We could have a test, like they do on Vulcan. Call it... Oh, I dunno, high school graduation. You get your diploma, you're an adult. I seem to recall Heinlein suggesting that US citizens couldn't vote unless they had a year of calculus. So some would adult at 15, some never.
This happened in the SF area. I believe that after this story was published in the SF Examiner, the public outcry was such that the charges against Washington were dropped. But they should never have been brought up in the first place. Cops and DAs make judgement calls all the time - assault, harassment, reckless driving, disturbing the peace.
Archeologists do not claim that it was a trivial act, only that it does not need extraterrestrial technology to explain it. Building a log cabin with an axe doesn't have to be done by flying saucer either, but I'm not going to run out and do it this afternoon to prove a point. And the pyramids were a lot bigger. Years. Thousands of laborers. A major investment of society's wealth. But not inexplicable.
"Well, these societies were way more advanced than we can ever dream of being. They have followed a similar strategem called the "non-impact society". They came and went, and left no impact on their environment." Or perhaps they simply didn't have the technology to do the damage? This is the virtue of the powerless. The Anasazi (sp?) of New Mexico and the Easter Islanders are two examples of low-tech societies which deforested themselves into poverty. They didn't have the tools to see what they were doing to their environment over two or three lifetimes (graphs, measurements, photos, etc.). The Pacific Islanders wiped out numerous species, either by hunting or bringing in rats (pests) and pigs (food). The North American Indians probably hunted numerous species to extinction when they crossed the land bridge. Some of these cultures were certainly cooler than, say, my 21st-century US, but we can't tell by their inablity to damage their surroundings.
We are studying stone tools and remnants of cloth, leather, and rope. We are not studying old airplanes, computers, or bricks. There is no evidence for any of this. Our prehistoric ancestors were smart, healthy, superstitious, and stone-age.
Short story: low population density until about 10,000 years ago. Then we had to build cities and allow specialized jobs, including alchemists (heh) and other investigators of the world. Communication was slow, and hard-earned knowledge easily lost. Things didn't really start picking up the pace until the publishing of books. Now we have telecommmunications, data storage, number crunching, and it's getting kinda crowded. Look for an ever-increasing rate in knowledge acquisition (don't forget the various enhanced brains just around the corner). But yes, people 100,000 years ago were just as smart.
Sure, we should just ask you which web sites to go to. Stupid archaeologists. They should simply toss out the current mainstream hypotheses and theories and embrace whatever new idea comes along, as scientists in other fields do.
Ummm... Actually, the alternative to science patents is sharing the information, as scientists have mostly done through the centuries. I fear patents will be the death of western science as it will be in software development.
Right. We'd all be eating with our hands, like the American founding fathers, who had no spoons, for the patent office had not been established yet. Oh, wait...
Thereby proving, in the public's eye, that this hypothetical hero *was* a terrorist.The public will be convinced that geeks are dangerous beyond what they had feared, and when the Disney cops come to confirm that I have no computers taht play their copy protected mouse, they will be accompanied by the county SWAT team. Just get arrested, and tell your conservative Uncle Bob what you did to get arrested. Everyone left of Rush Limbaugh will be behind you. Better yet, buy Aunt Mable a new "Upstairs Downstairs" CD and run it on the Linux box you set up for her...
"Atheism is the specific belief that God definately does not exist. As in "I know that God does not exist". Actually, this insistence that assertions about the universe can be made with certainty is a sign that you've fallen for the fundamentalist claim that such things "can be known beyond the shadow of a doubt" as ol' Grandpa used to say. What he really meant was that it made him uncomfortable to consider the possibility that he was wrong. There is no sasquatch. But I could be wrong. There are black holes. I could be wrong. There is no Zeus. I could be wrong. To deny uncertainty is merely to deny the nature of the world. Only tautologies (like arithmetic) are certain. Anything I say could be wrong, but most of my beliefs are very likely. Only the ones which I do not consider *very* likely do I normally refer to as uncertain (for me). When you walk about expressing routine doubt as to the existence of Zeus, I shall do the same for Yahweh. Some folks are genuinely undecided on this issue; they are true agnostics. But to claim to be agnostic because you might be wrong is to accept the religious belief that emotional certitude means that one cannot be wrong.
