Wow! You mean that, rather than showing a penchant for technobabble that he didn't fully understand, Lucas was actually enriching his fictional world by making a subtle reference to such an elaborate setup?
Bull. Lucas had no such thing in mind when the movie was filmed. Lucas made an error, and it was a beaut. Somebody came along after the fact and reinterpreted the world of Star Wars to fix it, which is cool. But it doesn't alter the fact that the Kessel Run started its life as a brainfart. STFU is a totally inappropriate reaction.
Hmm, that does bring up an interesting question. Has anyone considered using balloons to get up past most of the atmosphere? Strapping a couple of balloons onto the ship and letting them do most of the lifting, then let them go and continue upward using regular rockets. The balloons would then deflate and fall to Earth where they could be retrieved and reused.
It would add a lot of time to the flight, but you would save all the fuel needed to get up through the first 50K or so, without having to piggyback off a 747.
I'm sure somebody else has come up with the idea, but is anybody pursuing it?
Eventually, perhaps, if the environment was sufficiently hospitable for a very large volume of unicellular bacteria.
But "eventually" could be a very long time. You have to remember that it was nearly three billion years between the emergence of the first proper cell and multicellular organisms that could leave traces in the fossil record. Nobody can say for sure what was going on at the time, but it seems like the jump from single cells to multiple cells is a difficult one.
It's becoming increasingly clear that we need someplace to run off to when we screw up the Earth too badly. We've got six billion people on the same ship, and nobody has bothered to install lifeboats.
Also, the sooner we start working on Mars, the sooner we'll start learning how environments actually work, and the sooner we'll gather the expertise needed to avert major catastrophes.
The way I see it, terraforming Mars is an absolutely necessary safety measure, and no amount of money spent on problems "back home" will provide that safety. If we can turn Mars into a self-sustaining world of 20-million people or so, I don't see anything short of alien invasion or Sol going nova that could wipe us out.
I'm a big fan of intelligence, but I can think of a dozen attributes that I'd rather have in a boss. Good people skills. An interest in the work I'm doing. A willingness to listen to others, make compromises, and help people to get comfortable with them. The sort of iron guts needed to go into a meeting with his or her superiors and defend us underlings from scapegoating and unreasonable requests.
Do you have any evidence to back up your "most reliable indicator" claim? Has anyone actually given intelligence tests to a statistically relevant number of hires, and then tracked them to compare their successes? I'm sure there is a correlation, probably even a strong one. But I would guess that stronger indicators exist, and I'm very sure that the work done so far on intelligence testing is insufficient to justify your claims.
Are we sure the law is broken? I mean, if he'd been a citizen of the U.S., they could have sued just as easily. The difference is, we're pretty sure that the suit would fail here, whereas we are less familiar with the Brazillian system.
Now, if the first step of filing a defamation suit is to demand answers to a bunch of questions clarifying the exact nature of the comments, I don't see that as a huge imposition.
My suspicion is that the suit is without merit, because most of the questions have excellent, documentable answers. The defendant will have to hire a lawyer to help him revise his answers and make them judge-friendly, but I figure that's where the suit will end.
Lessig himself is a lawyer, and as proactive as he is, he doesn't strike me as the type to file a hail Mary lawsuit.
My guess is that he's going to take up the same general argument that he did in Eldred vs. Ashcroft: Since the Constitution explicitly states that Congress is supposed to use copyright to "promote the arts and sciences," and having dead works locked up where they cannot benefit the creator or the public does nothing to achieve this aim, he'll ask the court to declare the current laws unconstitutional, which would force Congress to go back and amend them.
The court isn't there just to interpret the laws made by Congress, but also to decide whether the laws themselves are in keeping with the aims of the Constitution. Judicial review, Marbury vs. Madison, blah blah blah. It may be that you're just saying that the court today is very unlikely to invoke it in this case.
If your book went out of print fifty years ago, and you've done absolutely nothing since to make your continued interest in the work known, hell yes.
