When Bill Gates started doing his foundation work, I remember him talking about bringing computers to everyone in the world. Then a year later I remember reading a quote from him about how wrong that was. He finally realized that many people don't have basic food and water. Now he seems to be doing some decent things with his life but it took a long time (and a lot of immoral business practices) before he woke up. Better late than never, I guess. While these people certainly understand the business world better than I do, to say they are smarter or more worldly is highly debatable. If you want to use an example of someone that's smart and worldly, pick someone like Nelson Mandela. Not a CEO.
Most of these things are too small to have been found by scientists. They've done a good job over the last few years finding most of the big ones (1 km diameter - stuff that'd wipe out the planet) but there are still plenty of smaller ones that they have no idea about. Most of them, in fact. I believe the only one that's ever been known in advance of its impact was in Sudan last year. And that was only known a day or so in advance.
Wow. I was lucky enough to be in a small country school that got one of the Apple IIs that Apple was handing out. No one knew what to do with it so it basically sat in the corner. A friend and I heard there was a computer in the school and figured it would be something like HAL. When we asked if we could use it, the teacher in charge had no clue so she just gave us free reign. Same at the next school I went to where they gave me a key to the lab with about six machines. Then at home where my parents gave me a TRS-80 Model III. Then in college when the department gave me a VAX (which no one was interested in because it ran something called "UNIX"). I basically learned by people giving me machines and getting out of the way. And thank god for that.
It may be true that your social life would suffer by leaving Facebook. But that's only because you've set up your life that way. The most interesting friends I have are those that don't have time for Facebook. And someone inviting me to friend them is usually a good warning sign that they aren't. Previously, I used to have to tell by how much a person talked about TV.
Immediately before the war American support was around 80%. But before Bush beat the war drums support was less than a majority. When he first mentioned the idea of invading Iraq, he had less than 40%. Bush created that 80% with all his WMD talk. As crazy as it sounds, before Bush's push for Iraq the American people were focused on Bin Laden and Afghanistan.
The difference is that firefighters prepare because they are absolutely sure that there will someday be a fire. Just like buildings built in earthquake zones are pretty near certain to be hit by an earthquake in their lifetime. This was a single flu season with no statistically significant evidence to indicate it would be different than any other. Now huge amounts of money has been thrown out the window on this one incident. And most of this preparation (the vaccine) is useless for the next event. That's not only a poor use of resources. But it will also dampen future efforts when the media is not crying wolf.
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 3,000 children, teenagers and young people died this year from the H1N1 flu. These are otherwise healthy young people who would not otherwise have died. A lot of them were infants under 5 years old.
Did you really just use a "think of the children" argument?
A friend does statistical models for a government health agency and was giving me the latest-greatest swine flu stats all the way through the media storm. The stats were never really very scary.
You listed Jon Stewart as a "traditional news" source? That's like listing SNL's "Weekend Update". Though I guess if you're defending FOX News as being news, then I can see how you'd lump him in there to help stretch your point. (I should also note that most of the things you mention that no non-FOX watcher would ever hear about, I saw on Jon's show. Black gun owner, ACORN, etc.)
The news is not that the East African rift will form a new ocean - that's been known for a few years
In order for an ocean to form, the plates on either side need to have somewhere to move to. That requires not only the local rift dynamics but also a shift in all the surrounding plates so they "get out of the way". I don't know of any evidence that this is happening. If others do, I'd be happy to have references.
Similarly, the nearby Red Sea was able to start spreading because the plate to the north was being subducted near Iran. But since that subduction has likely stopped, it's questionable whether the Red Sea will continue spreading into anything much bigger than it is today.
Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years.
Dividends are alive and well where I live. I haven't looked at the US market in a while but I thought it was only the tech stocks that weren't paying dividends.
Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term.
Without dividends, the earnings simply stay in the company itself instead of being paid to you. They don't vanish. Look at it this way... image the company doesn't pay them to you but instead puts them in a company bank account. The price of the stock must rise because the assets on the books are now higher than last year and, as a stockholder, you own a portion of those assets. You make it sound like the earnings will cease to exist if they aren't paid as dividends. But they still do exit. They're just in the company (which you own) instead of in your bank account (which you own). And if you trust the company enough to buy their stock in the first place, then you probably aren't going to mind if they hold on to your dividends. This simplifies your taxes and allows them to use the money when opportunities arise to make the company still stronger and further increase the company value.
