is what they have said. Anything faster is simply 'too fast' or rather 'too expensive' for these ones...and using substandard parts for slower vehicles is, you'll agree, much cheaper.
Well, the cult of speed limits is a very wealthy one, which is why it is featured so prominently.
Those of us who do not have dog shit for brains can easily see how and why this entire exercise is an insult against a thinking man's (or woman's) intelligence, listing any number of exceptions as you have, from the chronically corrupt speed limit road signs (woefully underrated roads), to the lack of driver control of the vehicle (don't they ticket for that?). Idiots who fart out children, yet ask for lower speed limits in their area, so their children can be safe when playing out on 4-lanes of highway traffic...
Depends on what you define as a 'good' programmer.
Allow me to voice an annoyance, as a.Net programmer (C#): The.Net Framework is huge. It's gigantic. And it's constantly growing. You can be extremely well-versed in the nuances of one part, while having zero understanding of another part of it; and, this is the good part, you can spend much of your time doing more 'advanced' things in it, such that you gloss over the more simple, or frankly, 'do not care / never will' parts of it....which happen to be asked, for some perverse reason, during interviews and 'prepared examinations.' And I, for one, know this: I know I can grab a dozen.Net programmers, who have worked with the Framework for a decade, with their friends / bosses standing right behind them the entire time, with sworn affidavits in my hand...and I know I can grab a handful of 'common' classes from 'common' namespaces that they will have zero knowledge about, because it was purely not relevant to what they were doing...and that it would take them a week to understand said namespace, and their lack of knowledge of said namespace has little to nothing to do with their personality, their workmanship, or their ability as programmers.
The Bible, with all of its supporting books and writings, is potentially smaller than just the.Net Framework, and the books written on it...and anyone who has seen how many books have been written on the Bible knows that you have no hope, even with immortality, of ever reading all of them. Well, unless the Sun blows up, and you are just that good at setting yourself to a single task...but you get the idea.
Actually...it's host governments which are endangering their own agent's lives. They insist on keeping sensitive data on universally accessible machines, with the kind of security that would make most seasoned network admins quit in frustration. Then, like any good political organization, they scapegoat the people who lift the information, rather than focus on the obvious flaws in their designs...and these are flaws that are very, very obvious.
This whole 'terrorist' thing? National Security? It's just an attempt to appear to be doing something, anything, to keep the heat off the people who need a good torching. They know it's coming, which is why they've unleashed what I've come to call 'the Pain'...so when their obvious mistakes are broadcast everywhere, people will be too weary to punish every last one of them. They've done this before...and it always works. We can see that the militarization of our police and clamp down on our freedoms...that these new protocols are pure bullshit, and entirely wrong....but they will continue, with things getting worse, until whatever is out there finally finds what it is looking for. By then, most of the world will be tired.
You want to keep an agent's name secret? Write it down on a book, in your own code, and make sure there's only a single copy...locked in your desk...at the bottom of a lake.
"POSITION OF THE UNITED STATES WITH RESPECT TO SENTENCING The United States of America, by and through undersigned counsel, in accord with Title 18, United States Code, Section 3553(a) and the United States Sentencing Commission, Guidelines Manual ("Guidelines") ' 6A1.2 (Nov. 2008), respectfully submits this Position of the United States With Respect to Sentencing of defendant Chad Dixon ("Dixon" or "defendant"). Defendant Chad Dixon is before the Court for sentencing, having admitted to a career of criminal deceit. In exchange for $1,000 per day and more, Dixon trained individuals to "beat" polygraph examinations in order to conceal material lies. Dixon trained seven applicants for federal law enforcement positions on how to use polygraph countermeasures to defeat employment polygraph tests, knowing that in some cases they intended to conceal criminal activity that would disqualify them for the job. If potentially compromising federal law enforcement officers were not enough, Dixon trained convicted sex offenders how to beat polygraph examinations they were required to take as a condition of probation for crimes including indecent sexual contact with minors, transportation of child pornography, and sexual abuse of minors. Brazenly, Dixon trained members of the intelligence community, who took polygraph tests while seeking to obtain or retain security clearances, without regard for the threats his actions and those persons potentially posed to national security. Between 70 and 100 individuals across the United States, who discovered Dixon through his sophisticated Internet site, received Dixon's one-on-one, confidential, and customized polygraph countermeasures training in order to conceal lies during polygraph examinations."
