I went to middle and high schools in TN, and 2 years of college (on the east side though, in Knoxville). Now I live in Arizona. I think you're mistaken about which state is the retard capital of the USA. Actually, they may be neck-and-neck, having lived in both, it's hard to pick one as a clear winner.
Also, the Creationist Museum is located in Kentucky....
I also spent some time in Mississippi living with a relative over the summer in high school. I think that state may have all the above beat.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. They've been trying to emulate old-fashioned desktops with GUIs ever since GUIs became available for consumers. That's why they even call them "desktops", and why the main screen in Windows (well, until Metro) is called "your desktop", with items on it going in the "Desktop" folder.
I grew up with floppy disks. IME, they were extremely reliable in the 80s and early and mid 90s. It was rare for them to go bad, unless they'd been mistreated. But towards the end of their reign in the late 90s, they started getting really unreliable. I think this is because they became an afterthought, only included in PCs because of Windows driver disks and inertia, and people weren't using them much, so the drive makers and or the floppy disk makers cut costs, making them very unreliable. Back in the C64 days, those things could really be counted on to save your data, but it wasn't like that when everyone started using the network to transfer files and hard drives had gotten so large than 1.44MB floppies just weren't practical any more for backups or file storage.
I'm sure the dust problem can be overcome with engineering. How much worse can the temperature extremes be than what our orbital telescopes have to deal with? As for sunlight, isn't that already a problem on Earth?
For mining, it's hard to say without actually going there and looking more closely. There's tons of stuff we mine now that it very rare and we could use more of. Even copper is getting more and more rare, as the prices for it keep rising greatly, and it's of critical importance to our technology. Lithium would be nice too. Plus, our existing mining processes cause enormous environmental devastation.
He3 on the moon isn't "mythical".
The moon would also be an excellent location for low-gravity manufacturing processes.
Seems like the biggest challenge would be building the cable and satellite; the work you have to do on the Moon should be minimal, mainly just anchoring the cable after it's dropped from the satellite. Of course, afterwards you'd want to build a base or something, but just to get the elevator working that isn't strictly necessary. The cable would be built on Earth. After this is all done and in place and a base is established, and mining operations started up, then we can start building up infrastructure and manufacturing operations there.
We don't go there because we're shortsighted and stupid. There's plenty of things the Moon would be good for, such as astronomy, and especially mining. There's a lot of He3 there, which would be very valuable for fusion reactors.
CS/computers used to be a haven for introverts to use their talents and have a well-paying job where they didn't have to interact with others too much. Now that the extroverted "brogrammers" are taking over the field, I wonder where all the young introverts are going now?
This makes sense to me. The "brogrammers" we hear about now aren't poorly-socialized introverts, they're extroverts, with bad behavior, so women don't want to be around that, understandably. When it was dominated by nerdy introverts, (some) women were just fine with that, because even though the men were socially awkward, they weren't outright misogynistic, like the "brogrammers" are.
Did you forget that they make tons of office laser printers? They'll save on costs by getting rid of their cheap, shitty, consumer inkjets that apparently are no longer profitable. Good riddance to them. Lots of companies (including IBM) have given up on or sold off their consumer product divisions, to concentrate solely on business customers, who are willing to pay a lot more money for products and demand better quality.
Presumably, they're going to continue with their laser printer business. They make a lot of big office laser printers, and from what I hear they're quite nice actually, totally unlike their consumer inkjets.
So to user your analogies, it's like Ford stopping production of their Fiesta cars, or Microsoft discontinuing their "Home" versions of Windows. Both of these moves would be welcome too.
As an American, I would bet money that he's an American, and English is his first and only language. That's a very common problem among American English speakers. Pretty soon, it'll probably be deemed "correct" here to use 's to indicate plural, since if enough people using a language do things a certain way, that becomes the standard.
I agree completely; I've never had a good experience with an inkjet, and I rely on laser printers now. They're dirt cheap when you get used business models on Ebay, and the cartridges are dirt cheap when you get the remanufactured kinds, and last for many thousands of pages for only about $25.
Scientifically, there's no use in debating philosophy, ethics, etc. either. They're orthogonal issues, except when stupid creationists try to take ancient writings as literal truth.
Huh? Obviously you don't live here in the USA. We're already filled with idiots; it's too late to change that. It's only inertia that's keeping us relevant at this point.
As for turning ourselves around, I don't think that's possible, and as I said in another post above, I can't think of a single case offhand where a society turned itself around, ever; societies seem to only decay and collapse, and then new societies are rebuilt in their place, usually after some horrible war.
I grew up Catholic. The Catholic Church does not believe the bible is literally true, and the story of Genesis is considered to be metaphor. The CC has serious issues, but the whole evolution debate is not one of them, nor is it for any non-fundamentalist sect. It's only the fundies who buy into the creationist BS. Unfortunately, the fundies are a growing majority in America.
Holy crap, are all your adult friends morons or creationists or fundamentalists or something? (To others, yes, I realize those sets intersect in a big way.)
