"...defending a fellow US-American company suddenly seems to become more important than pointing out how much Microsoft as a convicted monopolist engaged in illegal anti-competitive tactics is hurting innovation/the industry/society."
Well sure, as long as the EU is the one who gets to frame the debate by picking & choosing whom to prosecute.
In this case, I'm sure it's just coincidence that the EU decided to go after an American company, Microsoft, instead of the many state monopolies and near-monopolies across the EU on dozens of industries from airliners and alcohol to power production and paper sacks?
Hey, I personally wish that the DoJ *had* broken up Microsoft. Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft is going to cut their own wrists with a bloated, buggy, and unneeded Vista.
But let's call a spade a spade, and recognize that both the US gov't and the EU have a "homer" agenda that pushes them to punish 'foreigners' far more than they scrutinize themselves.
The only scientifically relevant statistic for Mythbusters is that a high percentage of the audience (most of the men, and probably a significant fraction of the women) want to see them do more experiments with Kari in a body suit (ala the butt-moulding exercise).
Which was recognized by 1980, and why the PnP games evolved into the 2nd generation mechanics: skill based play.
Instead of "level-systems" which rationalized the skills of various archetypes and quantized their abilities into discrete "levels" of performance, 2nd Gen PnP games (Runequest, Traveller, etc.) built their game models around a finer-grained system where a character improved their individual, task-based skills individually through repeated use or specific training. The problem with this for a PnP game is of course that it was mechanic-heavy, could be slow to play, and the list of potential skills was infinite.
Then, pendulum-like, the systems shifted back to a very simplistic model of minimalist rules and a focus on the storytelling (White Wolf, etc.) for the 3rd Generation.
We're probably into the 4th or 5th-gen PnP games, I haven't kept track in detail since the mid 90's, but the MMOG-CRPG systems are definitely stuck in what was outdated long ago for PnP gamers.
It's logical though, since 'level' systems are inherently easier to balance and much easier to implement as you have a very FIXED list of archetypes. Each of THEM have a very limited skill set that you can tweak as a game designer to force people to play together and depend on each other, nobody can be entirely self-sufficient. *Some* CRPGs are starting to play with hybrid level/skill systems (Oblivion, etc.) but still the whole addiction to the "level" thing is widespread.
For those that are interested, there HAVE been CRPGs that have dispensed with the "level" thing, an excellent one was Darklands (ancient....good luck digging it up, but it was extraordinarily rich).
Let me try to explain: The original poster was asking a simple question of the "OMFG my RIGHTS have been taken by the FASCIST gubbermint!" crowd: for a normal person, what "rights" has he lost, and how should he believe that the sky is indeed falling?
The rejoinder was (depending on how one takes it) certainly meant as an insult, presumeably because by having something as COMMONPLACE and BORING as a "heterosexual partner to whom one is bonded by that old fashioned thing, marriage" and "actual employment" and very much "offspring which one lives with and cares for" can't, by any definition available to the hip, trendy, metrosexual slashdotter, be considered "living". I mean, how could one even STAND such endless dull gray mediocrity???
Setting aside that: a) the point to which I was responding was a case of typical, cynical, postmodern answer-by-eructation so classic to the slashdot boards, and b) my point was mainly meant in jest, then
Please, Captain Serious, please let me know then how having a family and a steady job don't qualify as "a life"?
"I get up in the morning, feed my child, take a shower, go to work, go home, do my wife, go to bed. The same as I did before the government took away all my rights. Please tell me what I'm missing."
A life.
A slashdot poster commenting on how someone who bathes, has kids, a job, & a do-able wife needs to get "a life"?
Stop already. The "scare the geek" thing with taxes is a horse that's been beaten long past hamburger.
Yes, it's probable that eventually if you are earning a REAL-WORLD INCOME from selling things in a virtual game world, you'll be taxed on it, like you will eventually be taxed when selling crap on ebay.
But of course the "teaser" text never says that, they make it sound like there's going to be a lvl 100 Elite Auditor in every game watching how many coppers you make selling rabbit corpses.
IANAL, but according to the MPAA's 'take' on things (that you're not buying a copy of the film, but instead merely buying a license to view the film) wouldn't that be ENTIRELY legal?