I don't download the files or keep logs or anything like that. But I do have the watch to give me some feedback when I'm slacking off or pushing too much. It helps keep me in line. But the most interesting part for me has been getting more familiar with how my body works -- noticing that my heart rate is 5-10 beats higher in hot weather (due to vasodilation as the body tries to cool) or how it varies as I run inclines. I've gotten to the point where I can pretty much tell you what my heart rate is just by paying attention to breathing stress. Having that feel for how the body reacts has helped me with other things like pacing myself while backpacking, scuba diving in high currents, etc. More awareness is generally a plus.
Switzerland's been in Schengen for about a year now. But, yes, even before that there were plenty of places where it was hard to notice where the border was.
I'm surprised how many people here see Wave as a Twitter or Facebook. (This is Slashdot, right?) I see Wave primarily as a tool for collaborative development. Want to build a gamma ray spectrometer? Get a few like minded people together and create a Wave to organize the project. When I'm mulling over a project I already organize my thoughts in a tree structure just like Wave does. Though it's usually just in a text file with indentation to highlight the various branches of thought. I'd love to be able to do that with a Wave where I could have a group of people do this and also add multi-media, collapse ideas and add summaries, or view the history of the development process. That I can see other people's changes as they make them is just eye-candy to me.
It doesn't work on me. I don't own a TV, don't listen to the radio, do use ad blocking on the internet, and the few magazines I read aren't ad supported (for which I happily pay more). The only time I ever see ads is in public transportation or on the street and they're mostly for things that don't interest me. I don't recognize logos and can't sing jingles. I rarely go shopping and only with a list of exactly what I want - purchases are never spur of the moment. Since my tastes in books and music are so odd, I spend a lot of time having to search for the things I want (I have to do a lot of special orders) and rarely buy anything that would be popular enough to be advertised. I do enjoy a "normal" movie now and then, though, so I will go through the trailers to decide what I want to see. I guess you could call those ads. But since I go looking for them, it doesn't really fit the discussion here. Some of us really do live our own lives.
It was really great when it started. Just one video after the next with a VJ coming on at the top of the hour to tell you what was coming up. The concept was new and the only bands that made videos were the lesser-knowns. So you were exposed to a lot of new stuff. Best of all there were no commercials back then. I was too young then to know that stuff like that is always ruined with time.
I don't have a problem with last minute hacks to get something to work before a tight deadline. Unexpected behaviors pop up, deadlines are sometimes too optimistic, etc. What really pisses me off is when everyone else (read: management) thinks that that's the end of the line and that we don't need to clean it up in the next release. Basically, this means that the thing that wasn't my fault in the first place will end up biting me again a year down the road. So I usually end up cleaning up stuff like this on the sly.
They would be de-energized. But the nutrients would remain. Nutrients are the building blocks needed by photosynthetic organisms to build carbohydrates (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc). So de-energized compost piles would still be good places for plants to grow.
I agree with most of your "fakes". But it's near impossible to imagine the moon rocks were faked. Geochemists don't just look at the rocks and say "wow, they're gray just like on earth". For starters, radiometric dating shows them to be older than rocks on earth (because the earth recycles). So they would have had to build their own rocks with the proper isotope ratios and not left any other clues while doing so. There is no way someone wouldn't have noticed a fake by now. Especially one made with 1960s technology.
I think you're right that most creativity comes asynchronously. But I find synchronous collaboration useful because it helps to define the problem and find additional issues that I might not otherwise realize were there. The solutions often then come asynchronously. But distributing the problem is probably better done synchronously to avoid people having wildly different views of what the problem actually is. Something that I have found is often the case in these situations.
Slashdot Mirror
When Bill Gates started doing his foundation work, I remember him talking about bringing computers to everyone in the world. Then a year later I remember reading a quote from him about how wrong that was. He finally realized that many people don't have basic food and water. Now he seems to be doing some decent things with his life but it took a long time (and a lot of immoral business practices) before he woke up. Better late than never, I guess. While these people certainly understand the business world better than I do, to say they are smarter or more worldly is highly debatable. If you want to use an example of someone that's smart and worldly, pick someone like Nelson Mandela. Not a CEO.
