More interestingly, certain memes like "Bush is a criminal", "the war was illegal", "Bush/Cheney/Satan profited from the war", etc. seem to be unstoppable, regardless of facts because people intuitively "know" these things to be true.
For the same reason, of course...ideology trumps facts.
But this should come to no surprise at all - our entire western culture, from the modern concepts of 'democracy' to consumer capitalism is ALL ABOUT convincing people of things that they may realize are dubious if not downright absurd after logical review:
Owning an ipod will make you cool. Being rich makes you happy. Wearing these shoes will make you a better athlete. Rap is music. This candidate is substantially better (or even noticeably different) than that candidate.
Ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Is it any surprise that after 50 years of television indoctrination, we've developed into a culture that emphasizes emotion and impulse over rational thought?
I saw the popup about someone being punished by the king or something, and later another about someone and was like "WTF?".
My initial response was that this was probably futile, but these guys are annoying to the extent that they interfere with other peoples' experience by their invasive spamming. They have to spam in-game to advertise, so I guess it's not impossible for the dev's to keep on them, esp if they implement some sort of 'reporting' function like Blizzard has for inappropriate spam comments. Report - check by dev - if it's a spam ad, that account is banned. Done.
I would guess that for the guys who are running gold-selling sites without ingame spam, who cares? I mean, that's pretty much outside the game, and it's both a source of revenue for the developers as well as a fertile field for the developers to see and analyze bot tech in their games.
The correct thing to do would have been to hold the student legally liable for the results of their actions (ie LIBEL) since what they did wasn't to just say "this principal is a jerk" but made them out to be a pedophile.
That's actionable.
Then, when the stupid chick was facing criminal penalties, she could BEG the school for a compromise penalty that included suspension instead of $000's in penalties.
Kids today are so stupid, they have this 'no matter what I do, I'm always safe and protected' vibe (especially, for some stupid reason, regarding whatever they do on MySpace) that is such a pleasure to destroy when they hit the real world. The look on their face when they finally figure it out is priceless...assuming they live through it.
No, no, you've been watching BIASED media which clearly has a political axe to grind.
Change the channel, and you'll see it's Bush/Cheney who are to blame for everything that is wrong with the world. THAT is the objective truth, you see.
Not to sound totally stupid, but why wouldn't they dump the data into a system that only had read-only access from outside, and that's the only way to get in from "out there"?
..unless you're at one of the poles, in which case (I'm not sure about lunar precession) you probably have 24/7/365 solar power. Oh and a direct permanent LOS to earth as well as to the little chunk of space which is occluded from earth-based observation at any given time (behind the moon).
Two reasons that I believe getting to the moon and building at least one if not two permanent bases is something in our permanent, long-term national interest. "Possession is 9/10ths" and all that.
While the results are interesting, from my own viewpoint there seem to be a host of begged questions involved.
"As the researchers expected, DITF participants were found to be more likely to comply with the moderate request when it was preceded by the large request, than when the moderate request was presented alone."
Really? Maybe I'm odd, but if someone says "hey, do you mind teleporting around the world to take 50 different screenshots with me" will not make me any more likely to say yes to a subsequent "do you mind if I take your screenshot right here?"
In my cultural context (Minnesotan, white, middle class, male, 40 yr old) asking an immoderate request first will definitely skew my opinion of you (and thus your next request) negatively, while asking a reasonable request initially is far more likely to make me seriously consider helping on the harder one, even if I would have initially said no to it.
The classic case, as described in Wiki, says that people were asked if they would mentor some kids 2 hours a weekend for two years. When they said no, they were asked if they'd take them to the zoo for an hour this coming weekend. I'm no professional demographer or psychologist, but it seems that teasing out of this some sort of larger rationale - without a truly huge sample size - is pretty weak.
I'd love to correlate the data justifying the "DITF" presumptions with Geert Hofstede's cultural bias findings; I expect that there are radical differences in 'general response' to the FITD and DITF experiments between cultural groups which, if not controlled for, would invalidate (or entirely explain) most conclusions from the results.