Agreed. Firstly, and most obviously, their generation length is shorter (what's the lifespan of a chimp in the wild? a dozen years?) so quite LOGICALLY they are going to have more 'opportunities' in a given timespan to evolve. I'm going to guess that ants have evolved far more than humans, too - they may look unchanged in the last million years (to the untrained eye, anyway) but that doesn't mean that evolutionary pressures aren't constantly being applied - it merely means that their physical structure very early hit upon a design that has proved to have been the most successful compromise over time. It most certainly doesn't mean that they got to that design and stopped; it means that the (constant) pressure to mutate doesn't outweigh the advantages the current structure has.
Secondly, evolution is NOT LINEAR. There is absolutely nothing that says "top predator must have evolved more than prey" or "creature with opposable thumbs is clearly more evolved than one with flippers". The whale is a great example of this - IIRC they are descended from creatures which were originally water animals, evolved legs for use on land, and then WENT BACK INTO THE WATER. Cave fish are another - many of them actually evolved FROM fish that had evolved relatively complicated visual senses, but then evolved into sightless animals.
One point regarding the cave fish - I was almost tempted to say "evolved back into" which is patently impossible. Nothing evolves backward, only and ever forward, to greater or lesser degrees of complexity.
Somewhere, there's an unbelieveably advanced civilization trying to communicate across the unbridgeable distances of space. After beggaring their economy and pillaging their planet for resources, they finally were able to construct the "GIANT SIGNAL TO INTELLIGENT RACES ACROSS THE GALAXY", supposing that it was self-evidently clear that no natural stellar process can form such a perfect square shape.
I mean, sure, it might confuse the more primitive, stupider races. But how important are they?
Education isn't simply about regurgitating facts found elsewhere. Isn't the POINT of a 'liberal' (in the academic arts sense, not the political sense) education to teach the students to reason, to be able to measure the value of the information they are getting, to filter it as necessary to draw useful conclusions?
Seems to me that Wikipedia is EXACTLY the perfect tool to teach about how information is presented and how one should read with care toward the author's biases and intent. LIKE EVERY OTHER SOURCE OF INFORMATION (such as encyclopedias and books), Wiki authors are generally altruistic in intent but everyone has inherent biases. Further, some are not so altruistic. With books and reference works, the recycle time is long and slow between editions. With wiki it's very fast, sometimes hours. So in a sense Wiki is the 'hothouse' version of every other reference work.
I think it's an excellent educational tool, both as a reference (cited original sources and generally good summaries of knowledge-to-date) and as a meta-example of the potential dangers of simply absorbing facts without thinking critically about their source.
The idea of "updating" the internet makes me feel very much the same as when people talk about rewriting the US Constitution: we have a brilliantly conceived but outdated thing which could use an update to meet current circumstances impossible for the originators to have envisioned.
However, in the same vein, I'd be totally against it: I simply cannot see in the current world the ability to pull together an equally brilliant group of people who could do the task with an equal political objectivity. Indeed, as the internet is an acting infrastructure and not simply a set of rules on paper, it would be even more necessary to pull together resources from various who all have very different and conflicting biases. The BEST one could hope for would be something "designed by committee" ala the shuttle or the EU constitution. At worst, you're going to have interests conceding power in various facets to each other to suit their various needs. How would you like the internet *designed* by the RIAA? By the Republicans? By the Illuminati?
Thanks but no. I'll keep the creaky, leaky thing we've got. At least at it's CORE it's a fundamentally good thing. We just have to keep patching it.
Agreed. But what troubles me the most from the above summary was the phrase "A 26-year-old researcher in Washington, D.C., for liberal watchdog organization Media Matters for America, he was assigned to monitor Mr. Imus's program."
So from the *very* beginning, this was not a case of listeners being morally outraged; it was a matter of a leftish organization waiting for a conservative radio talk show host to say something that they could use politically. Granted, everyone knows that both sides do this and on a purely tactical level, it was idiotic of Mr. Imus to GIVE them material to work with. But does anyone else object to this? Who *wouldn't* run afoul of the the Thought Police if they had people "assigned" to monitor their speech?
Ironic and probably surprising to some that it was the Left (generally positioned as the side most concerned with Free Speech issues) who issued this particular politi-fatwa.
As usual, reality is somewhere in between. Are people going to be replicating Ferraris? Not anytime soon. Mainly, it's a question of "what can be made from (relatively) soft plastic"?