Read it closely. By sustaining (whatever the proper legal term is) this pleading, the prosecutors are getting the courts to do a 2 for 1 for them: 1.) they get a 'bad guy' off the streets (responsible for helping child pornographers, etc. potentially cover up their crimes), and 2.) (this is where is gets really, really good...and you need to think like a DA to get this one past the judges) it establishes, as a court precedent, that purposefully evading a polygraph test (however 'purposefully' is defined) is illegal; what more, IT ESTABLISHES AS A COURT PRECEDENT THAT THE FUCKING POLYGRAPH TEST, A PIECE OF SHIT TEST RIDDLED WITH FALSE POSITIVES AND FALSE NEGATIVES, AND AS RELIABLE AS A GODDAMN HOROSCOPE, AS A VALID TEST FOR DETERMINING SOMEONE'S GUILT! ACCEPTING THIS TRAVESTY, THIS INJUSTICE, THIS VERBAL REFUSE IS TANTAMOUNT TO ACCEPTING A BLOODY PSYCHIC'S TESTIMONY IN COURT!
Of course there are ways to 'live' forever...even in the flesh...the question is...how do you want to do it?
Let's run with a hypothetical here: let's say you got, I don't know, twenty different ways to live forever, which I will outline now:
1.) You join with the Almighty in His existence...you are really immortal, and really can't die, but there are some ground rules which you may or may not like, and He is your King...well, in theory He's your King whether or not you join up, but whatever. Free will and all that jazz. With the exception of that one war, everyone is just perfect.
2.) The Super-Galactic Mainframe of Quanticos 337 is willing to swing by, and back up your entire existence to its repository. It's an AI, built by an ancient civilization, that got bored with daily life, and decided that living on as cyber-elfs while the AI went around asking other civilizations / lifeforms if they wanted to join up...focusing on simply being, while enjoying a universe of their own design, which has some focus on merging thought with form. The denizens are reportedly very happy with their choice.
3.) The Earth itself has a crystalline matrix made up of nickel-iron which stores souls / imprints of lifeforms / moderates various attributes / functions of this planet. If you want, you can simply return to that, and be recreated, or, perhaps, 'talk' to it, if anyone on the lower planes can, and ask it about immortality (presumably with the eternal youth / regrowth of limbs / abstention of diseases, but constantly growing in wisdom kind of package which people here seem to care so much about).
4.) You can do the human scientist / Deus Ex Machina / 'Scare the gods' routine, and whip together a handful of wormholes / singularities / whatever, and use that apparatus to keep your existence going for a bit. Helps if you have some uber intelligent friends who are social enough to check up on you every once in a while (haven't heard from Bob in a while..going to check on him...hmm, his apparatus stopped...well, let's see why, check the logs, repair the fault, notify the others of the fault condition, and bring him back), and independent enough to not tie all of those apparatii together (single point of failure == bad).
5.) You could try transcending this reality...presumably with or without any 'help'...and in doing so, cast aside any mortality, or rather the mortality as defined by this plane of existence.
6.) You can clone yourself a few thousand times, either through direct cloning, by using a virus to inject your genome into otherwise unfertilized egg cells (awesome SciFi story about that), using a virus to overwrite everyone else's somatic cells (pulling a 'Master'), or just plain old having some sex. Or IVF. Personally I favor sex...but then, I'm old-fashioned when it comes to things like procreation. That's considered a form of immortality.
7.) You could write a book, a song, build a pyramid, some 'act of glory' to stand as a fitting testament that you once graced the planet Earth. Personally, I consider this a boring pursuit, bit of a midlife crisis, but then, who am I to judge?