As much as I may agree to every one of your points as cogent, well-reasoned, and accurate....I still can't help but wonder if we're just repeating the eternal mantra of "those damn kids!" 2008 version (tm).
I think the study's results are extremely age-, habit-, and context-dependent.
1) I'm a freight forwarder, dealing with time-sensitive issues all the time, and receiving around 150 emails a day (not counting junk/spam/personal). If it took me a minute or more to return to the context of what I was doing every time I answer an email, I'd never leave work. Perhaps for people in fields where email isn't a constant thing, it would be more distracting, but certainly not for people where email IS their job.
2) I'm 41. I've been 'on the internet' since at least the mid 90's (cred: I had a 5-digit slashdot ID at one time but forgot the login/pw....) so for me email is a very usual way to communicate, I prefer it. Even I have to admit that I'm baffled by how well younger people (teens or 20-somethings) can multitask through 8 different chat threads simultaneous. Yes, like many my age, I try to tell myself that they aren't able to think 'as deeply' in that experience, but in honesty that's a rationalization and they may simply be much better at that 'style' of comunication. For someone like my parents, I'd say yes, an email may be very jarring but for my generation and younger, not so much.
So while I can accept that a lawyer or researcher in his or her mid fifties or 60's, on hearing the 'ding' of email and breaking out of what they were doing to read it may indeed take over a minute to get back into the groove of what they were doing, I don't believe this result is average for most computer-literate people today.
Slashdot Poster Category A: "I find her stance on technology to be reprehensibly Luddite (when in fact it's just that I disagree with her politics and so will find anything I can to criticize her for)"
Slashdot Poster Category B: "I find her stance on technology to be laudably forward-looking (when in fact it's just that I agree with her politics and so will find anything I can to praise her for)"
Neither being actually forthright about their initial bias, and thus the 'discussion' reducing to a shouting match between two sides that aren't going to convince each other to change their position one iota.
1) there seems to be ample confusion about the data (for example, there is more arctic ice coverage this year than last), there seem to be different trends in temperature data, and some persuasive discussions about urbanization and data collection. The moment you say 'well, one year's not a trend' you're hurting your own argument - I'd argue in the same vein that climatologically the IPCC measure of 200 years, or 500 years, or even 1000 years is almost meanininglessly small in terms of climate change; the variation we're seeing is far, far below the nearly-random chaos static in the data. The longer-term data we use, the weaker the AGW argument appears to be. 2) the AGW crowd seem to shift effortlessly between two distinct arguments - AGW is NOT conclusively proven, while there is much more apparent evidence that there is global warming in general (whatever the source). Conflating the two is unhelpful and smells of a weak argument in favor of AGW. 3) using sea-level rise as one example, there is ABUNDANT evidence that within recent climatological history, the world was substantially warmer, and sea levels were higher; witness medieval towns such as Acre which were bustling ports but now are km inland? To claim today that the impending, alleged rise in sea level (which ranges from a predicted 2cm to a hysterical 2m over the next century, already a sign that the data's hard to read) is 'catastrophic' is just dumb; it's the equivalent of humanity building cities on a tidal flat and then complaining when the tide inevitably rolls back in. 4) more history - even widely-agreed data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record) points to a couple of facts: a) that historically the trend varies wildly b) that there are small cycles and big cycles c) that in the recent history we're actually COOLER than the probable 'earth norm', so warming is more likely than cooling over time 5) the tendency to simply throw a number of experts at it (as you do - look at all the reports agreeing!) is feeble, without refuting the more commonsense points listed here. I'm no expert, but one can easily download raw icecore data from paleoclimate sites, and plot the numbers on a graph in moments with excel, and see that the results do NOT show a discernable recent warming trend (I did it using Greenland and Alpine core data).
