'It's become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'"
Were they my neighbors, I would be asking the same thing.
Were they my friends, I would shun them.
Were they my significant other, I would leave them.
The notion in the USA that the minions are innocent and "just following orders" is ridiculous. Unless conscripted (which these people are not), they are as complicit as their masters. These people are damaging the USA in profound ways. They deserve it to be uncomfortable every step of the way.
Nexus 5 $350 no contract, direct from google: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_5_16GB_Black?id=nexus_5_black_16gb&hl=en
iphone5s is $650 http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5s
The only real comparison is to compare phone prices without contract, because on contract the additional cost of the phone is included in your bill which you pay over the term of the contract.
The N5 is so close to half price of the iphone5s as to make no difference. I used to grudgingly admit iphones could beat out androids back in the G1 days. The only thing apple has left these days is brand.
The biggest thing I have noticed correlated with pedigree schools is "being an elitist dick"(TM). It's anecdotal, but the better developers that I've met didn't go to ivy. By ivy here I don't mean colloquial Ivy, but tech Ivy like MIT and Stanford. The ivy devs I've met haven't been any better, but many will certainly tell you that they are, and that their $300k in debt is worth it.
The best flag that shiny startup you are applying to is doomed is when you read a requirement like "Must have a degree in x from a TOP university". It is something people who don't know how to evaluate new hires use as a yardstick. If you are so bad you need to resort to that then the odds of you bringing together a good team pretty low.
There are truly extraordinary programmers who not only don't listen to music while they code, they don't listen to music at any time. They don't see the point. I don't put myself in the extraordinary programmer bucket, but I have only the most superficial and passing interest in music. For example, I never have it on when I'm coding. I feel that it distracts me slightly and that I want all my mental resources available to focus on the problems I'm working on.
Everyone thinks their specialty or interest is something that the rest of the human race is missing out on. I am often amused when I talk to musicians and fine artists because they think my life is incomplete since I can't play the cello (if they are a cellist) or do an extraordinary oil painting. I could say I feel their life is incomplete because they often don't seem to write very well (I did philosophy) and can't do anything which eliminates work for humanity (I am also a programmer), but I don't, because it's shortsighted.
Humans currently have a very limited time to exist. Step 1 for a human is making sure you can provide for yourself and survive (most humans want this). After that, let people do what they want. It is their limited time to spend in the way they think will make them happy. *This includes children*.
" If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation"
The above quote is in stark contrast to my own experience in life. I'm not much older than you (29) and I have found that people often require extremely powerful motivators in order to accept "the new" otherwise known as "change". There are different personalities of course, but the personality "I want to learn it once and be an expert forever" is pretty common in my own workplace. A lot of people don't push themselves to learn. I don't mean outside the workplace, either. I just mean learning the proprietary in-house tech we have. Folks learn it as much as they absolutely need to then kind of check out when it comes to the more in depth stuff. Not all people of course, but not an insignificant part of the population either.
Other examples abound. How many 60 year olds were texting a decade ago? It certainly isn't that they are too stupid, because a lot of them do it now. Old people are just as smart (smarter?) as young people with the unfortunate disadvantage of poor reaction time. It's that they had methods of approaching the world which were well worn and change is scary.
The tech crowd is not plagued with the "change is scary" mantra to the same degree as other crowds. I've found that it accepts change faster than most other demographics I've been a part of.
Just be sure to be patient with your kids when you are teaching them logic. Humans (all humans) suck at logical naturally, but they REALLY suck when their brains are developing. Remember how learning basic math was challenging? It wasn't challenging simply because you hadn't seen math before. Your brain was not as equipped as it is in adulthood to deal with logic.
You may find that your kid takes a long time to pick up certain concepts, fails completely to pick up other concepts, while they pick up still others without blinking. Be patient. Try to let them guide their own learning process. They will get everything eventually, but the path to getting it might seem roundabout to you and fraught with strange failures.