I work in hick central, Washington; chief geek for a saw mill. The local newspaper is full of letters from my neighbors complaining about closing nursing homes, poor quality roads, bus routes closing, fewer police. They voted against the latest school levy, too (which it sorely needed). The kids are all bored and leave town when they grow up.
FUD aside, one can take any social trend or political philosphy and offer some absurd conclusion (e.g. if we allow abortion rights, pretty soon we'll be killing old people...). I would not do away with patents on invention, nor copyrights on specific works - such as your programs. But I am appalled by the idea of patents on algorithms and business processes. Suppose Henry Ford had been able to patent the assembly line? Where would we now be as an industrial society? And those drug companies are benefiting from open source science, even if a particular chemical or industrial process is patented. Nor do I recognize any right of yours to profit from your endeavors if someone else undercuts you by offering a similar program for free. There are economic benefits for companies to pool their resources in some areas. Heck, I hear of money-grubbing companies giving money to local public schools, just to maintain their pool of hirable employees. We run MS windows on our desktops here, but my boss & I favor Linux, and if MS's policies become too onerous, it will be cheaper for us to hire a programmer (like you) to write a java program or whatever to take our database (now on FileMaker Pro -yuck) and put it in a platform-independent format.
Funny, I'm SysAdmin for a wood mill and even write some software; they pay my salary and yet none of my perl hacks are for sale. They also pay the salaries of our electricians, our secretaries, and the mechanics, but they sell wood. I wouldn't mind releasing my little scripts if someone wanted them. Maybe we could trade, eh? Then we could both profit. If this Open Source trend continues, pretty soon scientists won't be able to earn a living selling their science, and they'll have to work for salary at oil companies, drug companies, the military, and universities...
Not the point. Most. Companies. Do. Not. Sell. Software. I'm sysadmin for a wood mill. All else being equal, should we spend our mill money on cheap software or expensive hardware? And should we use software that we can own, or that we have to pay a yearly fee for, even if it's a rough year for us?
Re:(spoiler)There are no woodchucks in A.D. 802701
on
Review: The Time Machine
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Oh... pshaw. We humans have been eating meat all the way back. Primates are omnivores; cousin chimp eats meat (they're just crummy hunters). Cretaceous protoprimates were cowering insectivores (hmmm... bugs!). Big Macs are bad for you. Running after a lean elk until it gives up and stabbing it with a stick & eating it is good for you (if bad for the elk).
WTF? I thought they had already been convicted, and the appeals court upheld that conviction. This was a reassessment of the penalty phase, right? Any honest lawyers out there? What's going on?
I am so sorry that you need to postulate an invisible superbeing to find meaning in life. I've enjoyed the heck out of the last 50-odd years, and I wouldn't mind a few thousand more. Regardless, I trust that some of my descendants will be among those spreading through the cosmos. Dophin-hybrids! Cyborgs! AIs! Groups minds! Yep, them's my kids...
Looks like a crank's book to me. I just went by the excerpts on the Amazon site. And yes, you were talking about thermal energy. Degrees kelvin refers to temperature. I wouldn't think that the random motions of the molecules would synchronize pendulums in any way, if that were the only "motion" in the platform. A mind that is too open may believe anything. Now, observing patterns in different arenas of nature can lead to important new insights. But the human brain is inclined to see patterns, whether they're there or not. Be cautious.
" At I have to admit that least something good may come out of this: The people of Afghanistan might get a better life through this war, at least the ones who survived it, the winter and the ongoing fighting between the tribal leaders."
This is effective strategy against terrorists. I just hope my president does not overreach himself, both morally and politically. Is he going to attack Saddam Hussein to finish his father's war? He may lose much of his current moral high ground and political support. If we are to be the world cop we need 1: a boss (international law) and 2: a paycheck. Without these, the metaphor falls.
But I hear they're taking a cue from recent Microsoft innovations: they will be personalizing the user interface. Yep, the steering wheel, brakes, accelerator, and light switch will now move forward, back, or out of your way according to your recent use of the vehicle. Been driving on the freeway, and haven't used the brakes much? It'll slide down into the floor, still convenient by a simple touch of the "restore controls" button. The one right next to the steering wheel lock.
If you think everyone has depth; either: you have low standards, or you haven't talked to many people. I get along fine with my co-workers, but I find interacting with them exhausting. And they all bore me. And no, not everyone bores me. Just erveryone at the mill where I work. I am excruciatingly polite (I think). But they bore me. Not my in-laws (engineers), not my fellow former students.