I recognize that to the AGW proponents, it's just so much simpler to point to the public and whine "But you're all so STUPID! Why can't you SEE it?" Frankly, this sort of petulant insistence is what most of us said about everything when we were teenagers, certain that we knew everything about everything. But people (even non-college-educated people) aren't as stupid as you'd like to think. Certainly, it would be more convenient if we were, we'd just have to 'go along' with the experts. Well, experts have motivations too - and the AGW proponents shifty tactics of attacking anyone who even slightly disagrees (his wife's brother's girlfriend's cousin works for EXXON!!) likewise suggests to an objective observer that the argument isn't so much about fact as about politics, philosophy, and quasi-religion.
Aside from this, there's the 'cry wolf' phenomenon. Most of us in our forties have heard our ENTIRE lives about how and why the world is in imminent danger of disaster: we're going to run out of food, fresh water, land, oil, landfills, animals, oceans; how the climate is going to be too cold, too hot; how DDT is thinning eggshells, how nuclear power is going to kill us all, etc, etc, etc. Already, "global warming" has become "global climate change" based on the numerous refutations of specific 'facts' of global warming (doubt it? Count how many times an Inconvenient Truth mentions Global WARMING vs. how many times Mr. Gore mentions global CLIMATE CHANGE...), which itself is a darn convenient switch - now any weather event can handily be twisted to 'show' what you want....
"Due to the complexity of the developing system, which includes the disk-planet and planet-planet interactions described, the simulations resulted in random systems. Nevertheless, two dominant cases were detected.
In a disk with low mass and high viscosity, the gas in the disk is removed before a planet can form, resulting in a system that has only rocky, icy bodies. At the other end, in a disk with high mass and low viscosity, planets are formed but are pulled towards the center of the system and acquire highly elliptical orbits around the star.
In the intermediate case, planets form but undergo only modest migration towards the star and their orbits don't become as elliptical. This seems to be the case of the solar system. The simulation showed that this case is realized in a small number of systems, meaning the solar system does not resemble most planetary systems. "
The report is saying that along a spectrum of possibilities, there are a number which produce results different than our system. 1) It says nothing about the real life DISTRIBUTION of these alternatives. If only a narrow band of X values produce the results you want, this isn't necessarily a problem if you're in the high point of a steep bell curve. Look at a H-R diagram - there are clearly 'sweet spots' in stellar development across the range of possibilities. Nothing says planetary development is any different. 2) This of course means little. There is no evidence either way to suggest that life (which is the point of looking for solar systems - I don't think we just have some weird fetish for similar solar systems) can or can't develop on those alternate results. Hell, we may find that solar systems with nearly circular orbits are rare but that's good because they produce the Galaxy's retarded civilizations, and everyone ELSE out there is laughing/pitying us.
FWIW run your own particle/gravity simulation, and find the same results yourself: http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes. It's awesome, and finally a use for that uber-mega-cpu you just bought.
...with which they should be able to pursue any basic career path that doesn't require extensive further education.
You're way overreacting - teaching kids how to learn to prioritize tasks, multitask, and handle the other basic necessities of daily work is PART OF A BASIC EDUCATION. He' not teaching them to file endless stacks of paperwork, to kiss ass, to mercilessly backstab coworkers in a futile effort at advancement; THOSE are the 'worker drone' skills which they will quickly learn on-the-job wherever they end up.
Sure, all the 20-somethings and privacy freaks come out of the woodwork because they despise the idea that someone is keeping an eye on them (some "parent issue" or delayed need to desperately assert their independence).
Frankly, however, there's a reasonable argument that many of the petty troubles in our society - from juvenile transgressions to the more serious things they grow into - stem from anonymity. Back when snoopy Mrs Parker or Old Man Smith was always watching what happened on their streets, and instantly phoning parents when little Jimmy or little Sue was breaking streetlights or spraying graffiti (before it was considered art), there was a natural brake on youthful behavior and more immediate consequences.