Lessig generally comes up with good plans for this sort of thing. He's not going to demand that every work not currently being printed be released into the public domain. That's just crazy. Instead, he's probably proposing some sort of notification system where, every other decade or so, an author has to fill out some short form to notify the Copyright Office that she doesn't want her work to be considered abandoned. Ideally, it would also provide another avenue for interested parties to hunt down the owners to get their permission.
I'm of the opinion that invoking the Creative Commons' "noncommercial" clause is a bad idea. If you really want to get this book into the hands of the widest audience, why not allow third parties to print them out, market them, and sell them for money? So long as the sharealike clause exists, there's no danger of the material getting hijacked.
I'm guessing a wide variety of printers would converge around a set of quality books. Some might target readers who will pay a premium for a hardbound book, with color, on good paper. Others will print crappy, disposable versions of the same books. By requiring non-commerciality, it seems a lot of effort would be wasted, as teachers all go to Kinkos to make batches of thirty books at a time.
Revoking the non-commercial clause would just make things more convenient for the users. Is there some advantage that I'm missing?
Neal Stephenson wrote the man pages? No wonder 'man ls' weighs in at 953 pages.:)
I agree. The book is horrible. It's dry, clumsily organized, and seems to take a lot for granted.
I'm okay with the idea of assuming a certain level of understanding, so long as it's consistent. In fact, a book that tries to cover anything high-level without taking anything for granted quickly becomes useless. There's also weird advice, like the insistence that the student avoid memorizing the quadratic equation.
There are other efforts with the same goals. My first impression is that this one isn't going to go anywhere.
Two points: First, Windows XP doesn't come with a half dozen text editors. You get Notepad, Wordpad, and MSWorks if the company you got your computer from really hates its customers. That's it. Nobody is complaining that Windows XP comes with too much software. Some complain that much of the default software is artificially "integrated" for no good reason other than to make life harder on competitorst, but that's not the same thing.
Second point: You could have a thousand different text editors on the hard drive, and it won't affect performance in any meaningful way. Unless things are being loaded into memory, you can install as many as you please. Feel free to complain that all the choices are overwhelming to most users, but unless you're fighting with a very small hard drive, there is no reason to complain about too much software leading to bloat. They simply don't affect perceived performance.
It's really not fair to gripe that a box can't handle a modern distro, even though it handles Win98/NT fine. We expect more from our operating systems today than we did six years ago.
Now, when somebody complains that Linux runs like a gimpy dog on a machine that can handle Windows XP easily, then I get a little nervous. Which people are doing. So I guess I am a little nervous.
But there are distros which are designed with an eye towards light fluffiness. Take Damn Small Linux, for example. A fully functional desktop on a 50MB ISO, and it's bootable, so it's easy to experiment with it.
Things like OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, and Evolution do feel bloated and unresponsive on older machines, but I've never used XP on an equivalent machine to get a good basis for comparison. I do agree with the author, that a lot of fat needs trimming from modern distros. But how to go about it?
I think the thing he was trying to focus on was their attempts to implement a "reconfigurable" or "programmable" chip. If this could be done well, I'm guessing it would take the whole "processor speed doesn't matter" thing to a whole new level, above what they teach in a basic computer architecture course.
Remember back when all the Pentium chips had "MMX" slapped onto the end of their names? MMX stood for "MultiMedia eXtensions," which were a set of operations programmers could use to speed up certain highly repetitive tasks like manipulating video or audio streams. I'm not familiar enough with them to provide a good example, but the point is that it is possible for a chip designer to implement a chip in such a way that it performs very well at certain tasks.
Make the chip configurable, and suddenly all this power falls into the hands of the programmer. So there would be certain situations where a 100MHz processor using the proper configuration could seriously outperform the same chip at ten times the clock speed, if the second was using a more general configuration.
I've already touched on the personal responsibility mantra elsewhere. I'll limit myself to one of your assertions: Fast food is not addictive.