The reason gamers tend to forgive valve for steam is because Valve treats it's customers well. They make a product which offers a lot. * Steam games download very quickly. * The user interface is lightweight and intuitive * Steam games (by valve) are usually polished, artistic masterpieces. *Convenience of having your game library in the cloud instead of scattered around your residence. * A useful IM system which integrates well into most games *probably more I'm not thinking of
You do have to trade something for this, but you DON'T have to trade always-on DRM. Steam isn't like that. You can play steam games offline. The only thing you are trading is that you can't resell your games. For me, this is an agreeable trade as I never resell my games anyway.
The reason people object to the crap EA et. al. does is because they try to take without giving anything back. They provide no added value in exchange for taking away the ability to resell games. In fact, they actually cripple games in order to achieve their goal.
If the steam value trade doesn't work for you because you want to resell games then I do sympathize. However, saying steam is the same as EA is hyperbole.
"People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period. "
In order to understand what a thing is, or what motivations and intentions are, we look to the action of an entity. We listen to the entity when it speaks because there is a chance it will point out some nuance of behavior we have missed. However, we do not accept assertions regarding action when those assertions are incongruous with those actions.
EA is a member of the set of companies that believe they can do whatever they like so long as they claim they aren't doing anything wrong.
Please, everyone, do the gaming community a favor and stop buying EA games.
I have apps on my android phone from about 5 years ago. They work fine. All you are going to want on the thing, presumably, are apps related to cooking or the oven itself.
You won't need to upgrade the hardware, because you aren't going to upgrade the software. You're going to leave the OS on it as-is for 15 years and use it to run super-simple apps which you could probably run on a computer built in 1999.
If I were designing this thing in hobbyist mode I probably wouldn't even have bothered making something with specs as high as the manufacturer is supplying.
The IP laws in the States do not protect the size and security of the paycheck of the lowly developer. The lowly developer is paid exactly as little as their company can get away with. It doesn't matter how much the company makes assuming the company makes enough to stay viable. These laws protect the size and security of MBA moochers at the top of the food chain. If my company, for example, made 200x what it does... I would not get a raise. If it made 1/200th of what it does, I wouldn't get a paycut.
Were that it were only twice as expensive. Your link points out the Russian vehicle is 580 mil. The enterprise is priced at a tril. This is roughly 1700 times as expensive. If my math is right.
History has shown that as populations become more educated and better nourished that birthrates actually decline. It seems that poverty promotes high birth rates. Maybe it has something to do with there being slim odds to pass ones genes on to the future generations, the more one procreates, the better the chances of that occuring.
Poor people don't increase the odds for the success of their children by having a ton of children. That behavior decreases the odds of success in a society like our own. The reason better educated people have less children is because they understand having less children is better for the children, the parents, and society at large. They understand this because they are educated. If poor people had less children it would increase the chances of the family creating self-sustaining wealth, because the family could spend less money. It would also increase the amount of resources available for any particular child (including parental attention, food, books, computers, instructors, etc.).
The poor people I have known who habitually reproduce did not do it because they thought it was good for the success of their genes. They did it because they didn't know any better. It didn't occur to them that there was an alternative to having sex and popping out a kid every once in a while by accident.
In other news: The sun today released an enormous amount of radiation. Enough to irradiate and kill everyone on earth! However, scientists report negligible risk in the event one limit themself to 15 minutes of direct exposure..
I actually had high hopes for Google Health being able to improve one little corner of an otherwise broken system. I should have known better though. Our healthcare system in this country is beyond repair at this point. We need to gut the entire system and rebuild it, but unfortunately politics and people's lingering fascination with private insurance companies will prevent it until we completely meltdown.
Recent case in point - I went to the doctor a month ago for some antibiotics - total cost TO ME (insurance picked up more) = $758. I could have purchased a plane ticket to Costa Rica, a couple nights in San Jose, and the medication cheaper than my visit to the local clinic.
Either you may be willing to buy this bridge I have for sale in London, or that "doctor's visit" included specialist work such as a CT scan... or a scope. I'm not saying our system isn't in awful shape, but over $1500 for a doc and antibiotics? I don't have insurance and did this exact thing two months ago (turns out I had bronchitis). It cost me about $200 total. Including the price of the meds.