But there are a host of items I can see from where I sit that could be easily replicated, and a likewise host of industries that make these things that will be faced with the radical paradigm shift of consumer production. - a pokemon psyduck action figure. - a letter opener (plastic) - a desk organizer thing (plastic) - coffee cups, plastic tumblers, plastic flatware - plastic picture frame - a stack of empty CD cases. - tape dispenser
People make these things too, and while currently the prices of the tech are orders of magnitude higher than they would need to be to make the above items competitive, we all know that eventually tech gets cheaper.
What's really farking sad is when the "read from the page" becomes the EXPECTATION, and the company expects you to present complicated, multilayer topics in POWERPOINT slides that are going to be distributed by email to 30 people, and they are each supposed to understand it from the powerpoint data without a presenter.
I'm sorry, sir, I simply can't present a careful, thoughtful review of a multimillion dollar North American multimodal, multinodal distribution system in FIVE GODDAMN BULLET POINTS.
So Microsoft's list is merely "known knowns" and "known unknowns" while (for MS anyway) this would have fallen into the category of "unknonwn unknowns"?
Biofuels only 'work' as a concept if you're one that is reflexively opposed to fossil fuels in the first place.
We already have serious issues of deforestation in the Amazon due to agriculture - does anyone think that will DECREASE if the value of sugar cane is increased by world demand for biofuel?
Further, in the US we already have problems with overtillage, exhaustion of the soil, loss of topsoil, and excessive pesticide use. Again, does anyone think that the widespread use of biofuel will help any of those situations? Particularly (regarding pesticides) when the corn isn't going to be consumed by anyone, so there is no food-quality issue to restrict the severity and frequency of pesticide use?
No, I'm thinking at some point we're going to look back and see biofuel (from grown crops) as a stupid, dead-end choice that wasted a lot of time & money.
But maybe someone can. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I'm sure I recall a story in the last year or so of someone (I think it was in Holland or Belgium?) spinning or stirring water at high speed in a vaccuum or some other odd pressure environment, and getting a wierd, six-way figure in the vortex when viewed from above?
Sorry, no time to search out the details, but maybe the mechanics of that might lend themselves to analyzing this?
"Why can't we have an MMORPG where the older and more experience are not given the double bonus of l33t stats and equipment in addition to superior skill at playing that they should have developed?"
WW2OL. Everyone gets basically the same equipment. Yes, longtime players have the capability of getting slightly better equipment (like an Fw190 instead of Me109e4), but then only in very limited quantities (ie they are competing against each other for the limited resource, and thus trying to kill each other once they DO get them). 90%+ of everyone has the same gear, and it's up to the PLAYER's skill to make the most of it. It's an MMO FPS - so you don't have the 'click to attack and we'll calculate if you hit or not'. Not at all - it's raw skill against raw skill. And a long time expert player that hasn't played for a month or so is almost certainly rusty and doesn't have THAT much advantage against n00bs, particularly n00bs with a lot of realistic FPS experience.
Or, one might say that we DO start revolutions only when it matters, not every time Chicken Little comes screaming down the path? At least, we used to.
Look, I'm not going to argue the complacence of the American demos with you. We've gotten PRECISELY what we've asked for: a stupid, disconnected electorate created by a decrepit educational system defended vociferously by its own entrenched bureaucracy. These voters (!) have spent the last 50 years being indoctrinated by the nanny state that nothing they do is their own fault (sue someone!), and that failure is someone else's mistake to be corrected by legislation and taxpayer-funded safety nets. Instead of worrying about electronic voting (as a crutch for voters too stupid to work a punch card? Hello?), maybe we should implement a 3-question "are you smarter than a 5th grader?" randomized test - pass all 3 questions and your vote counts?
Would EITHER party agree with that? I doubt it.
Add to the high-fructose-corn-syrup-addicted couch-potato masses a 24 hour media which is starving for something to cover, making every event a crisis, every rainstorm a disaster. (Hint: not everything is a "holocaust".) Leaven this mix with ardent (usually young) 'activists' who are so over-certain of their own self-worth that they are positive that they have to "do something!" and spend their time screeching disaster (cheerfully regurgitated by the abovementioned media) over any and everything.
Want to "do something"? Instead of pointlessly waving a sign or chanting doggerel about Bush or Cheney with your friends at some "meaningful" (actually social) event, spend an evening every week at Feed my Starving Children. http://www.fmsc.org/ (OHMYGOD...they are RELIGIOUS! They must have a secret agenda!) Shovel the old person's sidewalk next door. Join the local Lions/Kiwanis/Rotary/whatever, and help make your community a better place.