This depends entirely on your definition of addiction. Webster has both a narrow and a broad definition of addiction. The first one is pretty narrowly tailored towards drugs, but I think the latter applies nicely to fast food.
We are genetically predisposed to prefer high fat, high sugar foods. This was a perfect survival strategy back when calories were scarce. But now they're everywhere. It's gotten to where food is so abundant in America that the high-calorie crap is far cheaper than the foods that are actually good for you. In such an environment, our innate desires actually work to undermine our own health.
The entire fast food industry takes advantage of this internal drive. Despite a few attempts at offering healthy choices, they generally make the big bucks by competing to make the biggest, most fattening, cheapest meals, and then advertising them to consumers as highly desirable.
That's just the direction the profit motive is taking the industry, and I don't see any non-government solution for forcing "personal responsibility" on our corporate masters.
I haven't seen the movie. I'm guessing it's not a bad documentary, but as a medical experiment, it seems somewhat lacking.
The hook for the movie is that the guy tried an all fast-food diet for a month, and he blimped. Gained something like fifty pounds. But he was eating approximately 5000 calories a day. It doesn't really matter what form those calories take. I don't care if you're on Atkins, or a vegetarian, or eating an all snail diet: at 5000 calories a day, you're going to get supersized.
Another documentary is coming out later this year, which involves someone eating nothing but fast food and losing weight, simply by keeping total calories in check. I think there's some Big Food cash sponsoring it, but it does make a good point: From a weight loss standpoint, the total number of calories consumed and burned makes a much bigger difference than the source of said calories.
The problem is, we've been listening to this "personal responsibility" mantra of dieting for the last thirty years, and we just keep getting fatter and fatter. Is America's ever-expanding waistline prima facie evidence that we are simply making more and more irresponsible choices? It can be debated both ways, but I think there is a lot to be said for the idea that it is getting slowly harder to eat responsibly.
This month's Time magazine has an excellent series of articles on obesity (subscription required). Some of the factors making it difficult to choose healthy lifestyles include:
* Suburban sprawl leading to a lack of walkable communities. * Wide swaths of urban areas without convenient grocery stores, but with plenty of takeout. * High crime rates make it easier and safer to let kids veg out in front of the TV insead of sending them out to play. * Restaurants serving ever-larger portions. * A genetic predisposition, won through millions of years of evolution, to prefer high-fat and high-sugar foods. * The tendency by the fast food industry to take advantage of this genetic predisposition by increasing the fat and sugar content of their offerings. * Our country's overproduction of corn, leading to cheaper, fatter meat, and the use of high-fructose corn syrup in just about everything. * TV advertising targeting children. Personally, I consider it downright immoral to advertise anything to an eight year old who doesn't even understand that the point of advertising is to get him to want to buy something. * The relative ease and convenience of pre-packaged foods.
I'm not denying that we need a strong boost in the personal responsibility department. But it's a complex problem, and repeating this mantra as a cure-all seems to be taking us in the wrong direction.
The problem is, we're the only ones who will realize that a "recommendation" is just that, a recommendation. When some n00b parent is trying to decide what gear to buy for their kid, they'll treat the "recommendation" as though it were handed down from Mt. Siani.
The recommendations are such ridiculous overkill, I don't even know where to begin. Their minimum desktop system is better than any of the four computers in my house. The worst of my computers (800MHz P3 with 256MB RAM) is good for all my normal computer-related activities.
Down at the bottom of the spec sheet, they admit that they're recommending "top of the line" processors, and that the spec sheets will be frequently updated to make sure that it continues to recommend modern "top of the line" processors. Why?
Finally, to add opportunism to insult and injury, they link to a "Dell e-store" which we can assume gives them kickbacks.
As far as I'm concerned, "minimum system requirements" which do not even come close to reflecting actual minimum system requirements demonstrate (at best) an extreme insensitivity to the already high cost of providing students with an education. At worst, it's a blatant attempt to make money by lying to students and parents about what they need.