You need some new friends. Ones who graduated from high school this time.
We need voters that don't fall for deception, we need voters that vote for the interests of the community instead of the lies of their masters. We need voters that make nilly-willy war impossible. We need voters that put banks in their place. We need voters that put all sorts of abuses of authority to a stop.
Yes, and we need good leaders who will do the right thing for the people and not their own personal fame/power/fortune. However, thinking we're likely to get any of this (good leaders or good voters) is pure folly. Our voters are morons, and as a result our leaders suck. It's not going to improve, it's only going to get worse, until the whole system collapses. That's the way every civilization throughout history is and has been. Things get built up, and then they slowly (or quickly in some cases) decay, until the society collapses. From the ashes of that, a new society is built up again. The collapse and rebuild period however is always rather messy and frequently bloody. That's what we're headed for. I can't think of a single case offhand of an exception to this rule (where a society was in decline, and then rebuilt and improved itself without some bloody war or collapse).
Democrats have been complicit in lowering standards and dumbing down education over the past 4 decades or so. Their motives are somewhat different, but the result is mostly the same. Our public educational systems are a mess and our students woefully undereducated.
Mr. AC never said anything about a generalized belief in a creator, he was addressing Creationism, which is where fundamentalist religious belief causes people to refuse to belief in actual physical evidence that can be observed and verified, because they prefer to believe origin fairy tales that have no basis in reality and no evidence to support them, and tons of evidence that disproves them. Simply believing in a "creator" doesn't prevent you from accepting evolutionary theory; lots of religious people, including Christians (in fact, most of them if you consider them all instead of focusing only on Americans) have no problem with the theory of evolution, and regard the biblical creation tale to be mere metaphor, not literal truth.
WTF are you talking about? Obviously it's embellished here and there, but it holds to the historical record pretty well. Are you trying to tell me that King Henry didn't have 6 wives? That Anne Boleyn wasn't executed? That various people under him like Cromwell and Thomas More, once his best friends, weren't also executed?
You say all that like you're joking, and that it wouldn't work. However, China is being run by engineers (rather than lawyers), and they're doing great. You might argue about how long it'll last or whatever, but you can't argue that the standard of living there isn't better now than it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago; by all accounts, China is on an upswing, and they didn't achieve it by putting a bunch of lawyers in charge.
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I went to middle and high schools in TN, and 2 years of college (on the east side though, in Knoxville). Now I live in Arizona. I think you're mistaken about which state is the retard capital of the USA. Actually, they may be neck-and-neck, having lived in both, it's hard to pick one as a clear winner.
Also, the Creationist Museum is located in Kentucky....
I also spent some time in Mississippi living with a relative over the summer in high school. I think that state may have all the above beat.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. They've been trying to emulate old-fashioned desktops with GUIs ever since GUIs became available for consumers. That's why they even call them "desktops", and why the main screen in Windows (well, until Metro) is called "your desktop", with items on it going in the "Desktop" folder.
I grew up with floppy disks. IME, they were extremely reliable in the 80s and early and mid 90s. It was rare for them to go bad, unless they'd been mistreated. But towards the end of their reign in the late 90s, they started getting really unreliable. I think this is because they became an afterthought, only included in PCs because of Windows driver disks and inertia, and people weren't using them much, so the drive makers and or the floppy disk makers cut costs, making them very unreliable. Back in the C64 days, those things could really be counted on to save your data, but it wasn't like that when everyone started using the network to transfer files and hard drives had gotten so large than 1.44MB floppies just weren't practical any more for backups or file storage.
Except in Turkey, from what I read.
These days, "Creationism" (with a capital 'C') generally implies disbelief in evolution.
I'm sure the dust problem can be overcome with engineering. How much worse can the temperature extremes be than what our orbital telescopes have to deal with? As for sunlight, isn't that already a problem on Earth?
For mining, it's hard to say without actually going there and looking more closely. There's tons of stuff we mine now that it very rare and we could use more of. Even copper is getting more and more rare, as the prices for it keep rising greatly, and it's of critical importance to our technology. Lithium would be nice too. Plus, our existing mining processes cause enormous environmental devastation.
He3 on the moon isn't "mythical".
The moon would also be an excellent location for low-gravity manufacturing processes.
Seems like the biggest challenge would be building the cable and satellite; the work you have to do on the Moon should be minimal, mainly just anchoring the cable after it's dropped from the satellite. Of course, afterwards you'd want to build a base or something, but just to get the elevator working that isn't strictly necessary. The cable would be built on Earth. After this is all done and in place and a base is established, and mining operations started up, then we can start building up infrastructure and manufacturing operations there.
We don't go there because we're shortsighted and stupid. There's plenty of things the Moon would be good for, such as astronomy, and especially mining. There's a lot of He3 there, which would be very valuable for fusion reactors.
CS/computers used to be a haven for introverts to use their talents and have a well-paying job where they didn't have to interact with others too much. Now that the extroverted "brogrammers" are taking over the field, I wonder where all the young introverts are going now?
