The digital holes may be closable "in theory," but in practice there are so many different organizations with their fingers in the pie that I doubt it will happen. There are countries where copyright is a dead letter, and some of those countries even have companies operating in them selling hardware! Imagine that.
For music and movies, the analog hole is the only hole you really need, and it will always be around. In related news, Darth Vader's-- er, Bill Gate's-- *new* Death Star is absolutely impenetrable.
I've found that this isn't as true as you might believe. Any Mac or WinXP or Linux system can be changed without "admin" rights. If you're a professional developer you doubly have no excuse, since I've seen many a developer bring their own keyboard to work.
Maybe so, but most people can't write code at > 80 WPM anyway. Maybe it would help to reduce stress, if your fingers don't have to move as much. But I'm willing to bet that using proper wrist position and getting some exercise are much, much more important.
Maybe professional writers could use benefit from DVORAK. But they're unlikely to know how to change the default setting.
Nothing about the PC keyboard is really optimal-- just look at all the buttons like "scroll lock" that most people ignore. It's just "good enough" and the standard. In related news, humans still have veniform appendixes, and men still have nipples. Welcome to the world, where "good enough" is often enough.
Re:BREAKING NEWS!
on
The Ruby Way
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
We already have abortions for all, and huge illegal immigration.
Technically there haven't been any tax hikes, but we have tremendous deficit spending and tax breaks for the rich, which make tax hikes for the rest of the country pretty much inevitable.
So tell me again what the difference is between Democrats and Republicans? Oh yeah, the Repugs are against pollution controls and gay people. Also the Dems favor some hugely impractical socialized medicine scheme. Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
The screen is far too small on a cell phone to play movies. Watching a full-length movie would be really painful. I might occassionally watch "guy gets hit by a pie on youtube" on my cell phone, but hardly more than that. And you don't need massive disk space to do that.
Proper quality headphones are bigger than the entire size of the cell phone. Having a headphone jack is therefore somewhat irrelevant. If I wanted an iPod, I'd buy that, and throw it in the duffel bag with my regular size headphones. What's that, you say? You use crappy lo-fi "ear buds" that let everyone else hear what you're listening to? Well, the built-in speaker should be fine for you.
As far as the camera feature goes... I already have a camera which is much, much better than any camera on a phone. I can see using the cell phone camera in emergency situations where you absolutely have to take a picture of something. But aside from that, it is pretty much useless.
The US has done a lot of good things in the world. Hopefully it will do more in the future.
The fact that pointing out inconvenient historical facts about the situation in Iraq and elsewhere gets you labeled a "clever troll" is disturbing. Rewrite history much?
You have at least a few different levels of abstraction in the industry (you could probably think of more if you tried): applied physicists who understand transistors and atoms and all that stuff, hardware people who understand NAND gates and RTL, Systems people who understand Linux and kernel modules, applications developers who understand software engineering (hopefully), and scripting/web people who understand integrating programs.
I hate to say this, but people who are further up the hierarchy tend to look down on those below. Physicists tend to think that hardware is just a kludge. Hardware people tend to think that software is easy. And everyone thinks web development and scripting is easy (except the people doing it). The people further down on the hierarchy can usually be more laid-back and less mathematically oriented. Ideas from academia also tend to be more relevant to people further up the hierarchy, and less relevant to those below.
None of these levels are really "fixed"-- new advances are being made all the time by the physicists, and it ripples down the chain. This is bad news for people who want things to stay the same, but good news for people who enjoy action and adventure (and being considered obsolete old farts at 35). Also, look for more layers of abstraction to emerge in the future.
"No more coding from scratch" would only really be true if the operating system and software levels froze up, and new development ceased. But as long as those crazy physicists keep pushing more transistors on to a chip, it's a good bet that today's software will look like a bottle rocket compared to the Space Shuttle of tomorrow. Hold on to your seats, folks, and don't sell that MSFT or GOOG just yet.
I can't claim to understand economics at a PhD level, but I do know that almost all of academia considers the gold standard impractical for a modern-day nation, for exactly the reasons you describe. For one thing... like you said, the gold standard can lead to deflation. Deflation is evil, and destroys banks, making it impossible for entrepeneurs and others to get capital.
A lot of people claim that gold has "real value," whereas the dollar is just paper. But that's not really true. If you have nothing to eat, and nobody to trade with, then gold is just a useless shiny metal. Goods and services have utility only in the context of a particular time and place. If Dr. Smartguy discovers a cheap way of harvesting gold from asteroids tomorrow, then gold's value may plummet. If there's a population explosion in India in the next few years, then gold's value may soar. The price of gold today is NOT the price of gold in the future. Every transaction is unique at the moment it happens.