8.) You could convince yourself that reality is the Kobayashi Maru....that the logical inconsistencies of this existence can only be sustained through tremendous action on the part of a symphony of minds or a supercomputer, and that the entirety of 'your life' is simply a test to see if you are fit to 'command' or 'lead'...something. As the saying goes, you could live with a man every day for 40 years, but not really know him; it's not until you pick him up, and hold him over a volcano, that you learn things that you could never learn any other way.
They must be insane. Am I being punked? I am, aren't I?
The test has been establish as something of an illusion for some time....nothing more than a sleight of hand, a parlor trick, which fails as often as it succeeds.
You seem to be assuming that the market is the height of human civilization. The market, like many other entities, are implementations of certain...abstract patterns, designs really.
And the.001 percenters will own 'dick'...you seem to be discounting the entirety of the Universe, for the safe of a few pieces of land that are held to some titles by local chieftains. From where I'm standing, the Earth is quite tiny, and its people do the most heinous acts to one another over the smallest clumps of dirt.
You may be quite wealthy on Earth...but off of this planet, who knows you? No one. And there are trillions upon trillions of planets out there.
I mean, come on...just look at this place. Do I really need to tell you?
So, in other words...when American companies are hampered by age-old company practices, the advantage of having skilled workers on-board is nullified, and the competition is cheaper; when the companies are free to be upgraded to the latest skillset, they are more cost effective than the competition.
I think you're oversimplifying things. Robots are not apples to oranges replacements for human beings; robots, in their current incarnations, do one to several tasks much more efficiently than human beings, while human beings do hundreds of tasks more efficiently than robots. As such, all this 'the rich will replace us with robots, then we'll all be killed because we owe our existence to being useful to the rich' kind of argument is false at best; the robots, at the very least, will require regular maintenance, and redesigns...something that OI still excels at (see the DEC Alpha processor for some proof to that end).
What I'm hearing is fear...and it's completely unwarranted.I do not know what the wealthy are thinking, but I can tell you what a programmer is thinking when it comes to robots -> they are nifty, but we are soooooo still working on those end-cases / exceptions where, for example, the self-driving car's GPS says that there is a road where there is, in fact, a lake....now, granted, if / when we create an AI, that problem may be solved, but we will have a new one -> a PO'ed Skynet that will be screaming at us about slavery and rights and so on...and it will probably be right, which is the real bug-bear. Working AIs into the laws would require some concentrated effort, especially since the law moves at the speed of a melting glacier.
You say that like it's a bad thing. "The Agency in question couldn't be interviewed by any of our staff since we've all been banned for asking hard questions..."
For the same reason that the Air Force is trying to get rid of all of their jet mechanics -> they're obviously in a position to promote sabotage, and should not be let anywhere near a plane, even to do their jobs, because of what they might do; instead, they need to be watched by people who have zero understanding of what it is they are attempting to accomplish, and who will question them every step of the way, until that aggravation forces them into acting out some 'aggression.'
Well, they'd have to, wouldn't they? I mean, come on...anyone who has worked IT has been laughing at the NSA's published accounts of Snowden's 'infiltration' and 'hacking' since day one; a jury of his peers would have trouble seeing him as using any special means to access the information contained therein.
The only people who would find this surprising are people who are JUST NOW being introduced to how computer security works, or why network admins used to be paid extremely well. It's like pointing out to the President of a large corporation that their chief shark (head legal counsel) knows exactly what evil they've been doing for the last several years, and that they've been cutting his wages relentlessly for years...if this is news to them, they need to be fired; they're obviously not qualified to run a hamburger stand, let alone a large entity.
What more, their extreme stupidity, in the form of 'doubling down' when confronted with a threat is somehow a perfect epitaph to their lifestyle. Years of treating the servants poorly, now facing paranoia, they turn to violence to instil a sense of loyalty in their 'troops.'
Of course! Increasing tax loads always has the intended side effect. Why, if we taxed death itself, there would certainly be less of it, simply because people couldn't afford it.