And it's not just kids. They'd also talk to their neighbors when they see creepy Mr. Jones always pulling over in his car to talk to little Peggy Ann at the playground. Does that mean Mr Jones is a pedo? No, but the knowledge that someone, somewhere is watching is going to make sure Mr Jones keeps his paws to himself and always conducts himself with a modicum of restraint, regardless.
Just about anyone who lives in a strongly-defined 'neighborhood' or in a small town will agree (except the kids, some of whom find it predictably 'oppressive'). This near-omnipresent watch system doesn't absolutely prevent people from doing bad things (as any kid will confirm) but it does add a hurdle to bad behavior, forcing kids perhaps to think for a moment before they act....and giving most kids the chance to think first usually means their conscience can come into play.
"Obama had millions of votes for him as a senator, several times the entire population of Alaska. Even as a state senator he represented far more people than she has as a mayor." You DO recall that Obama was the sacrificial lamb that was put up against a Republican in a solid, predictably Republican-winning district, before the Republican's hot wife (7 of 9) publicly displayed some very nasty dirty laundry and obliterated him from contention.
Obama didn't 'win' that election, he was the only one left standing.
I mean, setting all/. "home team" boosterism and simple "Hate Bush, Hate the US, Hate anything the government does" crap aside.
If I walk up to a store in the middle of the night, break in past the mediocre locks, and wander around the inside of the store looking for stuff proving UFO's exist - isn't that a crime?
If the "store" happens to be a federal government building, can't I EXPECT to be punished rather severely?
If the "store" happens to not just be a federal building, but a DEFENSE DEPARTMENT building (and I know it), why would I be surprised to have my ass kicked?
As opposed to the perfectly predictable and stable climate we've always had?
Please. Climate changes in smaller and larger cycles, like waves lapping a beach. The whole global warming terror is akin to someone building their house close to the water at low tide, and then crying because now the tide's coming in.
So if I understand correctly, you're saying that despite WIDESPREAD belief* that Iraq had a functional nuclear/CBW development program, and clearly a sadistic, unhinged tyrant as a leader, we shouldn't have done anything so that we could 'save ourselves' for dealing with Iran today in 2008?
I wish I lived in your world, where one may be equipped with perfect oracular ability to foretell the future. In my world, it just makes you a tendentious whinger.
In my world, the US efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan convinced Libya to give up their program, and has made both Iran and NK aware of the fact that a US president - contrary to all the efforts of his country's media and half the population of his country - can commit frighteningly effective US troops to a major military action and keep them there, toppling the "major regional military power" almost effortlessly. Have the post-conflict operations been bungled? Sure, badly. But that hasn't helped Saddam, Uday, or Qusay(?) has it?
Likewise, the US has spent $hundreds of $billions with no significant effect on the US economy...that also is worth noting, for a power hostile to the US.
Finally, this has left the US military with an entire generation of combat-tested soldiers, combat-tested equipment, and a ton of modern military experience.
* and don't for a minute fall for the "it was all cooked up by Bush/Cheney" Orwellian nonsense. If you wish, I can give you 50+ quotes from DEMOCRATS all PRE-Year-2000 talking about the certainty of Saddam's nuclear or WMD programs, and how it needed to be addressed.
Well, in the broadest possible sense of animation, maybe. But the 'colloquial' meaning of animation would be creating something from nothing...modeling the character, texturing the character, and adding motion and sound.
This is the digital equivalent to painting over a photograph and calling it a painting. Yes, there's paint involved, and there's an image at the end, but I'm not sure most people would agree that it's equivalent to actually painting a picture from scratch on a blank canvas.
Slashdot Mirror
More interestingly, certain memes like "Bush is a criminal", "the war was illegal", "Bush/Cheney/Satan profited from the war", etc. seem to be unstoppable, regardless of facts because people intuitively "know" these things to be true.
For the same reason, of course...ideology trumps facts.
But this should come to no surprise at all - our entire western culture, from the modern concepts of 'democracy' to consumer capitalism is ALL ABOUT convincing people of things that they may realize are dubious if not downright absurd after logical review:
Owning an ipod will make you cool.