Of course, I am disturbed by the actions of "american neo-conservatives" in the government lately, and the staggering debt that we are carrying. But in our modern society, you just need to trust the people in power sometimes, because there is nothing you can do about some of their decisions. This is a hard pill for Libertarians to swallow, and I can understand why Ron Paul feels the way he does.
Iraq - warm and fuzzy Saddam invades neighbor and appears to have desire to go to Saudi, potentially throwing geopolitical and economic stability to the sewer. Saddam was our ally during the cold war. He had WMD because we supplied them.
Afghanistan - Wonderfully cordial and free thinking taliban, harboring terrorists and disallowing sports, music, games, education for women, etc. Bullies we were!!! We supplied weapons to the Taliban during their long fight against Soviet occupation. The cold war took precedence over any other considerations.
Panama - after that cute little fuzzball Noriega decided to become a primary drug conduit and looked the other way as his military took to brutalizing US service members and their wives. So because of a domestic problem in the US, we forced another country to change its drug policy? Sounds a lot like bullying to me. I don't know what the service members comment is all about, but the fact that we had military in their country at all probably created some hard feelings.
In Somalia and the Balkans, we were relatively benevolent, from what I can tell. But during the Cold War, a lot of hard decisions were made. A lot of dictators were armed and trained by the United States. Google for "school of the americas." What you find might surprise you.
Power corrupts. And the US has had a lot of power this last half-century.
Ooh. Pictures of kids smiling at American GIs. What a scandal. How could the New York Times cover up the fact that... you know... sometimes there are these kids... and they smile at American GIs. Instead, they divert attention to unimportant things like the military situation, hostages that have been tortured and killed, human rights violations, and (the lack of) WMDs! And the incipient religious civil war.
The "Accuracy in Media" group is obviously a neoconservative think tank. Just look at the biographies they have up at http://www.aim.org/static/20_0_7_0_C.
It's a bunch of American Legion members and other far-right political hacks. The "USA's survival" web site that it links to is a bunch of wacko rants about how the UN is going to corrupt our precious bodily fluids, how environmentalism is a cult, and Satanic "world government" is just around the corner.
Here's a sample from "USA's survival": U.S. taxpayers are being forced to subsidize a new form of state religion which holds that natural resources have to be protected for the sake of Gaia, a so-called Earth spirit. This religious movement, which has cult-like qualities, is being promoted by leading figures and organizations such as Vice President Albert Gore, broadcaster Ted Turner, and the United Nations.... These people believe in Gaia -- an "Earth spirit," goddess or planetary brain -- and they think that human beings can have mystical experiences or a spiritual relationship with this entity. In order to protect Gaia, in their view, the U.S. and other industrial countries have to be prohibited from certain uses of the world's natural resources. This is called "sustainable development."
You ought to be ashamed of yourself for spreading this nonsense.
Blocking from news, by no means leaves me uninformed. I read up on old publications of local election candidates and email them with questions and critique. When was the last time you contacted your local representative to voice your opinion?
I'm sorry, but bullshit things like "family values" or the fact that the guy has a good haircut are not reasons to vote for someone. You have to know what they did earlier in life, and (if they're an incumbent) what their voting record was. And to know those things, you have to read the news, not just whatever propaganda their press secretaries release. Otherwise, all your vote does is cancels out the vote of a thoughtful person who thinks "hmm, I don't like that guy's position on proposition X, better not vote for him" or "that guy was involved in a corruption scandal, better avoid him."
If you don't care about tsunamis, Bird Flu, Iraq, or global warming, then by all means don't listen to the news. But don't vote for people without having a reason to cast that vote. The fact that there are so many people like you who vote based on their "feelings" and touchy-feely campaign speeches IS what's wrong with the system.
How is this insightful? By not knowing what is going on in the world, you are "restoring democracy to the way it was intended to work"? By having no information, you can form a better opinion? That's just ridiculous. I'm almost tempted to call this a troll.
If anything, Americans need to be reading more news, preferrably from a lot of different sources. The fact that most people couldn't find Iraq or Darfur on a map goes a long way towards explaining how soccer moms tolerate criminally insane foreign policies.
For some reason, everyone keeps telling me that video game programmers get the shaft. They work really long hours for mediocre pay. I guess that's one field I won't be going into.
For reference, I'm now working about 40 hours a week-- well, maybe more like 35 hours a week once you consider lunch breaks and everything else. On salary.
What a shame - you were doing so well until this point. Care to mention any of this evidence you have? Evolution: the inheritence of genes based on differential reproductive success. I say that it is happening, and it will always happen. Simple as that.
Well, genetic engineering is advancing by leaps and bounds. We're learning how to map genes to diseases and other characteristics. Combine that with birth control and artificial insemination, and you can have kids with any of your genes that you want. And this is only using the stuff that I can think of off of the top of my head-- actual biologists are working on things like viruses that can alter your DNA after you're born (to do things like cure diabetes), etc.