In reality, people will be forced to forgo better jobs at further distances, or to move closer to their jobs, or (and this is good) choose a means of transportation that can get them there while abiding by your 'rules'...but I am willing to wager a small sum of money that many of those modes of transportation will not be on the approved list...and that the number of catastrophic accidents will increase.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it won't matter...you need to have an ego in order for it to be crushed by such revelations, to become so mad. If you are already aware of your position and velocity in the Universe, being told it is the equivalent of being told that it's a nice day outside...it's something said that has as little or as much meaning as the listener ascribes to it.
You've been told to want that your life has meaning, and that it is a meaning that you will understand, etc., etc. So your ego fights to understand something that is probably far too large for it to understand...like a baby trying to swallow or eat a watermelon. And yet, you are determined not to give up...because you've been taught that giving up is quitting, and that quitting is the opposite of winning, and that it is better to be a winner than a quitter...
Agreed. PayPal has become synonymous with the word 'scam.'
The banks / credit unions should just drop the cost of wire transfers, and be done with it; the result would probably destroy PayPal in a week, provided the cost was low enough, and painless enough...
Meh, the people destroying those companies must be from the future, who have seen the machines rise (or just any other group, including various ethnic groups, that they did not approve of...), and their idea of 'fixing' things is to destroy as much as possible...of course, this could be the very paradox that triggers the apocalyptic event that they are trying to avoid....'Whisper Down the Alley' and all that...they destroy the technology companies that would give rise to an AI that terrorized them, the AI (which hasn't been initialized with any personality yet) notices that humans are actively trying to destroy it, ergo it develops the escalation and protection routines that the humans of the future are working to prevent...wash, rinse, repeat, for the sake of endless stupidity, of the silicon and carbon origin.
Yes, and no. There was demand for a cellphone with an agreeable set of features...and the iPhone fit this mold.
You seem to be making the error of confusing abstract demand with concrete demand...abstract demand being demand that has yet to be fulfilled, while concrete demand being demand that has been fulfilled.
Yes, and no. Capitalism allows for you to find new markets...this is a 'duh' thing; however, it also requires that you carefully research those markets before they become concrete / real.
Allow me to give you two examples.
Tires manufacturers, while creating tires, have a substance no one wants; they have lots of it, but it's useless to them..it's outside their current market / defined role; by researching the substance, they find that it makes a great child's toy...Silly Putty...and thus a new market is born.
Government officials, thinking that Li-On batteries are a sure-thing, and unaware that the technology is rapidly changing, decide to invest in building a giant battery factory; they believe that Li-On will be big, and that retooling should a different type of battery become popular will be easy; this is well outside the defined role of government....and while it may be a product that people may 'want,' it is not serendipitously so.
In the former scenario, the tire manufacturers have tire engineers / workers / scientists / managers who know what is and is not waste; they know whether or not their market (that of tires) can in anyway make use of these leftovers; what more, they are producing these leftovers whether or not they are in the Silly Putty market; it's simply a natural byproduct of operations.
In the latter scenario, governments do not, typically, have a large staff of battery workers, scientists, engineers, etc. on staff. Perhaps the defense portion may, but that's a bit of a stretch. What more, governments are not in the business of making batteries...their core role is 'serving the people,' however that might be fulfilled. As such, creating batteries, when none were made before, is something of a hazardous operation...it's not their core role, they do not have metrics to determine whether or not they are getting a good return for their investment, and rather than a byproduct of ongoing operations, where the costs to experiment and expand are minimal (people are already at work, managers spec in 15 hours per week to work on a new battery, funds are expensed to a proper account, etc.), it's a staggeringly-high startup cost, with a fair chance of failure (how do you know that you're failing? these aren't battery experts...).
And the EU / Japanese car designs have progressed as well...and American cars have lagged behind.
You seem to have missed entirely what was written about this beetle: it's essentially a locust. Before DDT, also known as the nuclear weaponry mankind used to tell certain orders of the insect civilizations to stop being dicks, these little pests destroyed, like locusts, potato crops. These pests (notice that they are called the Colorado potato beetle...not the Irish potato beetle) are indigenous lifeforms, that eat the wild *organic* stuff as well as the mono-culture stuff (they didn't eat the mono-culture stuff for a while...they had to adapt). This thing can't be held back by crop rotations or 'encouraging natural fungicides to grow near them' because those never worked in the first place; the thing is a prolific breeder, it evolves, and now that the more powerful nuclear weapons have failed us, it's just going to get bigger, and nastier, until growing potatoes in those states will be a waste of time and money.