Devon
Admit when you don't know how to do something.
And then tell them that you're willing to accept the challenge of figuring it out. Honesty is even better when combined with a can-do attitude.
Devon
Most of these things are too small to have been found by scientists. They've done a good job over the last few years finding most of the big ones (1 km diameter - stuff that'd wipe out the planet) but there are still plenty of smaller ones that they have no idea about. Most of them, in fact. I believe the only one that's ever been known in advance of its impact was in Sudan last year. And that was only known a day or so in advance.
Devon
So your suggestion is that nothing good ever enters the public domain?
Devon
What are you smoking? That's not remotely true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_debt
Notice how the debt increases during Republican presidents and decreased during Clinton.
Devon
Wow. I was lucky enough to be in a small country school that got one of the Apple IIs that Apple was handing out. No one knew what to do with it so it basically sat in the corner. A friend and I heard there was a computer in the school and figured it would be something like HAL. When we asked if we could use it, the teacher in charge had no clue so she just gave us free reign. Same at the next school I went to where they gave me a key to the lab with about six machines. Then at home where my parents gave me a TRS-80 Model III. Then in college when the department gave me a VAX (which no one was interested in because it ran something called "UNIX"). I basically learned by people giving me machines and getting out of the way. And thank god for that.
Devon
It may be true that your social life would suffer by leaving Facebook. But that's only because you've set up your life that way. The most interesting friends I have are those that don't have time for Facebook. And someone inviting me to friend them is usually a good warning sign that they aren't. Previously, I used to have to tell by how much a person talked about TV.
Devon
Immediately before the war American support was around 80%. But before Bush beat the war drums support was less than a majority. When he first mentioned the idea of invading Iraq, he had less than 40%. Bush created that 80% with all his WMD talk. As crazy as it sounds, before Bush's push for Iraq the American people were focused on Bin Laden and Afghanistan.
Devon
The difference is that firefighters prepare because they are absolutely sure that there will someday be a fire. Just like buildings built in earthquake zones are pretty near certain to be hit by an earthquake in their lifetime. This was a single flu season with no statistically significant evidence to indicate it would be different than any other. Now huge amounts of money has been thrown out the window on this one incident. And most of this preparation (the vaccine) is useless for the next event. That's not only a poor use of resources. But it will also dampen future efforts when the media is not crying wolf.
Devon
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 3,000 children, teenagers and young people died this year from the H1N1 flu. These are otherwise healthy young people who would not otherwise have died. A lot of them were infants under 5 years old.
Did you really just use a "think of the children" argument?
Devon
A friend does statistical models for a government health agency and was giving me the latest-greatest swine flu stats all the way through the media storm. The stats were never really very scary.
Devon
You listed Jon Stewart as a "traditional news" source? That's like listing SNL's "Weekend Update". Though I guess if you're defending FOX News as being news, then I can see how you'd lump him in there to help stretch your point. (I should also note that most of the things you mention that no non-FOX watcher would ever hear about, I saw on Jon's show. Black gun owner, ACORN, etc.)
Devon
I once heard that traffic circles generally increase the number of accidents but decrease the number of fatal accidents. So that's also a factor.
Devon
The news is not that the East African rift will form a new ocean - that's been known for a few years
In order for an ocean to form, the plates on either side need to have somewhere to move to. That requires not only the local rift dynamics but also a shift in all the surrounding plates so they "get out of the way". I don't know of any evidence that this is happening. If others do, I'd be happy to have references.
Similarly, the nearby Red Sea was able to start spreading because the plate to the north was being subducted near Iran. But since that subduction has likely stopped, it's questionable whether the Red Sea will continue spreading into anything much bigger than it is today.
Devon
Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years.
Dividends are alive and well where I live. I haven't looked at the US market in a while but I thought it was only the tech stocks that weren't paying dividends.
Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term.