So yes, I think it's fair to say that man has transcended biological evolution. It's kind of scary in a way, but it's also kind of reassuring in a way, because it means that we don't have to listen to the eugenics folks.
It's because there is value to being in the same room as someone who you're working with.
Despite all the recent advances in chat rooms and things like email, IRC, AIM, Skype, and Yahoo Messenger, nothing (yet) can replace the advantages of simple human contact. Being in a chat room or on the phone is not the same thing as being at a meeting. The subtle non-verbal clues are not there. And if you want to get someone's attention, there is no way as easy as walking up to them. Phones, email, or teleconferencing apps can all be ignored pretty easily. Physical presence is very hard to ignore.
Most businesses are at least somewhat scared of the breaches of confidentiality that can occur when people telecommute. Remember, for 95% of the world, "computers" are Windows, and Windows is tremendously insecure-- vulnerable to keyloggers, backdoors, and other malware. Our company was so scared of this potential security breach that they bought dedicated laptops for all of the employees, and made it impossible to telecommute except through these. Overreaction? Probably, but there are some real risks.
And of course, there are the hordes of people who really do work better when other people are working around them. It's that old monkey-see, monkey-do thing again. It's very hard to play World of Warcraft when your work computer doesn't have a good graphics card, and your boss is in the next room. At home, anything goes. For most employers, this advantage alone is worth the extra 10,000 to 20,000 a year they spend on hiring someone local.
They're not trying to use this to prove you are one person or another in court.
If you have a surveillance video of a crime scene, and a huge database of faces of citizens, then you could use this to narrow down your list of suspects. Obviously once it ever gets to the court system, there will be plenty of human experts on hand to look at the camera footage and testify as to whether it looks like you.
Also, this could be used to flag "suspicious" people at airports and other places. That way, the human security could pay close attention to them.
Any way you look at it, it's a potentially orwellian technology-- but not the technology you are thinking of.
Or, just maybe, success depends on both luck and skill-- being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, and having the right kind of mindset. And not only in corporations, but also in academia. Anyone who thinks the careful planning of D-Day or the Manhatten project happened by chance is living in a dream world.
Frankly, I don't understand everybody's obsession with credit card number theft. Unless you are posting your credit card number on/. or wearing it on your T-shirt for everybody to see, you are NOT liable for any fraudulent charges. If the merchant cannot produce a receipt with your signature on it, or if the merchant cannot prove that you received their services, then it has no effect on you, except for you having to make a quick phone call to the credit card issuer.
Credit card fraud ruins your credit rating. This happened to the parents of a friend of mine. With a crappy credit rating, his parents were unable to get favorable terms for his school loans, and so he ended up taking out a lot of 9% or higher interest rate loans for his college education.
Also, when you report your credit card stolen, there is a period where you don't have a credit card at all because they cut you off for a while. So you had better have some cash on hand or another credit card to cover this situation. This is exactly why I have two credit cards rather than one.
And no, my friend never got a cent from the credit card companies to compensate for his ruined credit rating, or for the other inconveniences he went through. There's no law requiring it.
Yes, but Mendel's work was almost completely ignored by the scientific community until around 1900-- by which time both men had passed away.
Re:If giving credit, give credit accurately
on
Charles Darwin Online
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It is the worst kind of sophistry to argue that Darwinism can't be true because it makes you feel bad. Boo hoo! I was pretty upset when I found out that earth was not the center of the universe. But then I got over it-- in grade school.
Darwin did not "degrade life to an accidental tissue mass." He only made some observations about nature, and formed some theories based on those. As it turns out, these theories do a pretty good job of explaining how species change over time, and how new species are formed-- in fact, they've pretty much become the backbone of evolutionary biology.
Darwin himself was not a fascist or a rightist as you allege. In fact, he was a Christian, and he was as much troubled by questions of how to reconcile faith and reason as others. Hitler came to power almost a century later, and was influenced as much by nationalism and mysticism as by science. Stalin never accepted Darwinism-- in fact, he strictly prohibited it from being taught in Russia while he was in power. Instead, he favored the pseudo-scientist Lysenko. Try reading something about history before you spout this kind of nonsense. Assuming that history doesn't hurt your feelings too much!
Finally-- there is a lot of good evidence that man has transcended biological evolution. The whole point of having a big brain and a complex social structure is so that you don't have to make up a new gene each time you learn a new trick. And of course, in the future, genetic engineering will allow us to have whatever genes we desire.
I don't believe that a fast metabolism is some kind of genetic accident either. Unfortunately, you're wrong about that. No doubt in the next century, they'll identify the genes that are responsible, and then everyone will want them.