Or you could just be an anonymous internet poster, bitching about the complacence of your fellow citizens. Tip: posting on/. isn't really actually doing anything. Oh wait, that probably makes me "complacent" doesn't it? Ah well, I'm going to go complacently help my fellow men/women today. You "engaged" people rage all you want on teh intarweb. I'm sure something will come of it.
(Re the OP: blah blah blah blah disaster blah blah blah Bush blah blah Nazi blah blah Police State blah blah. Drop me a line when something actually happens...something besides some activists getting the attention they're BEGGING for to validate their MEANINGFULNESS. Z-z-z-z.)
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -Benjamin Franklin
Just as valid a saying today as it was then, as is and was the Constitution. And considering the constituion was, in some part, conceived with a bias towards liberty over safety, you can't deny one without denying the other.
Whether or not I agree with the rest of your comment, I have to repudiate this. It's just as INvalid today as it was then.
Ben Franklin was a brilliant man, and we were fortunate to have him as one of the early minds behind our Republic. He was also a self-promoter that would make Al Sharpton blush, and had a keen eye for the clever catchphrase which would stick in people's heads - all the more important in a word-of-mouth society like Colonial America. Luckily, he used his marketing mojo on behalf of the Revolution, not against it.
But back to my point: that quote you reference is was nothing more than an anti_George III marketing slogan. Its meaning was vapid even then. The whole sense of SOCIETY is one of constantly trading/compromising "liberties" in exchange for more "security". Ever stopped at a red traffic light, despite the fact that nobody was coming from the other directions? You might think it's trivial, but it's not: you have CONCEDED the SIMPLEST liberty in exchange for no increase in actual security, just a ritualized obedience to the mechanical whim of the stoplight. Something more substantial: got a job? Maybe one that requires you to spend 10+ hours a day at a specific location doing tasks you wouldn't otherwise want do? Why? You've trade a magnificent chunk of your liberty for the security of a salary. Most substantial of all: do you pay taxes? You spend your time working for money, and the government arbitrarily takes a goodly chunk of that - essentially taking your time - for what? Police services, fire services, roads, city services, defense, government, etc. ALL OF WHICH (ostensibly) increase your security.
So I'm sorry, but I wish people would think before they repeat that phrase. Meaningless marketing pap from the 18th Century is no less meaningless because its aged.
Truth in Advertising: I'm an ardent libertarian myself, and I despise anything but the most minimal government. But I prefer thinking libertarianism to empty-catchphrase libertarians any day.
...why we didn't develop something like the "cable car" system for personal vehicles. Kind of like, a belly-hook (or whatever device) on new cars that could engage continuously-running sub-pavement (cables/chains/whatever they use) that are under all major highways.
Then you use your personal vehicle to drive around, but the minute you get on a major highway, you have the ability to link in, and just read a book or whatever. Since it's mechanical (no doubt supported by certain computer systems) the chances of failure could be minimal. Since all cars are moving at the same speed on a fixed path, even the consequences of failures wouldn't be too bad, I imagine.
That would maximize the benefits of personal vehicles (flexibility) with the energy-saving, pollution-reducing, and labor-saving benefits of mass transit over highway distances.
Personally, I'd love to take the bus/train more often, but too often REQUIRE having a car @ work for customer visits, unanticipated errands, etc. during the day.
(hoping some urban planner reads this, goes "EUREKA!" and hands me a giant contract to plan it.)
"On the other hand (and as TFA points out), the key word is empathy. Without empathy, social structures cannot exist. If everyone and everyone is solely self-interested, groups of cooperating individuals could never thrive as they would be destroyed internally by conflicting self-interest."
I disagree. The idea of 'enlightened' self-interest resolves this. I might want my neighbor's hot new lawnmower, sure, but enlightened self-interest lets me step back from my gonads and realize that there is a direct and intrinsic long-term value in my NOT beating him up and taking it, even if I could.
Critics of social contract theory tend to get hung up in the "I never actually agreed to anything" semantics of the 'contract' itself; personally, I feel it neatly explains a great deal of human interrelationships and behavior. Humans are imitative and quick learners. If person A & B live close together in the wilderness (say they are friends) and person C moves near to them, there is liable to be some conflict until person C understands (either through learning or explanation) what the 'rules' between them are. Add persons D, E, F, and G and suddenly there is a community. Nobody's waving a 'contract' for anyone to sign, regulating their behavior, but it IS learned.