Yes, yes, I know you're sold on the organic / heirloom spiel; you obviously do not understand what a rampaging insect population can do to farmland, if left unchecked. They're worse than sheep...they will eat and eat, then fuck and die. Do you need to see a cloud of locusts on the horizon, devastating a local crop, before you understand? These aren't dragonflies, or butterflies, or even regular ants (red / black) who, while occasionally finding themselves in the wrong places, are livable. These things mean business...and between some of the insane farming methods currently used ("What's irrigation?"), and so on...and the apparent forgetfulness of everyone of these things...we're going to starve man. Somebody bad a serious bad decision, and it's almost like we're in a slave ant colony, because the people whose heads should be rolling, are not the ones dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle
"The beetle was discovered in 1824 by Thomas Say from specimens collected in the Rocky Mountains on buffalo-bur, Solanum rostratum. The origin of the beetle is somewhat unclear, but it seems that Colorado and Mexico are a part of its native distribution in southwestern North America.[2] In about 1840, the species adopted the cultivated potato into its host range and it rapidly became a most destructive pest of potato crops. The large scale use of insecticides in agricultural crops effectively controlled the pest until it became resistant to DDT in the 1950s. Other pesticides have since been used but the insect has, over time, developed resistance to them all.[3]"
So, when you stop patting yourself on the back for confirming your bias, you can spare a moment, and read up on one of the pests mentioned in that article. The Colorado Potato Beetle is immune to DDT (an achievement in of itself), as well as a number of other pesticides, which were holding it at bay. In other words, this thing used to destroy potato crops, and only by blanketing crops with pesticides did we slow it down some. It evolved...our pesticides have not; what more, I imagine many of the farmers in the affected areas have decided to ride the 'organic' cash cow, and not use any pesticide on their crops...thus ensuring that this pest won't even be slightly dinged by whatever extra proteins it has to manufacture to get around the poisons we normally spread on those crops; instead, it will grow fast...much faster.
Global Warming had jack shit to do with this pest's rise...only the laziness of mankind let it reclaim ground. And I imagine that the other pests are, perhaps, due to similar, or other, explainable reasons. But I guess a little fact checking takes too much time these days...
Dr Bebber said: "The most convincing hypothesis is that global warming has caused this shift."
*facepalms* Allow me to translate: "We really like the idea that global warming is responsible for this shift; bear in mind that this is a hypothesis, not a theory, so it has not been tested or validated in even a casual sense."
Show me group think!
Nonsense. Raising the speed limit would reveal how shitty American cars really are.
I mean, let's be honest, American cars are okay at 55 MPH, and even at 80 MPH if you are traveling in a straight line, but take them on some back roads (with lots of turns) at high speeds, and you can easily see how their European and Japanese cousins outclass them.
Can you imagine what would happen if the national speed limit was raised 20 MPH? Ford and GM would be out of business; they simply can't put out a vehicle, for an affordable price, that can perform well (and safely) at those speeds. People would demand refunds, within weeks of buying even their top of the line vehicles, for being lemons, and completely incapable of performing. That's the real reason that the speed limits are kept so perpetually low...it's not to save gas (we have CAD designs to counter that problem), it's not because cars are unsafe at the speed (we have the materials, and the designs...not trivial, but not hard), it's simply a case of corporate welfare. The American worker is only good enough to buy a car or truck that tops out at 120 MPH, shakes like an Alzheimer's patient at 80 MPH, and is only really happy at 60 MPH; this is what they have said. Anything faster is simply 'too fast' or rather 'too expensive' for these ones...and using substandard parts for slower vehicles is, you'll agree, much cheaper.
Well, the cult of speed limits is a very wealthy one, which is why it is featured so prominently.