The base pathways we have for processing food for energy are incredible invariant in terms of genetics. I think that your personal biochemistry is something that can be "trained" as much as any other physical attribute. Since when is the human form infinitely plastic? Can you "train" a short person to be tall?
No doubt the way you live influences your metabolism. But some people have either slow or fast ones. Sucks, don't it?
If everywhere were as rich as the USA, even though it would vastly increase the total amount of energy and land use, the negative impact would be less. That's a comforting view, but I really don't think it's true. Per person, US citizens still consume more energy, buy more products, and drive more cars than most of the world. Those products and that energy have to come from somewhere.
The environment is screwed because of countries, particularly in Asia, Africa, and South America that have rapidly growing populations, but their economies are screwed. If India or China could attain American economic levels, their environmental impact would vastly decrease. The solution to poor environments is rich economies which will limit the major environmental problems such as massive wood and (unfiltered) coal burning, slash and burn agriculture, over-fishing and hunting, inefficient internal combustion engines, raw waste dumping, etc. Yes, improvements in efficiency and better pollution ordinances always help. At one point earlier this century, people could have pointed proudly at well-regulated, environmentally efficient American factories producing our domestic goods, and perhaps think that America had begun to make some progress on reducing its environmental footprint.
However, since the Berlin Wall came down, and foreign policy tensions relaxed, money-minded people invented "globalization" and "free trade" to export their dirty work to countries with few environmental standards.
People are starving to death in the US now. And many don't have health insurance. Does that mean that our culture must be destroyed? I think maybe what you meant to say was that the standard of living in ancient China for the average person was not as luxurious as what we enjoy today in the West. Which is true, but not really germane to the debate.
I do not think that science is the opposite of authority, hierarchies, or loyalty-- in fact, science requires those things to survive. Check any major university and you will see evidence of those things-- provosts and president exercising their authority to dispense grants to the right people, hierarchies (undergrads are usually at the bottom, full professors at the top), etc.
Science also has rules that you have to follow, like citing your sources, giving descriptions of experiments, and not relying on supernatural explanations for phenomena. Scientists can be creative, but only within the confines of these rules. It is your peer group which is the authority, not "the world" (whatever that even means in this context.) Even in the hard sciences, saying that you are somehow directly receiving wisdom from the physical world is pretty disingenious, since you can never really directly perceive anything (I'll skip the philosophical digression...)
If you are indeed an American who thinks of world-historical events in terms of millenia as you have boasted, you're a very rare animal. Most americans don't have a very clear grasp of what the world was like even 100 or 200 years ago, let alone 1000. Ask about the Spanish-American war, or the War of Jenkins' ear, and most people's faces will go totally blank. In one sense, this is a good thing-- Americans are always looking towards the future, with few prejudices about what is traditional or correct. In another way, this is depressing because your grandkids will probably think you were a triple Hitler because you don't believe cows have the same rights as humans, or some other crazy political thing that would seem absurd to us now. (Remember that 200 years ago, being anti-slavery was considered outlandish and bizarre.)
Ancient Greece did not really have science in the Baconian sense. Manual labor and experiments were looked down on-- higher class people did not dirty their hands with trades such as pottery or metalworking. The idea of doing things with test tubes would have been contemptible to philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. No, the proper occupation for a high-class citizen was pure thought-- philosophy and geometry.
In fact, Plato's whole philosophy was based around the concept that the physical world was just a shadow of some ideal world. No need to do experiments or observations, when just pure thought would do. Pythagoras came up with basically a religious cult surrounding numbers.
Ancient Greece did invent geometry. Most of those theorems involving triangles that you learned in high school came from ancient greece. Angles, arcs, circles, all that stuff. Unfortunately, they never invented algebra, so after a while it became unwieldy to work on problems which didn't have a direct visual interpretation.
They also shone in philosophy and rhetoric. The Stoics, the Epicureans, and Platonists are just a few schools of philosophy I could name. A lot of people like to trace the idea of republics and limited government in general to the ancient Greeks, but that is kind of unclear. A lot of city states had dictators, or despots as they were called, at one time in their history. Plato, in "The Republic," describes a society rigidly structured by class, and ruled over by a benevolent philosopher-king.
Ancient Athens is the first (and possibly last?) example of true democracy, in the sense that all of the citizens met to make political decisions, and at least in theory, class differences were irrelevant. I'm not going to try to summarize everything that happened, but basically there were some advantages, and some disadvantages, and their system of government has little in common with the current US government.
Slashdot Mirror
The digital holes may be closable "in theory," but in practice there are so many different organizations with their fingers in the pie that I doubt it will happen. There are countries where copyright is a dead letter, and some of those countries even have companies operating in them selling hardware! Imagine that.