This makes sense to me. The "brogrammers" we hear about now aren't poorly-socialized introverts, they're extroverts, with bad behavior, so women don't want to be around that, understandably. When it was dominated by nerdy introverts, (some) women were just fine with that, because even though the men were socially awkward, they weren't outright misogynistic, like the "brogrammers" are.
I miss the 80s and 90s....
That's exactly what I'm thinking, especially with this new "brogrammer" crap that seems to have become the norm lately.
Did you forget that they make tons of office laser printers? They'll save on costs by getting rid of their cheap, shitty, consumer inkjets that apparently are no longer profitable. Good riddance to them. Lots of companies (including IBM) have given up on or sold off their consumer product divisions, to concentrate solely on business customers, who are willing to pay a lot more money for products and demand better quality.
Presumably, they're going to continue with their laser printer business. They make a lot of big office laser printers, and from what I hear they're quite nice actually, totally unlike their consumer inkjets.
So to user your analogies, it's like Ford stopping production of their Fiesta cars, or Microsoft discontinuing their "Home" versions of Windows. Both of these moves would be welcome too.
As an American, I would bet money that he's an American, and English is his first and only language. That's a very common problem among American English speakers. Pretty soon, it'll probably be deemed "correct" here to use 's to indicate plural, since if enough people using a language do things a certain way, that becomes the standard.
I agree completely; I've never had a good experience with an inkjet, and I rely on laser printers now. They're dirt cheap when you get used business models on Ebay, and the cartridges are dirt cheap when you get the remanufactured kinds, and last for many thousands of pages for only about $25.
Scientifically, there's no use in debating philosophy, ethics, etc. either. They're orthogonal issues, except when stupid creationists try to take ancient writings as literal truth.
Huh? Obviously you don't live here in the USA. We're already filled with idiots; it's too late to change that. It's only inertia that's keeping us relevant at this point.
As for turning ourselves around, I don't think that's possible, and as I said in another post above, I can't think of a single case offhand where a society turned itself around, ever; societies seem to only decay and collapse, and then new societies are rebuilt in their place, usually after some horrible war.
I grew up Catholic. The Catholic Church does not believe the bible is literally true, and the story of Genesis is considered to be metaphor. The CC has serious issues, but the whole evolution debate is not one of them, nor is it for any non-fundamentalist sect. It's only the fundies who buy into the creationist BS. Unfortunately, the fundies are a growing majority in America.
Holy crap, are all your adult friends morons or creationists or fundamentalists or something? (To others, yes, I realize those sets intersect in a big way.)
You need some new friends. Ones who graduated from high school this time.
We need voters that don't fall for deception, we need voters that vote for the interests of the community instead of the lies of their masters. We need voters that make nilly-willy war impossible. We need voters that put banks in their place. We need voters that put all sorts of abuses of authority to a stop.
Yes, and we need good leaders who will do the right thing for the people and not their own personal fame/power/fortune. However, thinking we're likely to get any of this (good leaders or good voters) is pure folly. Our voters are morons, and as a result our leaders suck. It's not going to improve, it's only going to get worse, until the whole system collapses. That's the way every civilization throughout history is and has been. Things get built up, and then they slowly (or quickly in some cases) decay, until the society collapses. From the ashes of that, a new society is built up again. The collapse and rebuild period however is always rather messy and frequently bloody. That's what we're headed for. I can't think of a single case offhand of an exception to this rule (where a society was in decline, and then rebuilt and improved itself without some bloody war or collapse).
Democrats have been complicit in lowering standards and dumbing down education over the past 4 decades or so. Their motives are somewhat different, but the result is mostly the same. Our public educational systems are a mess and our students woefully undereducated.
Mr. AC never said anything about a generalized belief in a creator, he was addressing Creationism, which is where fundamentalist religious belief causes people to refuse to belief in actual physical evidence that can be observed and verified, because they prefer to believe origin fairy tales that have no basis in reality and no evidence to support them, and tons of evidence that disproves them. Simply believing in a "creator" doesn't prevent you from accepting evolutionary theory; lots of religious people, including Christians (in fact, most of them if you consider them all instead of focusing only on Americans) have no problem with the theory of evolution, and regard the biblical creation tale to be mere metaphor, not literal truth.
In short, don't get your panties in a bunch.
Why is this even moded up to a score of 2 already?
Because there's tons of Americans here on Slashdot, and most Americans believe in Creationism.
WTF are you talking about? Obviously it's embellished here and there, but it holds to the historical record pretty well. Are you trying to tell me that King Henry didn't have 6 wives? That Anne Boleyn wasn't executed? That various people under him like Cromwell and Thomas More, once his best friends, weren't also executed?
You say all that like you're joking, and that it wouldn't work. However, China is being run by engineers (rather than lawyers), and they're doing great. You might argue about how long it'll last or whatever, but you can't argue that the standard of living there isn't better now than it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago; by all accounts, China is on an upswing, and they didn't achieve it by putting a bunch of lawyers in charge.