You're missing my point. The argument is that genetic research is on the bleeding edge of scientific discovery. This means change. Some people find change scary. The other theories I mentioned were all also once on the bleeding edge of thought, and were also attacked for their inevitable tendency to destroy mankind.
The point is that someone is going to do this research. It is a force-of-nature where mankind is concerned. We should be considering what to do with it (regulation, possible application, etc) not whether it should be done. Arguing about whether we should be doing genetic research is like arguing about whether the sun should one day burn itself out. I don't think it should! That would be very bad for life in our solar system!
Hopefully the sun is listening. If it doesn't shape up I'll go spray some insecticide on it.
You can QQ about the moral implications of scientific progress all you like, but you won't be stopping it. Don't like stem cell research because it is an affront to God? Don't like genetics research because it isn't natural? Tough tiddly winks. It takes one researcher spending time on a subject, doing it right, and publishing their results. There is no stopping science.
If you are so terrified of a universe humans understand, shed the hypocrisy. Shut off your computer and all your lights. Refuse antibiotics next time you have a major infection. Reject models like the heliocentric solar system, gravity, electromagnetism, and all the rest.
Having a powerful model for genetics has the potential to outshine all the theories mentioned above in practical use for human life. It will doubtless be necessary if ever we get off our asses and go to the stars.
Tech sites should probably be ignoring win8 altogether. In accordance with Bill's law(1), win8 will be an abomination of an OS purchased only by those who have it forced upon them with a new computer.
(1) Bill's Law: Every 2nd iteration of the Windows operating system will be so terrible as to be nigh unusable.
Bill's law is a pattern which surfaces as a side effect of Microsoft's business strategy. Rather than properly beta-test and develop an OS, Microsoft releases first a beta version of that OS as a full-fledged operating system. They then receive copious feedback regarding their awful OS which is incorporated into the actual release of that OS as a new iteration of the software. The cycle then repeats.
The set of major windows OS iterations (last decade) as Evidence:
[... win98SE=) -> winMillenium=( -> winXP =) -> winVista =( -> win7=)...]
We do not know that robots can *never* be empathetic. In fact, we know just the opposite. Robots can absolutely be empathetic.
Without getting too detailed, cognitive scientists have been working for a long time toward an understanding of human cognition. There is still a ways to go, but progress continues. There is every reason to believe human cognition will be accurately model-able in the near future (where "near" is considered in respect to the entire lifespan of humans as a species). The second ingredient is merely changing personhood attributions in the layman to omit certain physical characteristics which robots do not possess. The second step is actually really easy, comparatively.
It will be the case that humans feel empathy emanating from robots. The question is "when?". We can safely assume it won't be commonplace during the next 20 years. Even 50. A century from now? Maybe. A millennium? Almost certainly, barring rapture.
Your analogy isn't really getting the job done for you. Sure, the price of air travel has gone down - but it's still not cheap. It's still much, much cheaper, for example, to get something shipped UPS ground than UPS overnight. And for bulk quantities of stuff, forget it. Air's not an option for resupplying your coal fired power plant, for example.
The situation is even worse with respect to space. Prices aren't really coming down at all, and there really aren't any technological breakthroughs on the horizon as far as anyone can tell. Economies of scale, if you can achieve them, will only get you so far. You're going to need something that makes you some money "out there", and so far, no one has any particularly plausible ideas. The terrestrial planets are all made of the same stuff earth is, and no matter how cheap you make space travel, it's never going to be so cheap that mining is more economically done in space. Asteroids are the same deal. Comets: slushballs. Gas giants: hard to even imagine what you could recover or how to do it. And if you can't figure out what can be economically recovered, you probably can't even get the economy of scale.
Somehow we need to break out of that trap
Ok, I'll bite. Why do we need to? We've already established that there's no money in it. Carl Sagan seems to be casting about for a reason to do it in the quote. So why? This is really the heart of the matter. You can't just wave your hands and say "we need to get into space... just because". Someone needs to identify the actual benefits - and so far, they seem pretty slim.