For music and movies, the analog hole is the only hole you really need, and it will always be around. In related news, Darth Vader's-- er, Bill Gate's-- *new* Death Star is absolutely impenetrable.
So let me get this straight: "most people" become "high level executives"? Um, I thought there were only a few of those guys.
You're tired of stereotypes, so you trot out the old "mom's basement" expression?
And what the fuck does "go-getter" mean?
Better get those TPS reports on my desk PDQ, or I'm going to proactively synergize my boot up your ass.
I've found that this isn't as true as you might believe. Any Mac or WinXP or Linux system can be changed without "admin" rights. If you're a professional developer you doubly have no excuse, since I've seen many a developer bring their own keyboard to work.
Maybe so, but most people can't write code at > 80 WPM anyway. Maybe it would help to reduce stress, if your fingers don't have to move as much. But I'm willing to bet that using proper wrist position and getting some exercise are much, much more important.
Maybe professional writers could use benefit from DVORAK. But they're unlikely to know how to change the default setting.
Nothing about the PC keyboard is really optimal-- just look at all the buttons like "scroll lock" that most people ignore. It's just "good enough" and the standard. In related news, humans still have veniform appendixes, and men still have nipples. Welcome to the world, where "good enough" is often enough.
We already have abortions for all, and huge illegal immigration.
Technically there haven't been any tax hikes, but we have tremendous deficit spending and tax breaks for the rich, which make tax hikes for the rest of the country pretty much inevitable.
So tell me again what the difference is between Democrats and Republicans? Oh yeah, the Repugs are against pollution controls and gay people. Also the Dems favor some hugely impractical socialized medicine scheme. Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
The screen is far too small on a cell phone to play movies. Watching a full-length movie would be really painful. I might occassionally watch "guy gets hit by a pie on youtube" on my cell phone, but hardly more than that. And you don't need massive disk space to do that.
Proper quality headphones are bigger than the entire size of the cell phone. Having a headphone jack is therefore somewhat irrelevant. If I wanted an iPod, I'd buy that, and throw it in the duffel bag with my regular size headphones. What's that, you say? You use crappy lo-fi "ear buds" that let everyone else hear what you're listening to? Well, the built-in speaker should be fine for you.
As far as the camera feature goes... I already have a camera which is much, much better than any camera on a phone. I can see using the cell phone camera in emergency situations where you absolutely have to take a picture of something. But aside from that, it is pretty much useless.
Also, there is a memory card socket FYI.
The US has done a lot of good things in the world. Hopefully it will do more in the future.
The fact that pointing out inconvenient historical facts about the situation in Iraq and elsewhere gets you labeled a "clever troll" is disturbing. Rewrite history much?
You have at least a few different levels of abstraction in the industry (you could probably think of more if you tried): applied physicists who understand transistors and atoms and all that stuff, hardware people who understand NAND gates and RTL, Systems people who understand Linux and kernel modules, applications developers who understand software engineering (hopefully), and scripting/web people who understand integrating programs.
I hate to say this, but people who are further up the hierarchy tend to look down on those below. Physicists tend to think that hardware is just a kludge. Hardware people tend to think that software is easy. And everyone thinks web development and scripting is easy (except the people doing it).
The people further down on the hierarchy can usually be more laid-back and less mathematically oriented. Ideas from academia also tend to be more relevant to people further up the hierarchy, and less relevant to those below.
None of these levels are really "fixed"-- new advances are being made all the time by the physicists, and it ripples down the chain.
This is bad news for people who want things to stay the same, but good news for people who enjoy action and adventure (and being considered obsolete old farts at 35). Also, look for more layers of abstraction to emerge in the future.
"No more coding from scratch" would only really be true if the operating system and software levels froze up, and new development ceased. But as long as those crazy physicists keep pushing more transistors on to a chip, it's a good bet that today's software will look like a bottle rocket compared to the Space Shuttle of tomorrow. Hold on to your seats, folks, and don't sell that MSFT or GOOG just yet.
Bravo. A very well-done post.
I can't claim to understand economics at a PhD level, but I do know that almost all of academia considers the gold standard impractical for a modern-day nation, for exactly the reasons you describe. For one thing... like you said, the gold standard can lead to deflation. Deflation is evil, and destroys banks, making it impossible for entrepeneurs and others to get capital.
A lot of people claim that gold has "real value," whereas the dollar is just paper. But that's not really true. If you have nothing to eat, and nobody to trade with, then gold is just a useless shiny metal. Goods and services have utility only in the context of a particular time and place. If Dr. Smartguy discovers a cheap way of harvesting gold from asteroids tomorrow, then gold's value may plummet. If there's a population explosion in India in the next few years, then gold's value may soar. The price of gold today is NOT the price of gold in the future. Every transaction is unique at the moment it happens.