Heh. I remember being on the other side of this. I was playing (co-ed) basketball with a group of friends about seven years ago. One of the guys was about ten inches shorter than me. We started fighting for the ball, which turned into a wrestling match. The guy and I knew we were horsing around, but the girls thought I'd lost it.
The thing was, I was a pretty strong guy back then. But I couldn't get any leverage on the little doofus, and he was thoroughly kicking my butt.
Beware the dwarves, for they have a saying: "If your eyes are at their waist, then your teeth are at their groin." (thx Pratchett)
It's not that users of any given browser are "biased" somehow. It's that the statistics he is collecting may be biased towards nerds and against the general population.
It's like doing a political survey where half your contacts are accidentally taken from the rolls of the AARP. None of them may have any exceptional biases, but the survey itself isn't going to reflect the population at large.
You're really missing the point by bringing up all these hypotheticals. Maybe Suzie is in fact the most brilliant medical mind of her generation. But it's a thousand times more likely that such a person exists among the thousand other children who could be saved by letting her die. Maybe through some bizarre, unforseen coincidence, treating Suzie will lead to a powerful new treatment. But because I'm the one doing the illustrating, I have the right to say that there is no reason to believe that will be the result.
Neither am I describing a situation where the pricetag is a result of massive, unconscionable profiteering, or draconian intellectual property protections, or anything else we Slashdotters love to blame for the ills of society. The treatment simply costs $50 billion because it is a massive undertaking, on the scale of a dozen moon landings or five mammoth supercolliders. Worse, it might be the same amount of time, effort, and resources that would be needed to supply clean drinking water to a quarter of India, saving millions of lives.
There is a point, and beyond that point lies the no-mans-land where happy chatter about "the infinite value of life" is revealed as empty. Little Suzie probably crossed that line about 49.99 billion dollars ago. If you validate the infinite value of Suzie's life by performing the expensive treatment, it means leaving the needs of many, many others unfulfilled.
What does "human harm" entail? If a virus doesn't kill you, but wipes out three novels you've been working on for the past five years (should've kept a backup) have you been subjected to human harm or merely the financial harm that comes because you can no longer sell the works for profit?
If Rob is paged to come down to the office at 3AM because the virus has decimated the network, there's no easy way to put a dollar amount on the harm that he has suffered (unless he was dragged away from an intimate moment with his wife, in which case the loss can be calculated by taking the average rates of local hookers). But he has suffered harm.
Money is nothing more than a societal illusion, which we use to represent things we value. Admittedly, it has a distorting effect because it tends to place higher value on those things which are easiest to valuate. But that doesn't make the approach either completely heartless or completely beside the point.
I disagree. I think that the biggest problems stem from those people who think that only the people they know and care about have value. But other problems stem from those who think entirely with their compassion, to the exclusion of any and all reason.
If we say that a person's life has infinite value, then by any ordinary usage of the term, we should be willing and eager to spend whatever it takes to preserve that life. So I give you the following thought experiment: Little Suzie is dying of cancer. All the normal treatments have failed. However, her life can be spared by a miracle cure, which costs fifty billion dollars.
Since her life is truly of infinite value, we have no choice but to spend the money and save her life, right? Not unless we take her case entirely in isolation. If we look at all the other things that that money could have done, whether it was directed towards curing the cancers of a thousand other children, or fundamentally improving the educational system, or researching into how to make the miracle cure available for a reasonable cost.
Society does this sort of calculus all the time. Is it worth making garage doors more expensive to halve the number of crushing deaths they cause? Are side-impact airbags doing enough good to justify installing in every car? We have to do this because thinking only with our hearts means that we spend extravagantly on whatever tugs at our heartstrings at the moment, and have nothing left when it comes time to alleviate more subtle causes of human misery.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! You mean that, rather than showing a penchant for technobabble that he didn't fully understand, Lucas was actually enriching his fictional world by making a subtle reference to such an elaborate setup?