If you've ever moved into a new community yourself, you'll know that you very quickly 'hear' about things that you do 'wrong' in their view. Your choice is either move, change your behavior, or ignore the community approbation. In our more individual-isolating 21st century lives, it's easier to get away with this - you don't have to interact with your neighbors much. But it's not consequence free, not by a long shot.
I'm not denying that empathy exists, but I'm not clear that empathy isn't a developed sense of knowing what the other guy is going through, so as to better understand HIS self interest.
Slashdot Mirror
"...defending a fellow US-American company suddenly seems to become more important than pointing out how much Microsoft as a convicted monopolist engaged in illegal anti-competitive tactics is hurting innovation/the industry/society."
Well sure, as long as the EU is the one who gets to frame the debate by picking & choosing whom to prosecute.
In this case, I'm sure it's just coincidence that the EU decided to go after an American company, Microsoft, instead of the many state monopolies and near-monopolies across the EU on dozens of industries from airliners and alcohol to power production and paper sacks?
Hey, I personally wish that the DoJ *had* broken up Microsoft. Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft is going to cut their own wrists with a bloated, buggy, and unneeded Vista.
But let's call a spade a spade, and recognize that both the US gov't and the EU have a "homer" agenda that pushes them to punish 'foreigners' far more than they scrutinize themselves.
The only scientifically relevant statistic for Mythbusters is that a high percentage of the audience (most of the men, and probably a significant fraction of the women) want to see them do more experiments with Kari in a body suit (ala the butt-moulding exercise).
Which was recognized by 1980, and why the PnP games evolved into the 2nd generation mechanics: skill based play.
Instead of "level-systems" which rationalized the skills of various archetypes and quantized their abilities into discrete "levels" of performance, 2nd Gen PnP games (Runequest, Traveller, etc.) built their game models around a finer-grained system where a character improved their individual, task-based skills individually through repeated use or specific training. The problem with this for a PnP game is of course that it was mechanic-heavy, could be slow to play, and the list of potential skills was infinite.
Then, pendulum-like, the systems shifted back to a very simplistic model of minimalist rules and a focus on the storytelling (White Wolf, etc.) for the 3rd Generation.
We're probably into the 4th or 5th-gen PnP games, I haven't kept track in detail since the mid 90's, but the MMOG-CRPG systems are definitely stuck in what was outdated long ago for PnP gamers.
It's logical though, since 'level' systems are inherently easier to balance and much easier to implement as you have a very FIXED list of archetypes. Each of THEM have a very limited skill set that you can tweak as a game designer to force people to play together and depend on each other, nobody can be entirely self-sufficient. *Some* CRPGs are starting to play with hybrid level/skill systems (Oblivion, etc.) but still the whole addiction to the "level" thing is widespread.
For those that are interested, there HAVE been CRPGs that have dispensed with the "level" thing, an excellent one was Darklands (ancient....good luck digging it up, but it was extraordinarily rich).
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Let me try to explain:
The original poster was asking a simple question of the "OMFG my RIGHTS have been taken by the FASCIST gubbermint!" crowd: for a normal person, what "rights" has he lost, and how should he believe that the sky is indeed falling?
The rejoinder was (depending on how one takes it) certainly meant as an insult, presumeably because by having something as COMMONPLACE and BORING as a "heterosexual partner to whom one is bonded by that old fashioned thing, marriage" and "actual employment" and very much "offspring which one lives with and cares for" can't, by any definition available to the hip, trendy, metrosexual slashdotter, be considered "living". I mean, how could one even STAND such endless dull gray mediocrity???
Setting aside that:
a) the point to which I was responding was a case of typical, cynical, postmodern answer-by-eructation so classic to the slashdot boards, and
b) my point was mainly meant in jest, then
Please, Captain Serious, please let me know then how having a family and a steady job don't qualify as "a life"?
Kthx.
A slashdot poster commenting on how someone who bathes, has kids, a job, & a do-able wife needs to get "a life"?
+5, Ironic.
Stop already. The "scare the geek" thing with taxes is a horse that's been beaten long past hamburger.
Yes, it's probable that eventually if you are earning a REAL-WORLD INCOME from selling things in a virtual game world, you'll be taxed on it, like you will eventually be taxed when selling crap on ebay.