The actual benefit of advancing space-faring technology is the possibility that humans may one day establish a self-sustaining off-world colony. This is important, to some of us, because it makes extinction much less likely.
If you do not care about the extinction of humanity, then I understand not giving a damn about space travel. If you do care, space travel should be pretty important to you.
Who even has the money to pay for a Mars boondoggle, one-way or not?
Where's the payback for the billions of dollars this will require? A new flavor of Tang? Another cool pen that writes upside down? Seriously, where is the cost-benefit analysis, who can possibly show that the price is justifiable to the taxpayer?
We, along with Russia, simply do not have the money for such a frivolous project, even if the technical hurdles were surmountable. This is just another NASA pipe dream, stoked by science fiction and movie lore. Every dollar spent pursuing this project is a dollar flushed straight down the toilet (or, as some would say, graft for the contractors like Lockheed and Grumman who get the $ and don't have to produce anything tangible)
You and your kin are why humans will one day become extinct.
You are right that many government mandates placed on teachers do more harm than good. You are wrong in that you think her attitude is a symptom rather than part of the underlying cause.
You are wrong also in seeming to think teachers are justified in becoming cynical. You ask "the children could do no wrong?" with sarcasm, yet this is just the philosophy an educator must maintain. Children are not your equals. You are better than they in any measurable regard. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to point out moral, motivational, analytical, or any other deficiency in a child under your tutelage. Being a teacher is understanding this. It is recognizing that you are there to better them as people despite any challenge which lays before you.
In the end we are human. Indeed, we feel frustration. This is quite different from holding the attitude "these kids are a lost cause " or "they don't meet my expectations so I'm done working to help them". This is the attitude we see in the teacher mentioned above. To teach is to adopt the philosophy I espouse. To do otherwise is to become a hindrance.
You seem to think these musing come from someone looking in on the system rather than existing within it. A strange assumption.
"You've shown what the majority of people think already" No, you are displaying the viewpoint that most Americans have. That the teacher has no duty to care because her students have somehow offended her, as if those two groups are somehow on equal ground. You seem to think the children have some responsibility to the teacher. They do not. They are *children*. It is your own view which is destroying education; teachers giving up because they think they are morally justified based on these and other problems. "Be the bigger person" has no better application than when your position is that of an educator.
Teaching kids is not about getting something from the kids. It isn't about mutual respect. It isn't about them asking "how high" when you say "jump". It isn't about having kids revere you as their mentor.
Teaching kids is about *helping the kids*. If they are great at algebra, then teach them polynomials. If they can barely handle addition, teach them addition. If they can barely pay attention to addition, work on getting them to pay attention/have self confidence/etc. Someone with the attitude of this teacher (or yours) is certainly not doing this. She deserves a suspension. Her attitude betrays a point of view toxic to pedagogy. In a perfect world where she could easily find work elsewhere and where the school could easily replace her then she should be asked to leave. Hopefully she takes her suspension as a wake up call. I doubt it, but we can hope.
Did the Op also denounce capitalism when it was discovered that America was viciously torturing prisoners at Guantanamo?
It is trivial to point out that to explore socialism one must also explore political theory. No one suggested otherwise. However, it is wrong to view it as a model of government. Governments have people in power. "Socialism" does has no comment here. Perhaps the state is a socialist oligarchy, or a monarchy, or a democracy, or a dictatorship, or even a communist state!
Governments work to expand their powers regardless of the economic model being applied. Conflating the two is dangerous because people end up thinking like the OP: that socialism results in police grabbing power.
Socialism has no causal force here beyond the fore common to all such systems. The problem is that people are willing to trade liberty for security, which results in police forces being granted far more power than is necessary or safe.
Slashdot Mirror
'It's become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'"
Were they my neighbors, I would be asking the same thing.
Were they my friends, I would shun them.
Were they my significant other, I would leave them.