Bull. Lucas had no such thing in mind when the movie was filmed. Lucas made an error, and it was a beaut. Somebody came along after the fact and reinterpreted the world of Star Wars to fix it, which is cool. But it doesn't alter the fact that the Kessel Run started its life as a brainfart. STFU is a totally inappropriate reaction.
Hmm, that does bring up an interesting question. Has anyone considered using balloons to get up past most of the atmosphere? Strapping a couple of balloons onto the ship and letting them do most of the lifting, then let them go and continue upward using regular rockets. The balloons would then deflate and fall to Earth where they could be retrieved and reused.
It would add a lot of time to the flight, but you would save all the fuel needed to get up through the first 50K or so, without having to piggyback off a 747.
I'm sure somebody else has come up with the idea, but is anybody pursuing it?
Eventually, perhaps, if the environment was sufficiently hospitable for a very large volume of unicellular bacteria.
But "eventually" could be a very long time. You have to remember that it was nearly three billion years between the emergence of the first proper cell and multicellular organisms that could leave traces in the fossil record. Nobody can say for sure what was going on at the time, but it seems like the jump from single cells to multiple cells is a difficult one.
It's becoming increasingly clear that we need someplace to run off to when we screw up the Earth too badly. We've got six billion people on the same ship, and nobody has bothered to install lifeboats.
Also, the sooner we start working on Mars, the sooner we'll start learning how environments actually work, and the sooner we'll gather the expertise needed to avert major catastrophes.
The way I see it, terraforming Mars is an absolutely necessary safety measure, and no amount of money spent on problems "back home" will provide that safety. If we can turn Mars into a self-sustaining world of 20-million people or so, I don't see anything short of alien invasion or Sol going nova that could wipe us out.
I'm a big fan of intelligence, but I can think of a dozen attributes that I'd rather have in a boss. Good people skills. An interest in the work I'm doing. A willingness to listen to others, make compromises, and help people to get comfortable with them. The sort of iron guts needed to go into a meeting with his or her superiors and defend us underlings from scapegoating and unreasonable requests.
Do you have any evidence to back up your "most reliable indicator" claim? Has anyone actually given intelligence tests to a statistically relevant number of hires, and then tracked them to compare their successes? I'm sure there is a correlation, probably even a strong one. But I would guess that stronger indicators exist, and I'm very sure that the work done so far on intelligence testing is insufficient to justify your claims.
Are we sure the law is broken? I mean, if he'd been a citizen of the U.S., they could have sued just as easily. The difference is, we're pretty sure that the suit would fail here, whereas we are less familiar with the Brazillian system.
Now, if the first step of filing a defamation suit is to demand answers to a bunch of questions clarifying the exact nature of the comments, I don't see that as a huge imposition.
My suspicion is that the suit is without merit, because most of the questions have excellent, documentable answers. The defendant will have to hire a lawyer to help him revise his answers and make them judge-friendly, but I figure that's where the suit will end.
Lessig himself is a lawyer, and as proactive as he is, he doesn't strike me as the type to file a hail Mary lawsuit.
My guess is that he's going to take up the same general argument that he did in Eldred vs. Ashcroft: Since the Constitution explicitly states that Congress is supposed to use copyright to "promote the arts and sciences," and having dead works locked up where they cannot benefit the creator or the public does nothing to achieve this aim, he'll ask the court to declare the current laws unconstitutional, which would force Congress to go back and amend them.
The court isn't there just to interpret the laws made by Congress, but also to decide whether the laws themselves are in keeping with the aims of the Constitution. Judicial review, Marbury vs. Madison, blah blah blah. It may be that you're just saying that the court today is very unlikely to invoke it in this case.
If your book went out of print fifty years ago, and you've done absolutely nothing since to make your continued interest in the work known, hell yes.