But of course the "teaser" text never says that, they make it sound like there's going to be a lvl 100 Elite Auditor in every game watching how many coppers you make selling rabbit corpses.
IANAL, but according to the MPAA's 'take' on things (that you're not buying a copy of the film, but instead merely buying a license to view the film) wouldn't that be ENTIRELY legal?
Agreed.
Firstly, and most obviously, their generation length is shorter (what's the lifespan of a chimp in the wild? a dozen years?) so quite LOGICALLY they are going to have more 'opportunities' in a given timespan to evolve. I'm going to guess that ants have evolved far more than humans, too - they may look unchanged in the last million years (to the untrained eye, anyway) but that doesn't mean that evolutionary pressures aren't constantly being applied - it merely means that their physical structure very early hit upon a design that has proved to have been the most successful compromise over time. It most certainly doesn't mean that they got to that design and stopped; it means that the (constant) pressure to mutate doesn't outweigh the advantages the current structure has.
Secondly, evolution is NOT LINEAR. There is absolutely nothing that says "top predator must have evolved more than prey" or "creature with opposable thumbs is clearly more evolved than one with flippers". The whale is a great example of this - IIRC they are descended from creatures which were originally water animals, evolved legs for use on land, and then WENT BACK INTO THE WATER.
Cave fish are another - many of them actually evolved FROM fish that had evolved relatively complicated visual senses, but then evolved into sightless animals.
One point regarding the cave fish - I was almost tempted to say "evolved back into" which is patently impossible. Nothing evolves backward, only and ever forward, to greater or lesser degrees of complexity.
Somewhere, there's an unbelieveably advanced civilization trying to communicate across the unbridgeable distances of space. After beggaring their economy and pillaging their planet for resources, they finally were able to construct the "GIANT SIGNAL TO INTELLIGENT RACES ACROSS THE GALAXY", supposing that it was self-evidently clear that no natural stellar process can form such a perfect square shape.
I mean, sure, it might confuse the more primitive, stupider races. But how important are they?
Education isn't simply about regurgitating facts found elsewhere.
Isn't the POINT of a 'liberal' (in the academic arts sense, not the political sense) education to teach the students to reason, to be able to measure the value of the information they are getting, to filter it as necessary to draw useful conclusions?
Seems to me that Wikipedia is EXACTLY the perfect tool to teach about how information is presented and how one should read with care toward the author's biases and intent. LIKE EVERY OTHER SOURCE OF INFORMATION (such as encyclopedias and books), Wiki authors are generally altruistic in intent but everyone has inherent biases. Further, some are not so altruistic. With books and reference works, the recycle time is long and slow between editions. With wiki it's very fast, sometimes hours. So in a sense Wiki is the 'hothouse' version of every other reference work.
I think it's an excellent educational tool, both as a reference (cited original sources and generally good summaries of knowledge-to-date) and as a meta-example of the potential dangers of simply absorbing facts without thinking critically about their source.
The idea of "updating" the internet makes me feel very much the same as when people talk about rewriting the US Constitution: we have a brilliantly conceived but outdated thing which could use an update to meet current circumstances impossible for the originators to have envisioned.
However, in the same vein, I'd be totally against it: I simply cannot see in the current world the ability to pull together an equally brilliant group of people who could do the task with an equal political objectivity. Indeed, as the internet is an acting infrastructure and not simply a set of rules on paper, it would be even more necessary to pull together resources from various who all have very different and conflicting biases. The BEST one could hope for would be something "designed by committee" ala the shuttle or the EU constitution. At worst, you're going to have interests conceding power in various facets to each other to suit their various needs. How would you like the internet *designed* by the RIAA? By the Republicans? By the Illuminati?
Thanks but no. I'll keep the creaky, leaky thing we've got. At least at it's CORE it's a fundamentally good thing. We just have to keep patching it.
Agreed. But what troubles me the most from the above summary was the phrase "A 26-year-old researcher in Washington, D.C., for liberal watchdog organization Media Matters for America, he was assigned to monitor Mr. Imus's program."
So from the *very* beginning, this was not a case of listeners being morally outraged; it was a matter of a leftish organization waiting for a conservative radio talk show host to say something that they could use politically. Granted, everyone knows that both sides do this and on a purely tactical level, it was idiotic of Mr. Imus to GIVE them material to work with. But does anyone else object to this? Who *wouldn't* run afoul of the the Thought Police if they had people "assigned" to monitor their speech?