The notion in the USA that the minions are innocent and "just following orders" is ridiculous. Unless conscripted (which these people are not), they are as complicit as their masters. These people are damaging the USA in profound ways. They deserve it to be uncomfortable every step of the way.
Nexus 5 $350 no contract, direct from google:
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_5_16GB_Black?id=nexus_5_black_16gb&hl=en
iphone5s is $650
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5s
The only real comparison is to compare phone prices without contract, because on contract the additional cost of the phone is included in your bill which you pay over the term of the contract.
The N5 is so close to half price of the iphone5s as to make no difference. I used to grudgingly admit iphones could beat out androids back in the G1 days. The only thing apple has left these days is brand.
The biggest thing I have noticed correlated with pedigree schools is "being an elitist dick"(TM). It's anecdotal, but the better developers that I've met didn't go to ivy. By ivy here I don't mean colloquial Ivy, but tech Ivy like MIT and Stanford. The ivy devs I've met haven't been any better, but many will certainly tell you that they are, and that their $300k in debt is worth it.
The best flag that shiny startup you are applying to is doomed is when you read a requirement like "Must have a degree in x from a TOP university". It is something people who don't know how to evaluate new hires use as a yardstick. If you are so bad you need to resort to that then the odds of you bringing together a good team pretty low.
There are truly extraordinary programmers who not only don't listen to music while they code, they don't listen to music at any time. They don't see the point. I don't put myself in the extraordinary programmer bucket, but I have only the most superficial and passing interest in music. For example, I never have it on when I'm coding. I feel that it distracts me slightly and that I want all my mental resources available to focus on the problems I'm working on.
Everyone thinks their specialty or interest is something that the rest of the human race is missing out on. I am often amused when I talk to musicians and fine artists because they think my life is incomplete since I can't play the cello (if they are a cellist) or do an extraordinary oil painting. I could say I feel their life is incomplete because they often don't seem to write very well (I did philosophy) and can't do anything which eliminates work for humanity (I am also a programmer), but I don't, because it's shortsighted.
Humans currently have a very limited time to exist. Step 1 for a human is making sure you can provide for yourself and survive (most humans want this). After that, let people do what they want. It is their limited time to spend in the way they think will make them happy. *This includes children*.
" If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation"
The above quote is in stark contrast to my own experience in life. I'm not much older than you (29) and I have found that people often require extremely powerful motivators in order to accept "the new" otherwise known as "change". There are different personalities of course, but the personality "I want to learn it once and be an expert forever" is pretty common in my own workplace. A lot of people don't push themselves to learn. I don't mean outside the workplace, either. I just mean learning the proprietary in-house tech we have. Folks learn it as much as they absolutely need to then kind of check out when it comes to the more in depth stuff. Not all people of course, but not an insignificant part of the population either.
Other examples abound. How many 60 year olds were texting a decade ago? It certainly isn't that they are too stupid, because a lot of them do it now. Old people are just as smart (smarter?) as young people with the unfortunate disadvantage of poor reaction time. It's that they had methods of approaching the world which were well worn and change is scary.
The tech crowd is not plagued with the "change is scary" mantra to the same degree as other crowds. I've found that it accepts change faster than most other demographics I've been a part of.
Just be sure to be patient with your kids when you are teaching them logic. Humans (all humans) suck at logical naturally, but they REALLY suck when their brains are developing. Remember how learning basic math was challenging? It wasn't challenging simply because you hadn't seen math before. Your brain was not as equipped as it is in adulthood to deal with logic.
You may find that your kid takes a long time to pick up certain concepts, fails completely to pick up other concepts, while they pick up still others without blinking. Be patient. Try to let them guide their own learning process. They will get everything eventually, but the path to getting it might seem roundabout to you and fraught with strange failures.
The reason gamers tend to forgive valve for steam is because Valve treats it's customers well. They make a product which offers a lot.
* Steam games download very quickly.
* The user interface is lightweight and intuitive
* Steam games (by valve) are usually polished, artistic masterpieces.