Lessig generally comes up with good plans for this sort of thing. He's not going to demand that every work not currently being printed be released into the public domain. That's just crazy. Instead, he's probably proposing some sort of notification system where, every other decade or so, an author has to fill out some short form to notify the Copyright Office that she doesn't want her work to be considered abandoned. Ideally, it would also provide another avenue for interested parties to hunt down the owners to get their permission.
I'm of the opinion that invoking the Creative Commons' "noncommercial" clause is a bad idea. If you really want to get this book into the hands of the widest audience, why not allow third parties to print them out, market them, and sell them for money? So long as the sharealike clause exists, there's no danger of the material getting hijacked.
I'm guessing a wide variety of printers would converge around a set of quality books. Some might target readers who will pay a premium for a hardbound book, with color, on good paper. Others will print crappy, disposable versions of the same books. By requiring non-commerciality, it seems a lot of effort would be wasted, as teachers all go to Kinkos to make batches of thirty books at a time.
Revoking the non-commercial clause would just make things more convenient for the users. Is there some advantage that I'm missing?
Neal Stephenson wrote the man pages? No wonder 'man ls' weighs in at 953 pages. :)
I agree. The book is horrible. It's dry, clumsily organized, and seems to take a lot for granted.
I'm okay with the idea of assuming a certain level of understanding, so long as it's consistent. In fact, a book that tries to cover anything high-level without taking anything for granted quickly becomes useless. There's also weird advice, like the insistence that the student avoid memorizing the quadratic equation.
There are other efforts with the same goals. My first impression is that this one isn't going to go anywhere.
Actually, it sounds more like wiki.linuxquestions.org, which I've contributed to from time to time.
Yeah, this does sound like it's reinventing the wheel.
Two points: First, Windows XP doesn't come with a half dozen text editors. You get Notepad, Wordpad, and MSWorks if the company you got your computer from really hates its customers. That's it. Nobody is complaining that Windows XP comes with too much software. Some complain that much of the default software is artificially "integrated" for no good reason other than to make life harder on competitorst, but that's not the same thing.
Second point: You could have a thousand different text editors on the hard drive, and it won't affect performance in any meaningful way. Unless things are being loaded into memory, you can install as many as you please. Feel free to complain that all the choices are overwhelming to most users, but unless you're fighting with a very small hard drive, there is no reason to complain about too much software leading to bloat. They simply don't affect perceived performance.
It's really not fair to gripe that a box can't handle a modern distro, even though it handles Win98/NT fine. We expect more from our operating systems today than we did six years ago.
Now, when somebody complains that Linux runs like a gimpy dog on a machine that can handle Windows XP easily, then I get a little nervous. Which people are doing. So I guess I am a little nervous.
But there are distros which are designed with an eye towards light fluffiness. Take Damn Small Linux, for example. A fully functional desktop on a 50MB ISO, and it's bootable, so it's easy to experiment with it.
Things like OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, and Evolution do feel bloated and unresponsive on older machines, but I've never used XP on an equivalent machine to get a good basis for comparison. I do agree with the author, that a lot of fat needs trimming from modern distros. But how to go about it?
I think the thing he was trying to focus on was their attempts to implement a "reconfigurable" or "programmable" chip. If this could be done well, I'm guessing it would take the whole "processor speed doesn't matter" thing to a whole new level, above what they teach in a basic computer architecture course.
Remember back when all the Pentium chips had "MMX" slapped onto the end of their names? MMX stood for "MultiMedia eXtensions," which were a set of operations programmers could use to speed up certain highly repetitive tasks like manipulating video or audio streams. I'm not familiar enough with them to provide a good example, but the point is that it is possible for a chip designer to implement a chip in such a way that it performs very well at certain tasks.
Make the chip configurable, and suddenly all this power falls into the hands of the programmer. So there would be certain situations where a 100MHz processor using the proper configuration could seriously outperform the same chip at ten times the clock speed, if the second was using a more general configuration.
I've already touched on the personal responsibility mantra elsewhere. I'll limit myself to one of your assertions: Fast food is not addictive.