Ironic and probably surprising to some that it was the Left (generally positioned as the side most concerned with Free Speech issues) who issued this particular politi-fatwa.
Yes, as far as I can tell, TF2 plays PRECISELY as well on my PC as it does on my XboX360.
Somehow, I'm less than satisfied, however. Do you think they will remember my pre-rder from what, 1998?
As usual, reality is somewhere in between.
Are people going to be replicating Ferraris? Not anytime soon. Mainly, it's a question of "what can be made from (relatively) soft plastic"?
But there are a host of items I can see from where I sit that could be easily replicated, and a likewise host of industries that make these things that will be faced with the radical paradigm shift of consumer production.
- a pokemon psyduck action figure.
- a letter opener (plastic)
- a desk organizer thing (plastic)
- coffee cups, plastic tumblers, plastic flatware
- plastic picture frame
- a stack of empty CD cases.
- tape dispenser
People make these things too, and while currently the prices of the tech are orders of magnitude higher than they would need to be to make the above items competitive, we all know that eventually tech gets cheaper.
What's really farking sad is when the "read from the page" becomes the EXPECTATION, and the company expects you to present complicated, multilayer topics in POWERPOINT slides that are going to be distributed by email to 30 people, and they are each supposed to understand it from the powerpoint data without a presenter.
I'm sorry, sir, I simply can't present a careful, thoughtful review of a multimillion dollar North American multimodal, multinodal distribution system in FIVE GODDAMN BULLET POINTS.
That they'd get away with it?
So Microsoft's list is merely "known knowns" and "known unknowns" while (for MS anyway) this would have fallen into the category of "unknonwn unknowns"?
Biofuels only 'work' as a concept if you're one that is reflexively opposed to fossil fuels in the first place.
We already have serious issues of deforestation in the Amazon due to agriculture - does anyone think that will DECREASE if the value of sugar cane is increased by world demand for biofuel?
Further, in the US we already have problems with overtillage, exhaustion of the soil, loss of topsoil, and excessive pesticide use. Again, does anyone think that the widespread use of biofuel will help any of those situations? Particularly (regarding pesticides) when the corn isn't going to be consumed by anyone, so there is no food-quality issue to restrict the severity and frequency of pesticide use?
No, I'm thinking at some point we're going to look back and see biofuel (from grown crops) as a stupid, dead-end choice that wasted a lot of time & money.
But maybe someone can. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I'm sure I recall a story in the last year or so of someone (I think it was in Holland or Belgium?) spinning or stirring water at high speed in a vaccuum or some other odd pressure environment, and getting a wierd, six-way figure in the vortex when viewed from above?
Sorry, no time to search out the details, but maybe the mechanics of that might lend themselves to analyzing this?
"Why can't we have an MMORPG where the older and more experience are not given the double bonus of l33t stats and equipment in addition to superior skill at playing that they should have developed?"
WW2OL.
Everyone gets basically the same equipment. Yes, longtime players have the capability of getting slightly better equipment (like an Fw190 instead of Me109e4), but then only in very limited quantities (ie they are competing against each other for the limited resource, and thus trying to kill each other once they DO get them).
90%+ of everyone has the same gear, and it's up to the PLAYER's skill to make the most of it. It's an MMO FPS - so you don't have the 'click to attack and we'll calculate if you hit or not'. Not at all - it's raw skill against raw skill. And a long time expert player that hasn't played for a month or so is almost certainly rusty and doesn't have THAT much advantage against n00bs, particularly n00bs with a lot of realistic FPS experience.
Perhaps.
/. isn't really actually doing anything. Oh wait, that probably makes me "complacent" doesn't it? Ah well, I'm going to go complacently help my fellow men/women today. You "engaged" people rage all you want on teh intarweb. I'm sure something will come of it.
Or, one might say that we DO start revolutions only when it matters, not every time Chicken Little comes screaming down the path? At least, we used to.
Look, I'm not going to argue the complacence of the American demos with you. We've gotten PRECISELY what we've asked for: a stupid, disconnected electorate created by a decrepit educational system defended vociferously by its own entrenched bureaucracy. These voters (!) have spent the last 50 years being indoctrinated by the nanny state that nothing they do is their own fault (sue someone!), and that failure is someone else's mistake to be corrected by legislation and taxpayer-funded safety nets. Instead of worrying about electronic voting (as a crutch for voters too stupid to work a punch card? Hello?), maybe we should implement a 3-question "are you smarter than a 5th grader?" randomized test - pass all 3 questions and your vote counts?