*Convenience of having your game library in the cloud instead of scattered around your residence.
* A useful IM system which integrates well into most games
*probably more I'm not thinking of
You do have to trade something for this, but you DON'T have to trade always-on DRM. Steam isn't like that. You can play steam games offline. The only thing you are trading is that you can't resell your games. For me, this is an agreeable trade as I never resell my games anyway.
The reason people object to the crap EA et. al. does is because they try to take without giving anything back. They provide no added value in exchange for taking away the ability to resell games. In fact, they actually cripple games in order to achieve their goal.
If the steam value trade doesn't work for you because you want to resell games then I do sympathize. However, saying steam is the same as EA is hyperbole.
Steam != EA
"People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period. "
In order to understand what a thing is, or what motivations and intentions are, we look to the action of an entity. We listen to the entity when it speaks because there is a chance it will point out some nuance of behavior we have missed. However, we do not accept assertions regarding action when those assertions are incongruous with those actions.
EA is a member of the set of companies that believe they can do whatever they like so long as they claim they aren't doing anything wrong.
Please, everyone, do the gaming community a favor and stop buying EA games.
I have apps on my android phone from about 5 years ago. They work fine. All you are going to want on the thing, presumably, are apps related to cooking or the oven itself.
You won't need to upgrade the hardware, because you aren't going to upgrade the software. You're going to leave the OS on it as-is for 15 years and use it to run super-simple apps which you could probably run on a computer built in 1999.
If I were designing this thing in hobbyist mode I probably wouldn't even have bothered making something with specs as high as the manufacturer is supplying.
The IP laws in the States do not protect the size and security of the paycheck of the lowly developer. The lowly developer is paid exactly as little as their company can get away with. It doesn't matter how much the company makes assuming the company makes enough to stay viable. These laws protect the size and security of MBA moochers at the top of the food chain. If my company, for example, made 200x what it does... I would not get a raise. If it made 1/200th of what it does, I wouldn't get a paycut.
My big problems with this:
2) it is nearly twice as expensive as the Russian nuclear
Were that it were only twice as expensive. Your link points out the Russian vehicle is 580 mil. The enterprise is priced at a tril. This is roughly 1700 times as expensive. If my math is right.
History has shown that as populations become more educated and better nourished that birthrates actually decline. It seems that poverty promotes high birth rates. Maybe it has something to do with there being slim odds to pass ones genes on to the future generations, the more one procreates, the better the chances of that occuring.
Poor people don't increase the odds for the success of their children by having a ton of children. That behavior decreases the odds of success in a society like our own. The reason better educated people have less children is because they understand having less children is better for the children, the parents, and society at large. They understand this because they are educated. If poor people had less children it would increase the chances of the family creating self-sustaining wealth, because the family could spend less money. It would also increase the amount of resources available for any particular child (including parental attention, food, books, computers, instructors, etc.).
The poor people I have known who habitually reproduce did not do it because they thought it was good for the success of their genes. They did it because they didn't know any better. It didn't occur to them that there was an alternative to having sex and popping out a kid every once in a while by accident.
In other news: The sun today released an enormous amount of radiation. Enough to irradiate and kill everyone on earth! However, scientists report negligible risk in the event one limit themself to 15 minutes of direct exposure..
Thanks for wasting my time, Slashdot editors.
I actually had high hopes for Google Health being able to improve one little corner of an otherwise broken system. I should have known better though. Our healthcare system in this country is beyond repair at this point. We need to gut the entire system and rebuild it, but unfortunately politics and people's lingering fascination with private insurance companies will prevent it until we completely meltdown.
Recent case in point - I went to the doctor a month ago for some antibiotics - total cost TO ME (insurance picked up more) = $758. I could have purchased a plane ticket to Costa Rica, a couple nights in San Jose, and the medication cheaper than my visit to the local clinic.