This depends entirely on your definition of addiction. Webster has both a narrow and a broad definition of addiction. The first one is pretty narrowly tailored towards drugs, but I think the latter applies nicely to fast food.
We are genetically predisposed to prefer high fat, high sugar foods. This was a perfect survival strategy back when calories were scarce. But now they're everywhere. It's gotten to where food is so abundant in America that the high-calorie crap is far cheaper than the foods that are actually good for you. In such an environment, our innate desires actually work to undermine our own health.
The entire fast food industry takes advantage of this internal drive. Despite a few attempts at offering healthy choices, they generally make the big bucks by competing to make the biggest, most fattening, cheapest meals, and then advertising them to consumers as highly desirable.
That's just the direction the profit motive is taking the industry, and I don't see any non-government solution for forcing "personal responsibility" on our corporate masters.
I haven't seen the movie. I'm guessing it's not a bad documentary, but as a medical experiment, it seems somewhat lacking.
The hook for the movie is that the guy tried an all fast-food diet for a month, and he blimped. Gained something like fifty pounds. But he was eating approximately 5000 calories a day. It doesn't really matter what form those calories take. I don't care if you're on Atkins, or a vegetarian, or eating an all snail diet: at 5000 calories a day, you're going to get supersized.
Another documentary is coming out later this year, which involves someone eating nothing but fast food and losing weight, simply by keeping total calories in check. I think there's some Big Food cash sponsoring it, but it does make a good point: From a weight loss standpoint, the total number of calories consumed and burned makes a much bigger difference than the source of said calories.
The problem is, we've been listening to this "personal responsibility" mantra of dieting for the last thirty years, and we just keep getting fatter and fatter. Is America's ever-expanding waistline prima facie evidence that we are simply making more and more irresponsible choices? It can be debated both ways, but I think there is a lot to be said for the idea that it is getting slowly harder to eat responsibly.
This month's Time magazine has an excellent series of articles on obesity (subscription required). Some of the factors making it difficult to choose healthy lifestyles include:
* Suburban sprawl leading to a lack of walkable communities.
* Wide swaths of urban areas without convenient grocery stores, but with plenty of takeout.
* High crime rates make it easier and safer to let kids veg out in front of the TV insead of sending them out to play.
* Restaurants serving ever-larger portions.
* A genetic predisposition, won through millions of years of evolution, to prefer high-fat and high-sugar foods.
* The tendency by the fast food industry to take advantage of this genetic predisposition by increasing the fat and sugar content of their offerings.
* Our country's overproduction of corn, leading to cheaper, fatter meat, and the use of high-fructose corn syrup in just about everything.
* TV advertising targeting children. Personally, I consider it downright immoral to advertise anything to an eight year old who doesn't even understand that the point of advertising is to get him to want to buy something.
* The relative ease and convenience of pre-packaged foods.
I'm not denying that we need a strong boost in the personal responsibility department. But it's a complex problem, and repeating this mantra as a cure-all seems to be taking us in the wrong direction.
The problem is, we're the only ones who will realize that a "recommendation" is just that, a recommendation. When some n00b parent is trying to decide what gear to buy for their kid, they'll treat the "recommendation" as though it were handed down from Mt. Siani.
The recommendations are such ridiculous overkill, I don't even know where to begin. Their minimum desktop system is better than any of the four computers in my house. The worst of my computers (800MHz P3 with 256MB RAM) is good for all my normal computer-related activities.
Down at the bottom of the spec sheet, they admit that they're recommending "top of the line" processors, and that the spec sheets will be frequently updated to make sure that it continues to recommend modern "top of the line" processors. Why?
Finally, to add opportunism to insult and injury, they link to a "Dell e-store" which we can assume gives them kickbacks.
As far as I'm concerned, "minimum system requirements" which do not even come close to reflecting actual minimum system requirements demonstrate (at best) an extreme insensitivity to the already high cost of providing students with an education. At worst, it's a blatant attempt to make money by lying to students and parents about what they need.
"My retirement grease!!!"