Being rich makes you happy.
Wearing these shoes will make you a better athlete.
Rap is music.
This candidate is substantially better (or even noticeably different) than that candidate.
Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Is it any surprise that after 50 years of television indoctrination, we've developed into a culture that emphasizes emotion and impulse over rational thought?
I saw the popup about someone being punished by the king or something, and later another about someone and was like "WTF?".
My initial response was that this was probably futile, but these guys are annoying to the extent that they interfere with other peoples' experience by their invasive spamming. They have to spam in-game to advertise, so I guess it's not impossible for the dev's to keep on them, esp if they implement some sort of 'reporting' function like Blizzard has for inappropriate spam comments. Report - check by dev - if it's a spam ad, that account is banned. Done.
I would guess that for the guys who are running gold-selling sites without ingame spam, who cares? I mean, that's pretty much outside the game, and it's both a source of revenue for the developers as well as a fertile field for the developers to see and analyze bot tech in their games.
The correct thing to do would have been to hold the student legally liable for the results of their actions (ie LIBEL) since what they did wasn't to just say "this principal is a jerk" but made them out to be a pedophile.
That's actionable.
Then, when the stupid chick was facing criminal penalties, she could BEG the school for a compromise penalty that included suspension instead of $000's in penalties.
Kids today are so stupid, they have this 'no matter what I do, I'm always safe and protected' vibe (especially, for some stupid reason, regarding whatever they do on MySpace) that is such a pleasure to destroy when they hit the real world. The look on their face when they finally figure it out is priceless...assuming they live through it.
Yeah, what harm could come from accusing a principal of being a pedophile?
....Global Warming - not something based entirely on fear mongering? Because it doesn't seem to be working on Republicans.
No, no, you've been watching BIASED media which clearly has a political axe to grind.
Change the channel, and you'll see it's Bush/Cheney who are to blame for everything that is wrong with the world. THAT is the objective truth, you see.
Not to sound totally stupid, but why wouldn't they dump the data into a system that only had read-only access from outside, and that's the only way to get in from "out there"?
..unless you're at one of the poles, in which case (I'm not sure about lunar precession) you probably have 24/7/365 solar power. Oh and a direct permanent LOS to earth as well as to the little chunk of space which is occluded from earth-based observation at any given time (behind the moon).
Two reasons that I believe getting to the moon and building at least one if not two permanent bases is something in our permanent, long-term national interest. "Possession is 9/10ths" and all that.
We're talking about San Francisco. Why rated +5, Funny?
If you ask the rest of the country, I'd say it's going to mod out +5, Preferred.
While the results are interesting, from my own viewpoint there seem to be a host of begged questions involved.
"As the researchers expected, DITF participants were found to be more likely to comply with the moderate request when it was preceded by the large request, than when the moderate request was presented alone."
Really? Maybe I'm odd, but if someone says "hey, do you mind teleporting around the world to take 50 different screenshots with me" will not make me any more likely to say yes to a subsequent "do you mind if I take your screenshot right here?"
In my cultural context (Minnesotan, white, middle class, male, 40 yr old) asking an immoderate request first will definitely skew my opinion of you (and thus your next request) negatively, while asking a reasonable request initially is far more likely to make me seriously consider helping on the harder one, even if I would have initially said no to it.
The classic case, as described in Wiki, says that people were asked if they would mentor some kids 2 hours a weekend for two years. When they said no, they were asked if they'd take them to the zoo for an hour this coming weekend. I'm no professional demographer or psychologist, but it seems that teasing out of this some sort of larger rationale - without a truly huge sample size - is pretty weak.
I'd love to correlate the data justifying the "DITF" presumptions with Geert Hofstede's cultural bias findings; I expect that there are radical differences in 'general response' to the FITD and DITF experiments between cultural groups which, if not controlled for, would invalidate (or entirely explain) most conclusions from the results.