Of course, I am disturbed by the actions of "american neo-conservatives" in the government lately, and the staggering debt that we are carrying. But in our modern society, you just need to trust the people in power sometimes, because there is nothing you can do about some of their decisions. This is a hard pill for Libertarians to swallow, and I can understand why Ron Paul feels the way he does.
Iraq - warm and fuzzy Saddam invades neighbor and appears to have desire to go to Saudi, potentially throwing geopolitical and economic stability to the sewer.
Saddam was our ally during the cold war. He had WMD because we supplied them.
Afghanistan - Wonderfully cordial and free thinking taliban, harboring terrorists and disallowing sports, music, games, education for women, etc. Bullies we were!!!
We supplied weapons to the Taliban during their long fight against Soviet occupation. The cold war took precedence over any other considerations.
Panama - after that cute little fuzzball Noriega decided to become a primary drug conduit and looked the other way as his military took to brutalizing US service members and their wives.
So because of a domestic problem in the US, we forced another country to change its drug policy? Sounds a lot like bullying to me.
I don't know what the service members comment is all about, but the fact that we had military in their country at all probably created some hard feelings.
In Somalia and the Balkans, we were relatively benevolent, from what I can tell.
But during the Cold War, a lot of hard decisions were made. A lot of dictators were armed and trained by the United States. Google for "school of the americas." What you find might surprise you.
Power corrupts. And the US has had a lot of power this last half-century.
Ooh. Pictures of kids smiling at American GIs.
...
What a scandal. How could the New York Times cover up the fact that... you know... sometimes there are these kids... and they smile at American GIs. Instead, they divert attention to unimportant things like the military situation, hostages that have been tortured and killed, human rights violations, and (the lack of) WMDs! And the incipient religious civil war.
The "Accuracy in Media" group is obviously a neoconservative think tank. Just look at the biographies they have up at http://www.aim.org/static/20_0_7_0_C.
It's a bunch of American Legion members and other far-right political hacks.
The "USA's survival" web site that it links to is a bunch of wacko rants about how the UN is going to corrupt our precious bodily fluids, how environmentalism is a cult, and Satanic "world government" is just around the corner.
Here's a sample from "USA's survival":
U.S. taxpayers are being forced to subsidize a new form of state religion which holds that natural resources have to be protected for the sake of Gaia, a so-called Earth spirit. This religious movement, which has cult-like qualities, is being promoted by leading figures and organizations such as Vice President Albert Gore, broadcaster Ted Turner, and the United Nations.
These people believe in Gaia -- an "Earth spirit," goddess or planetary brain -- and they think that human beings can have mystical experiences or a spiritual relationship with this entity. In order to protect Gaia, in their view, the U.S. and other industrial countries have to be prohibited from certain uses of the world's natural resources. This is called "sustainable development."
You ought to be ashamed of yourself for spreading this nonsense.
Blocking from news, by no means leaves me uninformed. I read up on old publications of local election candidates and email them with questions and critique. When was the last time you contacted your local representative to voice your opinion?
I'm sorry, but bullshit things like "family values" or the fact that the guy has a good haircut are not reasons to vote for someone. You have to know what they did earlier in life, and (if they're an incumbent) what their voting record was. And to know those things, you have to read the news, not just whatever propaganda their press secretaries release. Otherwise, all your vote does is cancels out the vote of a thoughtful person who thinks "hmm, I don't like that guy's position on proposition X, better not vote for him" or "that guy was involved in a corruption scandal, better avoid him."
If you don't care about tsunamis, Bird Flu, Iraq, or global warming, then by all means don't listen to the news. But don't vote for people without having a reason to cast that vote. The fact that there are so many people like you who vote based on their "feelings" and touchy-feely campaign speeches IS what's wrong with the system.
How is this insightful? By not knowing what is going on in the world, you are "restoring democracy to the way it was intended to work"? By having no information, you can form a better opinion? That's just ridiculous. I'm almost tempted to call this a troll.
If anything, Americans need to be reading more news, preferrably from a lot of different sources. The fact that most people couldn't find Iraq or Darfur on a map goes a long way towards explaining how soccer moms tolerate criminally insane foreign policies.
For some reason, everyone keeps telling me that video game programmers get the shaft. They work really long hours for mediocre pay. I guess that's one field I won't be going into.
For reference, I'm now working about 40 hours a week-- well, maybe more like 35 hours a week once you consider lunch breaks and everything else. On salary.
What a shame - you were doing so well until this point. Care to mention any of this evidence you have? Evolution: the inheritence of genes based on differential reproductive success. I say that it is happening, and it will always happen. Simple as that.