Heh. I remember being on the other side of this. I was playing (co-ed) basketball with a group of friends about seven years ago. One of the guys was about ten inches shorter than me. We started fighting for the ball, which turned into a wrestling match. The guy and I knew we were horsing around, but the girls thought I'd lost it.
The thing was, I was a pretty strong guy back then. But I couldn't get any leverage on the little doofus, and he was thoroughly kicking my butt.
Beware the dwarves, for they have a saying: "If your eyes are at their waist, then your teeth are at their groin." (thx Pratchett)
Little guys fight dirty. That's all I'm sayin'.
It's not that users of any given browser are "biased" somehow. It's that the statistics he is collecting may be biased towards nerds and against the general population.
It's like doing a political survey where half your contacts are accidentally taken from the rolls of the AARP. None of them may have any exceptional biases, but the survey itself isn't going to reflect the population at large.
You're really missing the point by bringing up all these hypotheticals. Maybe Suzie is in fact the most brilliant medical mind of her generation. But it's a thousand times more likely that such a person exists among the thousand other children who could be saved by letting her die. Maybe through some bizarre, unforseen coincidence, treating Suzie will lead to a powerful new treatment. But because I'm the one doing the illustrating, I have the right to say that there is no reason to believe that will be the result.
Neither am I describing a situation where the pricetag is a result of massive, unconscionable profiteering, or draconian intellectual property protections, or anything else we Slashdotters love to blame for the ills of society. The treatment simply costs $50 billion because it is a massive undertaking, on the scale of a dozen moon landings or five mammoth supercolliders. Worse, it might be the same amount of time, effort, and resources that would be needed to supply clean drinking water to a quarter of India, saving millions of lives.
There is a point, and beyond that point lies the no-mans-land where happy chatter about "the infinite value of life" is revealed as empty. Little Suzie probably crossed that line about 49.99 billion dollars ago. If you validate the infinite value of Suzie's life by performing the expensive treatment, it means leaving the needs of many, many others unfulfilled.
What does "human harm" entail? If a virus doesn't kill you, but wipes out three novels you've been working on for the past five years (should've kept a backup) have you been subjected to human harm or merely the financial harm that comes because you can no longer sell the works for profit?
If Rob is paged to come down to the office at 3AM because the virus has decimated the network, there's no easy way to put a dollar amount on the harm that he has suffered (unless he was dragged away from an intimate moment with his wife, in which case the loss can be calculated by taking the average rates of local hookers). But he has suffered harm.
Money is nothing more than a societal illusion, which we use to represent things we value. Admittedly, it has a distorting effect because it tends to place higher value on those things which are easiest to valuate. But that doesn't make the approach either completely heartless or completely beside the point.
I'll agree, so long as time spent watching NASCAR and WWF is deducted from the total.
Okay, that was simple trolling. I do apologize.
I disagree. I think that the biggest problems stem from those people who think that only the people they know and care about have value. But other problems stem from those who think entirely with their compassion, to the exclusion of any and all reason.
If we say that a person's life has infinite value, then by any ordinary usage of the term, we should be willing and eager to spend whatever it takes to preserve that life. So I give you the following thought experiment: Little Suzie is dying of cancer. All the normal treatments have failed. However, her life can be spared by a miracle cure, which costs fifty billion dollars.
Since her life is truly of infinite value, we have no choice but to spend the money and save her life, right? Not unless we take her case entirely in isolation. If we look at all the other things that that money could have done, whether it was directed towards curing the cancers of a thousand other children, or fundamentally improving the educational system, or researching into how to make the miracle cure available for a reasonable cost.
Society does this sort of calculus all the time. Is it worth making garage doors more expensive to halve the number of crushing deaths they cause? Are side-impact airbags doing enough good to justify installing in every car? We have to do this because thinking only with our hearts means that we spend extravagantly on whatever tugs at our heartstrings at the moment, and have nothing left when it comes time to alleviate more subtle causes of human misery.