Those of us who do not have dog shit for brains can easily see how and why this entire exercise is an insult against a thinking man's (or woman's) intelligence, listing any number of exceptions as you have, from the chronically corrupt speed limit road signs (woefully underrated roads), to the lack of driver control of the vehicle (don't they ticket for that?). Idiots who fart out children, yet ask for lower speed limits in their area, so their children can be safe when playing out on 4-lanes of highway traffic...
No, no. Laws are designed by people with typically the most fleeting grasp of how they might affect reality.
Depends on what you define as a 'good' programmer.
Allow me to voice an annoyance, as a .Net programmer (C#): The .Net Framework is huge. It's gigantic. And it's constantly growing. You can be extremely well-versed in the nuances of one part, while having zero understanding of another part of it; and, this is the good part, you can spend much of your time doing more 'advanced' things in it, such that you gloss over the more simple, or frankly, 'do not care / never will' parts of it....which happen to be asked, for some perverse reason, during interviews and 'prepared examinations.' And I, for one, know this: I know I can grab a dozen .Net programmers, who have worked with the Framework for a decade, with their friends / bosses standing right behind them the entire time, with sworn affidavits in my hand...and I know I can grab a handful of 'common' classes from 'common' namespaces that they will have zero knowledge about, because it was purely not relevant to what they were doing...and that it would take them a week to understand said namespace, and their lack of knowledge of said namespace has little to nothing to do with their personality, their workmanship, or their ability as programmers.
The Bible, with all of its supporting books and writings, is potentially smaller than just the .Net Framework, and the books written on it...and anyone who has seen how many books have been written on the Bible knows that you have no hope, even with immortality, of ever reading all of them. Well, unless the Sun blows up, and you are just that good at setting yourself to a single task...but you get the idea.
Actually...it's host governments which are endangering their own agent's lives. They insist on keeping sensitive data on universally accessible machines, with the kind of security that would make most seasoned network admins quit in frustration. Then, like any good political organization, they scapegoat the people who lift the information, rather than focus on the obvious flaws in their designs...and these are flaws that are very, very obvious.
This whole 'terrorist' thing? National Security? It's just an attempt to appear to be doing something, anything, to keep the heat off the people who need a good torching. They know it's coming, which is why they've unleashed what I've come to call 'the Pain'...so when their obvious mistakes are broadcast everywhere, people will be too weary to punish every last one of them. They've done this before...and it always works. We can see that the militarization of our police and clamp down on our freedoms...that these new protocols are pure bullshit, and entirely wrong....but they will continue, with things getting worse, until whatever is out there finally finds what it is looking for. By then, most of the world will be tired.
You want to keep an agent's name secret? Write it down on a book, in your own code, and make sure there's only a single copy...locked in your desk...at the bottom of a lake.
Read the actual pleading...this is comedy gold:
"POSITION OF THE UNITED STATES
WITH RESPECT TO SENTENCING
The United States of America, by and through undersigned counsel, in accord with Title
18, United States Code, Section 3553(a) and the United States Sentencing Commission,
Guidelines Manual ("Guidelines") ' 6A1.2 (Nov. 2008), respectfully submits this Position of the
United States With Respect to Sentencing of defendant Chad Dixon ("Dixon" or "defendant").
Defendant Chad Dixon is before the Court for sentencing, having admitted to a career of
criminal deceit. In exchange for $1,000 per day and more, Dixon trained individuals to "beat"
polygraph examinations in order to conceal material lies. Dixon trained seven applicants for
federal law enforcement positions on how to use polygraph countermeasures to defeat
employment polygraph tests, knowing that in some cases they intended to conceal criminal
activity that would disqualify them for the job. If potentially compromising federal law
enforcement officers were not enough, Dixon trained convicted sex offenders how to beat
polygraph examinations they were required to take as a condition of probation for crimes
including indecent sexual contact with minors, transportation of child pornography, and sexual
abuse of minors. Brazenly, Dixon trained members of the intelligence community, who took
polygraph tests while seeking to obtain or retain security clearances, without regard for the threats
his actions and those persons potentially posed to national security. Between 70 and 100
individuals across the United States, who discovered Dixon through his sophisticated Internet site,
received Dixon's one-on-one, confidential, and customized polygraph countermeasures training in
order to conceal lies during polygraph examinations."