Well, genetic engineering is advancing by leaps and bounds. We're learning how to map genes to diseases and other characteristics. Combine that with birth control and artificial insemination, and you can have kids with any of your genes that you want. And this is only using the stuff that I can think of off of the top of my head-- actual biologists are working on things like viruses that can alter your DNA after you're born (to do things like cure diabetes), etc.
So yes, I think it's fair to say that man has transcended biological evolution. It's kind of scary in a way, but it's also kind of reassuring in a way, because it means that we don't have to listen to the eugenics folks.
It's because there is value to being in the same room as someone who you're
working with.
Despite all the recent advances in chat rooms and things like email, IRC, AIM,
Skype, and Yahoo Messenger, nothing (yet) can replace the advantages of simple
human contact. Being in a chat room or on the phone is not the same thing as
being at a meeting. The subtle non-verbal clues are not there. And if you want
to get someone's attention, there is no way as easy as walking
up to them. Phones, email, or teleconferencing apps can all be ignored pretty
easily. Physical presence is very hard to ignore.
Most businesses are at least somewhat scared of the breaches of confidentiality
that can occur when people telecommute. Remember, for 95% of the world,
"computers" are Windows, and Windows is tremendously insecure-- vulnerable to
keyloggers, backdoors, and other malware. Our company was so scared of this
potential security breach that they bought dedicated laptops for all of the
employees, and made it impossible to telecommute except through these.
Overreaction? Probably, but there are some real risks.
And of course, there are the hordes of people who really do work better when
other people are working around them. It's that old monkey-see, monkey-do thing
again. It's very hard to play World of Warcraft when your work computer
doesn't have a good graphics card, and your boss is in the next room. At home,
anything goes. For most employers, this advantage alone is worth the extra
10,000 to 20,000 a year they spend on hiring someone local.
They're not trying to use this to prove you are one person or another in court.
If you have a surveillance video of a crime scene, and a huge database of faces of citizens, then you could use this to narrow down your list of suspects. Obviously once it ever gets to the court system, there will be plenty of human experts on hand to look at the camera footage and testify as to whether it looks like you.
Also, this could be used to flag "suspicious" people at airports and other places. That way, the human security could pay close attention to them.
Any way you look at it, it's a potentially orwellian technology-- but not the technology you are thinking of.
Or, just maybe, success depends on both luck and skill-- being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, and having the right kind of mindset. And not only in corporations, but also in academia. Anyone who thinks the careful planning of D-Day or the Manhatten project happened by chance is living in a dream world.
Frankly, I don't understand everybody's obsession with credit card number theft. Unless you are posting your credit card number on /. or wearing it on your T-shirt for everybody to see, you are NOT liable for any fraudulent charges. If the merchant cannot produce a receipt with your signature on it, or if the merchant cannot prove that you received their services, then it has no effect on you, except for you having to make a quick phone call to the credit card issuer.
Credit card fraud ruins your credit rating. This happened to the parents of a friend of mine. With a crappy credit rating, his parents were unable to get favorable terms for his school loans, and so he ended up taking out a lot of 9% or higher interest rate loans for his college education.
Also, when you report your credit card stolen, there is a period where you don't have a credit card at all because they cut you off for a while. So you had better have some cash on hand or another credit card to cover this situation. This is exactly why I have two credit cards rather than one.
And no, my friend never got a cent from the credit card companies to compensate for his ruined credit rating, or for the other inconveniences he went through. There's no law requiring it.
Yes, but Mendel's work was almost completely ignored by the scientific community until around 1900-- by which time both men had passed away.
It is the worst kind of sophistry to argue that Darwinism can't be true because it makes you feel bad. Boo hoo! I was pretty upset when I found out that earth was not the center of the universe. But then I got over it-- in grade school.
Darwin did not "degrade life to an accidental tissue mass." He only made some observations about nature, and formed some theories based on those. As it turns out, these theories do a pretty good job of explaining how species change over time, and how new species are formed-- in fact, they've pretty much become the backbone of evolutionary biology.
Darwin himself was not a fascist or a rightist as you allege. In fact, he was a Christian, and he was as much troubled by questions of how to reconcile faith and reason as others. Hitler came to power almost a century later, and was influenced as much by nationalism and mysticism as by science. Stalin never accepted Darwinism-- in fact, he strictly prohibited it from being taught in Russia while he was in power. Instead, he favored the pseudo-scientist Lysenko. Try reading something about history before you spout this kind of nonsense. Assuming that history doesn't hurt your feelings too much!
Finally-- there is a lot of good evidence that man has transcended biological evolution. The whole point of having a big brain and a complex social structure is so that you don't have to make up a new gene each time you learn a new trick. And of course, in the future, genetic engineering will allow us to have whatever genes we desire.
That's what every scientific study suggests: "more studies should be done on this topic."