As much as I may agree to every one of your points as cogent, well-reasoned, and accurate....I still can't help but wonder if we're just repeating the eternal mantra of "those damn kids!" 2008 version (tm).
I think the study's results are extremely age-, habit-, and context-dependent.
1) I'm a freight forwarder, dealing with time-sensitive issues all the time, and receiving around 150 emails a day (not counting junk/spam/personal). If it took me a minute or more to return to the context of what I was doing every time I answer an email, I'd never leave work. Perhaps for people in fields where email isn't a constant thing, it would be more distracting, but certainly not for people where email IS their job.
2) I'm 41. I've been 'on the internet' since at least the mid 90's (cred: I had a 5-digit slashdot ID at one time but forgot the login/pw....) so for me email is a very usual way to communicate, I prefer it. Even I have to admit that I'm baffled by how well younger people (teens or 20-somethings) can multitask through 8 different chat threads simultaneous. Yes, like many my age, I try to tell myself that they aren't able to think 'as deeply' in that experience, but in honesty that's a rationalization and they may simply be much better at that 'style' of comunication. For someone like my parents, I'd say yes, an email may be very jarring but for my generation and younger, not so much.
So while I can accept that a lawyer or researcher in his or her mid fifties or 60's, on hearing the 'ding' of email and breaking out of what they were doing to read it may indeed take over a minute to get back into the groove of what they were doing, I don't believe this result is average for most computer-literate people today.
Slashdot Poster Category A: "I find her stance on technology to be reprehensibly Luddite (when in fact it's just that I disagree with her politics and so will find anything I can to criticize her for)"
Slashdot Poster Category B: "I find her stance on technology to be laudably forward-looking (when in fact it's just that I agree with her politics and so will find anything I can to praise her for)"
Neither being actually forthright about their initial bias, and thus the 'discussion' reducing to a shouting match between two sides that aren't going to convince each other to change their position one iota.
Next question?
I wish I lived in such a black-and-white world.
1) there seems to be ample confusion about the data (for example, there is more arctic ice coverage this year than last), there seem to be different trends in temperature data, and some persuasive discussions about urbanization and data collection. The moment you say 'well, one year's not a trend' you're hurting your own argument - I'd argue in the same vein that climatologically the IPCC measure of 200 years, or 500 years, or even 1000 years is almost meanininglessly small in terms of climate change; the variation we're seeing is far, far below the nearly-random chaos static in the data. The longer-term data we use, the weaker the AGW argument appears to be.
2) the AGW crowd seem to shift effortlessly between two distinct arguments - AGW is NOT conclusively proven, while there is much more apparent evidence that there is global warming in general (whatever the source). Conflating the two is unhelpful and smells of a weak argument in favor of AGW.
3) using sea-level rise as one example, there is ABUNDANT evidence that within recent climatological history, the world was substantially warmer, and sea levels were higher; witness medieval towns such as Acre which were bustling ports but now are km inland? To claim today that the impending, alleged rise in sea level (which ranges from a predicted 2cm to a hysterical 2m over the next century, already a sign that the data's hard to read) is 'catastrophic' is just dumb; it's the equivalent of humanity building cities on a tidal flat and then complaining when the tide inevitably rolls back in.
4) more history - even widely-agreed data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record) points to a couple of facts:
a) that historically the trend varies wildly
b) that there are small cycles and big cycles
c) that in the recent history we're actually COOLER than the probable 'earth norm', so warming is more likely than cooling over time
5) the tendency to simply throw a number of experts at it (as you do - look at all the reports agreeing!) is feeble, without refuting the more commonsense points listed here. I'm no expert, but one can easily download raw icecore data from paleoclimate sites, and plot the numbers on a graph in moments with excel, and see that the results do NOT show a discernable recent warming trend (I did it using Greenland and Alpine core data).