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We could have a test, like they do on Vulcan. Call it... Oh, I dunno, high school graduation. You get your diploma, you're an adult. I seem to recall Heinlein suggesting that US citizens couldn't vote unless they had a year of calculus. So some would adult at 15, some never.
This happened in the SF area. I believe that after this story was published in the SF Examiner, the public outcry was such that the charges against Washington were dropped. But they should never have been brought up in the first place. Cops and DAs make judgement calls all the time - assault, harassment, reckless driving, disturbing the peace.
Archeologists do not claim that it was a trivial act, only that it does not need extraterrestrial technology to explain it. Building a log cabin with an axe doesn't have to be done by flying saucer either, but I'm not going to run out and do it this afternoon to prove a point. And the pyramids were a lot bigger. Years. Thousands of laborers. A major investment of society's wealth. But not inexplicable.
"Well, these societies were way more advanced than we can ever dream of being. They have followed a similar strategem called the "non-impact society". They came and went, and left no impact on their environment."
Or perhaps they simply didn't have the technology to do the damage? This is the virtue of the powerless. The Anasazi (sp?) of New Mexico and the Easter Islanders are two examples of low-tech societies which deforested themselves into poverty. They didn't have the tools to see what they were doing to their environment over two or three lifetimes (graphs, measurements, photos, etc.). The Pacific Islanders wiped out numerous species, either by hunting or bringing in rats (pests) and pigs (food). The North American Indians probably hunted numerous species to extinction when they crossed the land bridge. Some of these cultures were certainly cooler than, say, my 21st-century US, but we can't tell by their inablity to damage their surroundings.
We are studying stone tools and remnants of cloth, leather, and rope. We are not studying old airplanes, computers, or bricks. There is no evidence for any of this. Our prehistoric ancestors were smart, healthy, superstitious, and stone-age.
Short story: low population density until about 10,000 years ago. Then we had to build cities and allow specialized jobs, including alchemists (heh) and other investigators of the world. Communication was slow, and hard-earned knowledge easily lost. Things didn't really start picking up the pace until the publishing of books. Now we have telecommmunications, data storage, number crunching, and it's getting kinda crowded. Look for an ever-increasing rate in knowledge acquisition (don't forget the various enhanced brains just around the corner). But yes, people 100,000 years ago were just as smart.
Sure, we should just ask you which web sites to go to. Stupid archaeologists. They should simply toss out the current mainstream hypotheses and theories and embrace whatever new idea comes along, as scientists in other fields do.
Heavy squats, three sets, once a week.
Ummm... Actually, the alternative to science patents is sharing the information, as scientists have mostly done through the centuries. I fear patents will be the death of western science as it will be in software development.
Right. We'd all be eating with our hands, like the American founding fathers, who had no spoons, for the patent office had not been established yet. Oh, wait...
Thereby proving, in the public's eye, that this hypothetical hero *was* a terrorist.The public will be convinced that geeks are dangerous beyond what they had feared, and when the Disney cops come to confirm that I have no computers taht play their copy protected mouse, they will be accompanied by the county SWAT team. Just get arrested, and tell your conservative Uncle Bob what you did to get arrested. Everyone left of Rush Limbaugh will be behind you. Better yet, buy Aunt Mable a new "Upstairs Downstairs" CD and run it on the Linux box you set up for her...
"Atheism is the specific belief that God definately does not exist. As in "I know that God does not exist".
Actually, this insistence that assertions about the universe can be made with certainty is a sign that you've fallen for the fundamentalist claim that such things "can be known beyond the shadow of a doubt" as ol' Grandpa used to say. What he really meant was that it made him uncomfortable to consider the possibility that he was wrong. There is no sasquatch. But I could be wrong. There are black holes. I could be wrong. There is no Zeus. I could be wrong. To deny uncertainty is merely to deny the nature of the world. Only tautologies (like arithmetic) are certain. Anything I say could be wrong, but most of my beliefs are very likely. Only the ones which I do not consider *very* likely do I normally refer to as uncertain (for me). When you walk about expressing routine doubt as to the existence of Zeus, I shall do the same for Yahweh. Some folks are genuinely undecided on this issue; they are true agnostics. But to claim to be agnostic because you might be wrong is to accept the religious belief that emotional certitude means that one cannot be wrong.
email me at kermit at urx dot com
I'm at work now, but I have something that may do it at home.