Either you may be willing to buy this bridge I have for sale in London, or that "doctor's visit" included specialist work such as a CT scan... or a scope. I'm not saying our system isn't in awful shape, but over $1500 for a doc and antibiotics? I don't have insurance and did this exact thing two months ago (turns out I had bronchitis). It cost me about $200 total. Including the price of the meds.
Herbicide... thanks no "edit" button.
You're missing my point. The argument is that genetic research is on the bleeding edge of scientific discovery. This means change. Some people find change scary. The other theories I mentioned were all also once on the bleeding edge of thought, and were also attacked for their inevitable tendency to destroy mankind.
The point is that someone is going to do this research. It is a force-of-nature where mankind is concerned. We should be considering what to do with it (regulation, possible application, etc) not whether it should be done. Arguing about whether we should be doing genetic research is like arguing about whether the sun should one day burn itself out. I don't think it should! That would be very bad for life in our solar system!
Hopefully the sun is listening. If it doesn't shape up I'll go spray some insecticide on it.
You can QQ about the moral implications of scientific progress all you like, but you won't be stopping it. Don't like stem cell research because it is an affront to God? Don't like genetics research because it isn't natural? Tough tiddly winks. It takes one researcher spending time on a subject, doing it right, and publishing their results. There is no stopping science.
If you are so terrified of a universe humans understand, shed the hypocrisy. Shut off your computer and all your lights. Refuse antibiotics next time you have a major infection. Reject models like the heliocentric solar system, gravity, electromagnetism, and all the rest.
Having a powerful model for genetics has the potential to outshine all the theories mentioned above in practical use for human life. It will doubtless be necessary if ever we get off our asses and go to the stars.
Tech sites should probably be ignoring win8 altogether. In accordance with Bill's law(1), win8 will be an abomination of an OS purchased only by those who have it forced upon them with a new computer.
(1) Bill's Law:
Every 2nd iteration of the Windows operating system will be so terrible as to be nigh unusable.
Bill's law is a pattern which surfaces as a side effect of Microsoft's business strategy. Rather than properly beta-test and develop an OS, Microsoft releases first a beta version of that OS as a full-fledged operating system. They then receive copious feedback regarding their awful OS which is incorporated into the actual release of that OS as a new iteration of the software. The cycle then repeats.
The set of major windows OS iterations (last decade) as Evidence: ...]
[... win98SE=) -> winMillenium=( -> winXP =) -> winVista =( -> win7=)
We do not know that robots can *never* be empathetic. In fact, we know just the opposite. Robots can absolutely be empathetic.
Without getting too detailed, cognitive scientists have been working for a long time toward an understanding of human cognition. There is still a ways to go, but progress continues. There is every reason to believe human cognition will be accurately model-able in the near future (where "near" is considered in respect to the entire lifespan of humans as a species). The second ingredient is merely changing personhood attributions in the layman to omit certain physical characteristics which robots do not possess. The second step is actually really easy, comparatively.
It will be the case that humans feel empathy emanating from robots. The question is "when?". We can safely assume it won't be commonplace during the next 20 years. Even 50. A century from now? Maybe. A millennium? Almost certainly, barring rapture.
If you think the people who criticize apple are using Windows CE, Palm or Symbian devices then you're not paying attention. At all.
Your analogy isn't really getting the job done for you. Sure, the price of air travel has gone down - but it's still not cheap. It's still much, much cheaper, for example, to get something shipped UPS ground than UPS overnight. And for bulk quantities of stuff, forget it. Air's not an option for resupplying your coal fired power plant, for example.
The situation is even worse with respect to space. Prices aren't really coming down at all, and there really aren't any technological breakthroughs on the horizon as far as anyone can tell. Economies of scale, if you can achieve them, will only get you so far. You're going to need something that makes you some money "out there", and so far, no one has any particularly plausible ideas. The terrestrial planets are all made of the same stuff earth is, and no matter how cheap you make space travel, it's never going to be so cheap that mining is more economically done in space. Asteroids are the same deal. Comets: slushballs. Gas giants: hard to even imagine what you could recover or how to do it. And if you can't figure out what can be economically recovered, you probably can't even get the economy of scale.