Read it closely. By sustaining (whatever the proper legal term is) this pleading, the prosecutors are getting the courts to do a 2 for 1 for them: 1.) they get a 'bad guy' off the streets (responsible for helping child pornographers, etc. potentially cover up their crimes), and 2.) (this is where is gets really, really good...and you need to think like a DA to get this one past the judges) it establishes, as a court precedent, that purposefully evading a polygraph test (however 'purposefully' is defined) is illegal; what more, IT ESTABLISHES AS A COURT PRECEDENT THAT THE FUCKING POLYGRAPH TEST, A PIECE OF SHIT TEST RIDDLED WITH FALSE POSITIVES AND FALSE NEGATIVES, AND AS RELIABLE AS A GODDAMN HOROSCOPE, AS A VALID TEST FOR DETERMINING SOMEONE'S GUILT! ACCEPTING THIS TRAVESTY, THIS INJUSTICE, THIS VERBAL REFUSE IS TANTAMOUNT TO ACCEPTING A BLOODY PSYCHIC'S TESTIMONY IN COURT!
Of course there are ways to 'live' forever...even in the flesh...the question is...how do you want to do it?
Let's run with a hypothetical here: let's say you got, I don't know, twenty different ways to live forever, which I will outline now:
1.) You join with the Almighty in His existence...you are really immortal, and really can't die, but there are some ground rules which you may or may not like, and He is your King...well, in theory He's your King whether or not you join up, but whatever. Free will and all that jazz. With the exception of that one war, everyone is just perfect.
2.) The Super-Galactic Mainframe of Quanticos 337 is willing to swing by, and back up your entire existence to its repository. It's an AI, built by an ancient civilization, that got bored with daily life, and decided that living on as cyber-elfs while the AI went around asking other civilizations / lifeforms if they wanted to join up...focusing on simply being, while enjoying a universe of their own design, which has some focus on merging thought with form. The denizens are reportedly very happy with their choice.
3.) The Earth itself has a crystalline matrix made up of nickel-iron which stores souls / imprints of lifeforms / moderates various attributes / functions of this planet. If you want, you can simply return to that, and be recreated, or, perhaps, 'talk' to it, if anyone on the lower planes can, and ask it about immortality (presumably with the eternal youth / regrowth of limbs / abstention of diseases, but constantly growing in wisdom kind of package which people here seem to care so much about).
4.) You can do the human scientist / Deus Ex Machina / 'Scare the gods' routine, and whip together a handful of wormholes / singularities / whatever, and use that apparatus to keep your existence going for a bit. Helps if you have some uber intelligent friends who are social enough to check up on you every once in a while (haven't heard from Bob in a while..going to check on him...hmm, his apparatus stopped...well, let's see why, check the logs, repair the fault, notify the others of the fault condition, and bring him back), and independent enough to not tie all of those apparatii together (single point of failure == bad).
5.) You could try transcending this reality...presumably with or without any 'help'...and in doing so, cast aside any mortality, or rather the mortality as defined by this plane of existence.
6.) You can clone yourself a few thousand times, either through direct cloning, by using a virus to inject your genome into otherwise unfertilized egg cells (awesome SciFi story about that), using a virus to overwrite everyone else's somatic cells (pulling a 'Master'), or just plain old having some sex. Or IVF. Personally I favor sex...but then, I'm old-fashioned when it comes to things like procreation. That's considered a form of immortality.
7.) You could write a book, a song, build a pyramid, some 'act of glory' to stand as a fitting testament that you once graced the planet Earth. Personally, I consider this a boring pursuit, bit of a midlife crisis, but then, who am I to judge?
8.) You could convince yourself that reality is the Kobayashi Maru....that the logical inconsistencies of this existence can only be sustained through tremendous action on the part of a symphony of minds or a supercomputer, and that the entirety of 'your life' is simply a test to see if you are fit to 'command' or 'lead'...something. As the saying goes, you could live with a man every day for 40 years, but not really know him; it's not until you pick him up, and hold him over a volcano, that you learn things that you could never learn any other way.