I work in hick central, Washington; chief geek for a saw mill. The local newspaper is full of letters from my neighbors complaining about closing nursing homes, poor quality roads, bus routes closing, fewer police. They voted against the latest school levy, too (which it sorely needed). The kids are all bored and leave town when they grow up.
FUD aside, one can take any social trend or political philosphy and offer some absurd conclusion (e.g. if we allow abortion rights, pretty soon we'll be killing old people...). I would not do away with patents on invention, nor copyrights on specific works - such as your programs. But I am appalled by the idea of patents on algorithms and business processes. Suppose Henry Ford had been able to patent the assembly line? Where would we now be as an industrial society? And those drug companies are benefiting from open source science, even if a particular chemical or industrial process is patented. Nor do I recognize any right of yours to profit from your endeavors if someone else undercuts you by offering a similar program for free. There are economic benefits for companies to pool their resources in some areas. Heck, I hear of money-grubbing companies giving money to local public schools, just to maintain their pool of hirable employees. We run MS windows on our desktops here, but my boss & I favor Linux, and if MS's policies become too onerous, it will be cheaper for us to hire a programmer (like you) to write a java program or whatever to take our database (now on FileMaker Pro -yuck) and put it in a platform-independent format.
Funny, I'm SysAdmin for a wood mill and even write some software; they pay my salary and yet none of my perl hacks are for sale. They also pay the salaries of our electricians, our secretaries, and the mechanics, but they sell wood. I wouldn't mind releasing my little scripts if someone wanted them. Maybe we could trade, eh? Then we could both profit. If this Open Source trend continues, pretty soon scientists won't be able to earn a living selling their science, and they'll have to work for salary at oil companies, drug companies, the military, and universities...
Not the point. Most. Companies. Do. Not. Sell. Software. I'm sysadmin for a wood mill. All else being equal, should we spend our mill money on cheap software or expensive hardware? And should we use software that we can own, or that we have to pay a yearly fee for, even if it's a rough year for us?
Oh... pshaw. We humans have been eating meat all the way back. Primates are omnivores; cousin chimp eats meat (they're just crummy hunters). Cretaceous protoprimates were cowering insectivores (hmmm... bugs!). Big Macs are bad for you. Running after a lean elk until it gives up and stabbing it with a stick & eating it is good for you (if bad for the elk).
WTF? I thought they had already been convicted, and the appeals court upheld that conviction. This was a reassessment of the penalty phase, right? Any honest lawyers out there? What's going on?
I am so sorry that you need to postulate an invisible superbeing to find meaning in life. I've enjoyed the heck out of the last 50-odd years, and I wouldn't mind a few thousand more. Regardless, I trust that some of my descendants will be among those spreading through the cosmos. Dophin-hybrids! Cyborgs! AIs! Groups minds! Yep, them's my kids...
Looks like a crank's book to me. I just went by the excerpts on the Amazon site. And yes, you were talking about thermal energy. Degrees kelvin refers to temperature. I wouldn't think that the random motions of the molecules would synchronize pendulums in any way, if that were the only "motion" in the platform. A mind that is too open may believe anything. Now, observing patterns in different arenas of nature can lead to important new insights. But the human brain is inclined to see patterns, whether they're there or not. Be cautious.
This is effective strategy against terrorists. I just hope my president does not overreach himself, both morally and politically. Is he going to attack Saddam Hussein to finish his father's war? He may lose much of his current moral high ground and political support. If we are to be the world cop we need 1: a boss (international law) and 2: a paycheck. Without these, the metaphor falls.
But I hear they're taking a cue from recent Microsoft innovations: they will be personalizing the user interface. Yep, the steering wheel, brakes, accelerator, and light switch will now move forward, back, or out of your way according to your recent use of the vehicle. Been driving on the freeway, and haven't used the brakes much? It'll slide down into the floor, still convenient by a simple touch of the "restore controls" button. The one right next to the steering wheel lock.
Not so. You hardware people always miss the answer when the problem turns out to be biological.
Socks are the larval forms of coat hangers.
If you think everyone has depth; either: you have low standards, or you haven't talked to many people. I get along fine with my co-workers, but I find interacting with them exhausting. And they all bore me. And no, not everyone bores me. Just erveryone at the mill where I work. I am excruciatingly polite (I think). But they bore me. Not my in-laws (engineers), not my fellow former students.