I recognize that to the AGW proponents, it's just so much simpler to point to the public and whine "But you're all so STUPID! Why can't you SEE it?" Frankly, this sort of petulant insistence is what most of us said about everything when we were teenagers, certain that we knew everything about everything. But people (even non-college-educated people) aren't as stupid as you'd like to think. Certainly, it would be more convenient if we were, we'd just have to 'go along' with the experts. Well, experts have motivations too - and the AGW proponents shifty tactics of attacking anyone who even slightly disagrees (his wife's brother's girlfriend's cousin works for EXXON!!) likewise suggests to an objective observer that the argument isn't so much about fact as about politics, philosophy, and quasi-religion.
Aside from this, there's the 'cry wolf' phenomenon. Most of us in our forties have heard our ENTIRE lives about how and why the world is in imminent danger of disaster: we're going to run out of food, fresh water, land, oil, landfills, animals, oceans; how the climate is going to be too cold, too hot; how DDT is thinning eggshells, how nuclear power is going to kill us all, etc, etc, etc. Already, "global warming" has become "global climate change" based on the numerous refutations of specific 'facts' of global warming (doubt it? Count how many times an Inconvenient Truth mentions Global WARMING vs. how many times Mr. Gore mentions global CLIMATE CHANGE...), which itself is a darn convenient switch - now any weather event can handily be twisted to 'show' what you want....
While it's obviously true that eventually a cry o
The summary != TFA. Surprise!
"Due to the complexity of the developing system, which includes the disk-planet and planet-planet interactions described, the simulations resulted in random systems. Nevertheless, two dominant cases were detected.
In a disk with low mass and high viscosity, the gas in the disk is removed before a planet can form, resulting in a system that has only rocky, icy bodies. At the other end, in a disk with high mass and low viscosity, planets are formed but are pulled towards the center of the system and acquire highly elliptical orbits around the star.
In the intermediate case, planets form but undergo only modest migration towards the star and their orbits don't become as elliptical. This seems to be the case of the solar system. The simulation showed that this case is realized in a small number of systems, meaning the solar system does not resemble most planetary systems. "
The report is saying that along a spectrum of possibilities, there are a number which produce results different than our system.
1) It says nothing about the real life DISTRIBUTION of these alternatives. If only a narrow band of X values produce the results you want, this isn't necessarily a problem if you're in the high point of a steep bell curve. Look at a H-R diagram - there are clearly 'sweet spots' in stellar development across the range of possibilities. Nothing says planetary development is any different.
2) This of course means little. There is no evidence either way to suggest that life (which is the point of looking for solar systems - I don't think we just have some weird fetish for similar solar systems) can or can't develop on those alternate results. Hell, we may find that solar systems with nearly circular orbits are rare but that's good because they produce the Galaxy's retarded civilizations, and everyone ELSE out there is laughing/pitying us.
FWIW run your own particle/gravity simulation, and find the same results yourself: http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes. It's awesome, and finally a use for that uber-mega-cpu you just bought.
...with which they should be able to pursue any basic career path that doesn't require extensive further education.
You're way overreacting - teaching kids how to learn to prioritize tasks, multitask, and handle the other basic necessities of daily work is PART OF A BASIC EDUCATION. He' not teaching them to file endless stacks of paperwork, to kiss ass, to mercilessly backstab coworkers in a futile effort at advancement; THOSE are the 'worker drone' skills which they will quickly learn on-the-job wherever they end up.
Blah blah blah privacy blah blah blah dictatorship.
Sure, all the 20-somethings and privacy freaks come out of the woodwork because they despise the idea that someone is keeping an eye on them (some "parent issue" or delayed need to desperately assert their independence).
Frankly, however, there's a reasonable argument that many of the petty troubles in our society - from juvenile transgressions to the more serious things they grow into - stem from anonymity. Back when snoopy Mrs Parker or Old Man Smith was always watching what happened on their streets, and instantly phoning parents when little Jimmy or little Sue was breaking streetlights or spraying graffiti (before it was considered art), there was a natural brake on youthful behavior and more immediate consequences.