Without dividends, the earnings simply stay in the company itself instead of being paid to you. They don't vanish. Look at it this way... image the company doesn't pay them to you but instead puts them in a company bank account. The price of the stock must rise because the assets on the books are now higher than last year and, as a stockholder, you own a portion of those assets. You make it sound like the earnings will cease to exist if they aren't paid as dividends. But they still do exit. They're just in the company (which you own) instead of in your bank account (which you own). And if you trust the company enough to buy their stock in the first place, then you probably aren't going to mind if they hold on to your dividends. This simplifies your taxes and allows them to use the money when opportunities arise to make the company still stronger and further increase the company value.
Devon
I don't download the files or keep logs or anything like that. But I do have the watch to give me some feedback when I'm slacking off or pushing too much. It helps keep me in line. But the most interesting part for me has been getting more familiar with how my body works -- noticing that my heart rate is 5-10 beats higher in hot weather (due to vasodilation as the body tries to cool) or how it varies as I run inclines. I've gotten to the point where I can pretty much tell you what my heart rate is just by paying attention to breathing stress. Having that feel for how the body reacts has helped me with other things like pacing myself while backpacking, scuba diving in high currents, etc. More awareness is generally a plus.
Devon
Switzerland's been in Schengen for about a year now. But, yes, even before that there were plenty of places where it was hard to notice where the border was.
Devon
I'm surprised how many people here see Wave as a Twitter or Facebook. (This is Slashdot, right?) I see Wave primarily as a tool for collaborative development. Want to build a gamma ray spectrometer? Get a few like minded people together and create a Wave to organize the project. When I'm mulling over a project I already organize my thoughts in a tree structure just like Wave does. Though it's usually just in a text file with indentation to highlight the various branches of thought. I'd love to be able to do that with a Wave where I could have a group of people do this and also add multi-media, collapse ideas and add summaries, or view the history of the development process. That I can see other people's changes as they make them is just eye-candy to me.
Devon
It doesn't work on me. I don't own a TV, don't listen to the radio, do use ad blocking on the internet, and the few magazines I read aren't ad supported (for which I happily pay more). The only time I ever see ads is in public transportation or on the street and they're mostly for things that don't interest me. I don't recognize logos and can't sing jingles. I rarely go shopping and only with a list of exactly what I want - purchases are never spur of the moment. Since my tastes in books and music are so odd, I spend a lot of time having to search for the things I want (I have to do a lot of special orders) and rarely buy anything that would be popular enough to be advertised. I do enjoy a "normal" movie now and then, though, so I will go through the trailers to decide what I want to see. I guess you could call those ads. But since I go looking for them, it doesn't really fit the discussion here. Some of us really do live our own lives.
Devon
I wish MTV was about music.
It was really great when it started. Just one video after the next with a VJ coming on at the top of the hour to tell you what was coming up. The concept was new and the only bands that made videos were the lesser-knowns. So you were exposed to a lot of new stuff. Best of all there were no commercials back then. I was too young then to know that stuff like that is always ruined with time.
I don't have a problem with last minute hacks to get something to work before a tight deadline. Unexpected behaviors pop up, deadlines are sometimes too optimistic, etc. What really pisses me off is when everyone else (read: management) thinks that that's the end of the line and that we don't need to clean it up in the next release. Basically, this means that the thing that wasn't my fault in the first place will end up biting me again a year down the road. So I usually end up cleaning up stuff like this on the sly.
I actually find your overly expansive view of property rights a lot scarier than anything google is doing.
This from the country where people can put up "POSTED" signs and chase people off their property with shotguns and dogs.
They would be de-energized. But the nutrients would remain. Nutrients are the building blocks needed by photosynthetic organisms to build carbohydrates (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc). So de-energized compost piles would still be good places for plants to grow.
Devon
I agree with most of your "fakes". But it's near impossible to imagine the moon rocks were faked. Geochemists don't just look at the rocks and say "wow, they're gray just like on earth". For starters, radiometric dating shows them to be older than rocks on earth (because the earth recycles). So they would have had to build their own rocks with the proper isotope ratios and not left any other clues while doing so. There is no way someone wouldn't have noticed a fake by now. Especially one made with 1960s technology.
Devon
I think you're right that most creativity comes asynchronously. But I find synchronous collaboration useful because it helps to define the problem and find additional issues that I might not otherwise realize were there. The solutions often then come asynchronously. But distributing the problem is probably better done synchronously to avoid people having wildly different views of what the problem actually is. Something that I have found is often the case in these situations.
Devon