The alternative conclusion, "this is a dead-end field, and I believe our funding should be cut," seems to be strangely unpopular.
I don't believe that a fast metabolism is some kind of genetic accident either.
Unfortunately, you're wrong about that.
No doubt in the next century, they'll identify the genes that are responsible, and then everyone will want them.
The base pathways we have for processing food for energy are incredible invariant in terms of genetics. I think that your personal biochemistry is something that can be "trained" as much as any other physical attribute.
Since when is the human form infinitely plastic? Can you "train" a short person to be tall?
No doubt the way you live influences your metabolism. But some people have either slow or fast ones. Sucks, don't it?
If everywhere were as rich as the USA, even though it would vastly increase the total amount of energy and land use, the negative impact would be less.
That's a comforting view, but I really don't think it's true.
Per person, US citizens still consume more energy, buy more products, and drive more cars than most of the world.
Those products and that energy have to come from somewhere.
The environment is screwed because of countries, particularly in Asia, Africa, and South America that have rapidly growing populations, but their economies are screwed. If India or China could attain American economic levels, their environmental impact would vastly decrease. The solution to poor environments is rich economies which will limit the major environmental problems such as massive wood and (unfiltered) coal burning, slash and burn agriculture, over-fishing and hunting, inefficient internal combustion engines, raw waste dumping, etc.
Yes, improvements in efficiency and better pollution ordinances always help. At one point earlier this century, people could have pointed proudly at well-regulated, environmentally efficient American factories producing our domestic goods, and perhaps think that America had begun to make some progress on reducing its environmental footprint.
However, since the Berlin Wall came down, and foreign policy tensions relaxed, money-minded people invented "globalization" and "free trade" to export their dirty work to countries with few environmental standards.
People are starving to death in the US now. And many don't have health insurance. Does that mean that our culture must be destroyed?
I think maybe what you meant to say was that the standard of living in ancient China for the average person was not as luxurious as what we enjoy today in the West. Which is true, but not really germane to the debate.
I do not think that science is the opposite of authority, hierarchies, or loyalty-- in fact, science requires those things to survive. Check any major university and you will see evidence of those things-- provosts and president exercising their authority to dispense grants to the right people, hierarchies (undergrads are usually at the bottom, full professors at the top), etc.
Science also has rules that you have to follow, like citing your sources, giving descriptions of experiments, and not relying on supernatural explanations for phenomena. Scientists can be creative, but only within the confines of these rules. It is your peer group which is the authority, not "the world" (whatever that even means in this context.) Even in the hard sciences, saying that you are somehow directly receiving wisdom from the physical world is pretty disingenious, since you can never really directly perceive anything (I'll skip the philosophical digression...)
If you are indeed an American who thinks of world-historical events in terms of millenia as you have boasted, you're a very rare animal. Most americans don't have a very clear grasp of what the world was like even 100 or 200 years ago, let alone 1000. Ask about the Spanish-American war, or the War of Jenkins' ear, and most people's faces will go totally blank. In one sense, this is a good thing-- Americans are always looking towards the future, with few prejudices about what is traditional or correct. In another way, this is depressing because your grandkids will probably think you were a triple Hitler because you don't believe cows have the same rights as humans, or some other crazy political thing that would seem absurd to us now. (Remember that 200 years ago, being anti-slavery was considered outlandish and bizarre.)
Ancient Greece did not really have science in the Baconian sense. Manual labor and experiments were looked down on-- higher class people did not dirty their hands with trades such as pottery or metalworking. The idea of doing things with test tubes would have been contemptible to philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. No, the proper occupation for a high-class citizen was pure thought-- philosophy and geometry.
In fact, Plato's whole philosophy was based around the concept that the physical world was just a shadow of some ideal world. No need to do experiments or observations, when just pure thought would do. Pythagoras came up with basically a religious cult surrounding numbers.
Ancient Greece did invent geometry. Most of those theorems involving triangles that you learned in high school came from ancient greece. Angles, arcs, circles, all that stuff. Unfortunately, they never invented algebra, so after a while it became unwieldy to work on problems which didn't have a direct visual interpretation.
They also shone in philosophy and rhetoric. The Stoics, the Epicureans, and Platonists are just a few schools of philosophy I could name. A lot of people like to trace the idea of republics and limited government in general to the ancient Greeks, but that is kind of unclear. A lot of city states had dictators, or despots as they were called, at one time in their history. Plato, in "The Republic," describes a society rigidly structured by class, and ruled over by a benevolent philosopher-king.
Ancient Athens is the first (and possibly last?) example of true democracy, in the sense that all of the citizens met to make political decisions, and at least in theory, class differences were irrelevant. I'm not going to try to summarize everything that happened, but basically there were some advantages, and some disadvantages, and their system of government has little in common with the current US government.