And it's not just kids. They'd also talk to their neighbors when they see creepy Mr. Jones always pulling over in his car to talk to little Peggy Ann at the playground. Does that mean Mr Jones is a pedo? No, but the knowledge that someone, somewhere is watching is going to make sure Mr Jones keeps his paws to himself and always conducts himself with a modicum of restraint, regardless.
Just about anyone who lives in a strongly-defined 'neighborhood' or in a small town will agree (except the kids, some of whom find it predictably 'oppressive'). This near-omnipresent watch system doesn't absolutely prevent people from doing bad things (as any kid will confirm) but it does add a hurdle to bad behavior, forcing kids perhaps to think for a moment before they act....and giving most kids the chance to think first usually means their conscience can come into play.
"Obama had millions of votes for him as a senator, several times the entire population of Alaska. Even as a state senator he represented far more people than she has as a mayor."
You DO recall that Obama was the sacrificial lamb that was put up against a Republican in a solid, predictably Republican-winning district, before the Republican's hot wife (7 of 9) publicly displayed some very nasty dirty laundry and obliterated him from contention.
Obama didn't 'win' that election, he was the only one left standing.
I mean, setting all /. "home team" boosterism and simple "Hate Bush, Hate the US, Hate anything the government does" crap aside.
If I walk up to a store in the middle of the night, break in past the mediocre locks, and wander around the inside of the store looking for stuff proving UFO's exist - isn't that a crime?
If the "store" happens to be a federal government building, can't I EXPECT to be punished rather severely?
If the "store" happens to not just be a federal building, but a DEFENSE DEPARTMENT building (and I know it), why would I be surprised to have my ass kicked?
I don't get it. Why is this even a NEWS item?
IMO screw paper. Burn them into copperplates or engravings. It's not a complicated process and it's going to survive more than paper.
...when it was apparent that their editorial focus had shifted from simply science reporting to advocacy.
Someone please let me know if they've gone back? I really used to enjoy the magazine (thus my 20 year subscription).
As opposed to the perfectly predictable and stable climate we've always had?
Please. Climate changes in smaller and larger cycles, like waves lapping a beach. The whole global warming terror is akin to someone building their house close to the water at low tide, and then crying because now the tide's coming in.
Ah, the glory of 20/20 hindsight.
So if I understand correctly, you're saying that despite WIDESPREAD belief* that Iraq had a functional nuclear/CBW development program, and clearly a sadistic, unhinged tyrant as a leader, we shouldn't have done anything so that we could 'save ourselves' for dealing with Iran today in 2008?
I wish I lived in your world, where one may be equipped with perfect oracular ability to foretell the future. In my world, it just makes you a tendentious whinger.
In my world, the US efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan convinced Libya to give up their program, and has made both Iran and NK aware of the fact that a US president - contrary to all the efforts of his country's media and half the population of his country - can commit frighteningly effective US troops to a major military action and keep them there, toppling the "major regional military power" almost effortlessly. Have the post-conflict operations been bungled? Sure, badly. But that hasn't helped Saddam, Uday, or Qusay(?) has it?
Likewise, the US has spent $hundreds of $billions with no significant effect on the US economy...that also is worth noting, for a power hostile to the US.
Finally, this has left the US military with an entire generation of combat-tested soldiers, combat-tested equipment, and a ton of modern military experience.
* and don't for a minute fall for the "it was all cooked up by Bush/Cheney" Orwellian nonsense. If you wish, I can give you 50+ quotes from DEMOCRATS all PRE-Year-2000 talking about the certainty of Saddam's nuclear or WMD programs, and how it needed to be addressed.
Maybe it just feels like much, much longer when you have more than one wife?
Well, in the broadest possible sense of animation, maybe.
But the 'colloquial' meaning of animation would be creating something from nothing...modeling the character, texturing the character, and adding motion and sound.
This is the digital equivalent to painting over a photograph and calling it a painting. Yes, there's paint involved, and there's an image at the end, but I'm not sure most people would agree that it's equivalent to actually painting a picture from scratch on a blank canvas.