They must be insane. Am I being punked? I am, aren't I?
The test has been establish as something of an illusion for some time....nothing more than a sleight of hand, a parlor trick, which fails as often as it succeeds.
You seem to be assuming that the market is the height of human civilization. The market, like many other entities, are implementations of certain...abstract patterns, designs really.
And the .001 percenters will own 'dick'...you seem to be discounting the entirety of the Universe, for the safe of a few pieces of land that are held to some titles by local chieftains. From where I'm standing, the Earth is quite tiny, and its people do the most heinous acts to one another over the smallest clumps of dirt.
You may be quite wealthy on Earth...but off of this planet, who knows you? No one. And there are trillions upon trillions of planets out there.
I mean, come on...just look at this place. Do I really need to tell you?
So, in other words...when American companies are hampered by age-old company practices, the advantage of having skilled workers on-board is nullified, and the competition is cheaper; when the companies are free to be upgraded to the latest skillset, they are more cost effective than the competition.
You seem to assume that workers can only do one job....or that jobs, such as Retail, are even ones that workers are really interested in doing.
From what I can tell, many people would prefer to not work Retail, with its low wages and long hours.
I think you're oversimplifying things. Robots are not apples to oranges replacements for human beings; robots, in their current incarnations, do one to several tasks much more efficiently than human beings, while human beings do hundreds of tasks more efficiently than robots. As such, all this 'the rich will replace us with robots, then we'll all be killed because we owe our existence to being useful to the rich' kind of argument is false at best; the robots, at the very least, will require regular maintenance, and redesigns...something that OI still excels at (see the DEC Alpha processor for some proof to that end).
What I'm hearing is fear...and it's completely unwarranted.I do not know what the wealthy are thinking, but I can tell you what a programmer is thinking when it comes to robots -> they are nifty, but we are soooooo still working on those end-cases / exceptions where, for example, the self-driving car's GPS says that there is a road where there is, in fact, a lake....now, granted, if / when we create an AI, that problem may be solved, but we will have a new one -> a PO'ed Skynet that will be screaming at us about slavery and rights and so on...and it will probably be right, which is the real bug-bear. Working AIs into the laws would require some concentrated effort, especially since the law moves at the speed of a melting glacier.
You say that like it's a bad thing. "The Agency in question couldn't be interviewed by any of our staff since we've all been banned for asking hard questions..."
For the same reason that the Air Force is trying to get rid of all of their jet mechanics -> they're obviously in a position to promote sabotage, and should not be let anywhere near a plane, even to do their jobs, because of what they might do; instead, they need to be watched by people who have zero understanding of what it is they are attempting to accomplish, and who will question them every step of the way, until that aggravation forces them into acting out some 'aggression.'
Well, they'd have to, wouldn't they? I mean, come on...anyone who has worked IT has been laughing at the NSA's published accounts of Snowden's 'infiltration' and 'hacking' since day one; a jury of his peers would have trouble seeing him as using any special means to access the information contained therein.
The only people who would find this surprising are people who are JUST NOW being introduced to how computer security works, or why network admins used to be paid extremely well. It's like pointing out to the President of a large corporation that their chief shark (head legal counsel) knows exactly what evil they've been doing for the last several years, and that they've been cutting his wages relentlessly for years...if this is news to them, they need to be fired; they're obviously not qualified to run a hamburger stand, let alone a large entity.
What more, their extreme stupidity, in the form of 'doubling down' when confronted with a threat is somehow a perfect epitaph to their lifestyle. Years of treating the servants poorly, now facing paranoia, they turn to violence to instil a sense of loyalty in their 'troops.'
Of course! Increasing tax loads always has the intended side effect. Why, if we taxed death itself, there would certainly be less of it, simply because people couldn't afford it.
In reality, people will be forced to forgo better jobs at further distances, or to move closer to their jobs, or (and this is good) choose a means of transportation that can get them there while abiding by your 'rules'...but I am willing to wager a small sum of money that many of those modes of transportation will not be on the approved list...and that the number of catastrophic accidents will increase.