Ok, I'll bite. Why do we need to? We've already established that there's no money in it. Carl Sagan seems to be casting about for a reason to do it in the quote. So why? This is really the heart of the matter. You can't just wave your hands and say "we need to get into space... just because". Someone needs to identify the actual benefits - and so far, they seem pretty slim.
The actual benefit of advancing space-faring technology is the possibility that humans may one day establish a self-sustaining off-world colony. This is important, to some of us, because it makes extinction much less likely.
If you do not care about the extinction of humanity, then I understand not giving a damn about space travel. If you do care, space travel should be pretty important to you.
Who even has the money to pay for a Mars boondoggle, one-way or not?
Where's the payback for the billions of dollars this will require? A new flavor of Tang? Another cool pen that writes upside down? Seriously, where is the cost-benefit analysis, who can possibly show that the price is justifiable to the taxpayer?
We, along with Russia, simply do not have the money for such a frivolous project, even if the technical hurdles were surmountable. This is just another NASA pipe dream, stoked by science fiction and movie lore. Every dollar spent pursuing this project is a dollar flushed straight down the toilet (or, as some would say, graft for the contractors like Lockheed and Grumman who get the $ and don't have to produce anything tangible)
You and your kin are why humans will one day become extinct.
You are right that many government mandates placed on teachers do more harm than good. You are wrong in that you think her attitude is a symptom rather than part of the underlying cause.
You are wrong also in seeming to think teachers are justified in becoming cynical. You ask "the children could do no wrong?" with sarcasm, yet this is just the philosophy an educator must maintain. Children are not your equals. You are better than they in any measurable regard. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to point out moral, motivational, analytical, or any other deficiency in a child under your tutelage. Being a teacher is understanding this. It is recognizing that you are there to better them as people despite any challenge which lays before you.
In the end we are human. Indeed, we feel frustration. This is quite different from holding the attitude "these kids are a lost cause " or "they don't meet my expectations so I'm done working to help them". This is the attitude we see in the teacher mentioned above. To teach is to adopt the philosophy I espouse. To do otherwise is to become a hindrance.
You seem to think these musing come from someone looking in on the system rather than existing within it. A strange assumption.
"You've shown what the majority of people think already"
No, you are displaying the viewpoint that most Americans have. That the teacher has no duty to care because her students have somehow offended her, as if those two groups are somehow on equal ground. You seem to think the children have some responsibility to the teacher. They do not. They are *children*. It is your own view which is destroying education; teachers giving up because they think they are morally justified based on these and other problems. "Be the bigger person" has no better application than when your position is that of an educator.
Teaching kids is not about getting something from the kids. It isn't about mutual respect. It isn't about them asking "how high" when you say "jump". It isn't about having kids revere you as their mentor.
Teaching kids is about *helping the kids*. If they are great at algebra, then teach them polynomials. If they can barely handle addition, teach them addition. If they can barely pay attention to addition, work on getting them to pay attention/have self confidence/etc. Someone with the attitude of this teacher (or yours) is certainly not doing this. She deserves a suspension. Her attitude betrays a point of view toxic to pedagogy. In a perfect world where she could easily find work elsewhere and where the school could easily replace her then she should be asked to leave. Hopefully she takes her suspension as a wake up call. I doubt it, but we can hope.
Did the Op also denounce capitalism when it was discovered that America was viciously torturing prisoners at Guantanamo?
It is trivial to point out that to explore socialism one must also explore political theory. No one suggested otherwise. However, it is wrong to view it as a model of government. Governments have people in power. "Socialism" does has no comment here. Perhaps the state is a socialist oligarchy, or a monarchy, or a democracy, or a dictatorship, or even a communist state!
Governments work to expand their powers regardless of the economic model being applied. Conflating the two is dangerous because people end up thinking like the OP: that socialism results in police grabbing power.
Socialism has no causal force here beyond the fore common to all such systems. The problem is that people are willing to trade liberty for security, which results in police forces being granted far more power than is necessary or safe.