Would EITHER party agree with that? I doubt it.
Add to the high-fructose-corn-syrup-addicted couch-potato masses a 24 hour media which is starving for something to cover, making every event a crisis, every rainstorm a disaster. (Hint: not everything is a "holocaust".) Leaven this mix with ardent (usually young) 'activists' who are so over-certain of their own self-worth that they are positive that they have to "do something!" and spend their time screeching disaster (cheerfully regurgitated by the abovementioned media) over any and everything.
Want to "do something"? Instead of pointlessly waving a sign or chanting doggerel about Bush or Cheney with your friends at some "meaningful" (actually social) event, spend an evening every week at Feed my Starving Children. http://www.fmsc.org/ (OHMYGOD...they are RELIGIOUS! They must have a secret agenda!)
Shovel the old person's sidewalk next door.
Join the local Lions/Kiwanis/Rotary/whatever, and help make your community a better place.
Or you could just be an anonymous internet poster, bitching about the complacence of your fellow citizens. Tip: posting on
(Re the OP: blah blah blah blah disaster blah blah blah Bush blah blah Nazi blah blah Police State blah blah. Drop me a line when something actually happens...something besides some activists getting the attention they're BEGGING for to validate their MEANINGFULNESS. Z-z-z-z.)
Whether or not I agree with the rest of your comment, I have to repudiate this. It's just as INvalid today as it was then.
Ben Franklin was a brilliant man, and we were fortunate to have him as one of the early minds behind our Republic. He was also a self-promoter that would make Al Sharpton blush, and had a keen eye for the clever catchphrase which would stick in people's heads - all the more important in a word-of-mouth society like Colonial America. Luckily, he used his marketing mojo on behalf of the Revolution, not against it.
But back to my point: that quote you reference is was nothing more than an anti_George III marketing slogan. Its meaning was vapid even then.
The whole sense of SOCIETY is one of constantly trading/compromising "liberties" in exchange for more "security".
Ever stopped at a red traffic light, despite the fact that nobody was coming from the other directions? You might think it's trivial, but it's not: you have CONCEDED the SIMPLEST liberty in exchange for no increase in actual security, just a ritualized obedience to the mechanical whim of the stoplight.
Something more substantial: got a job? Maybe one that requires you to spend 10+ hours a day at a specific location doing tasks you wouldn't otherwise want do? Why? You've trade a magnificent chunk of your liberty for the security of a salary.
Most substantial of all: do you pay taxes? You spend your time working for money, and the government arbitrarily takes a goodly chunk of that - essentially taking your time - for what? Police services, fire services, roads, city services, defense, government, etc. ALL OF WHICH (ostensibly) increase your security.
So I'm sorry, but I wish people would think before they repeat that phrase. Meaningless marketing pap from the 18th Century is no less meaningless because its aged.
Truth in Advertising: I'm an ardent libertarian myself, and I despise anything but the most minimal government. But I prefer thinking libertarianism to empty-catchphrase libertarians any day.
...why we didn't develop something like the "cable car" system for personal vehicles.
Kind of like, a belly-hook (or whatever device) on new cars that could engage continuously-running sub-pavement (cables/chains/whatever they use) that are under all major highways.
Then you use your personal vehicle to drive around, but the minute you get on a major highway, you have the ability to link in, and just read a book or whatever. Since it's mechanical (no doubt supported by certain computer systems) the chances of failure could be minimal. Since all cars are moving at the same speed on a fixed path, even the consequences of failures wouldn't be too bad, I imagine.
That would maximize the benefits of personal vehicles (flexibility) with the energy-saving, pollution-reducing, and labor-saving benefits of mass transit over highway distances.
Personally, I'd love to take the bus/train more often, but too often REQUIRE having a car @ work for customer visits, unanticipated errands, etc. during the day.
(hoping some urban planner reads this, goes "EUREKA!" and hands me a giant contract to plan it.)
"On the other hand (and as TFA points out), the key word is empathy. Without empathy, social structures cannot exist. If everyone and everyone is solely self-interested, groups of cooperating individuals could never thrive as they would be destroyed internally by conflicting self-interest."
I disagree. The idea of 'enlightened' self-interest resolves this. I might want my neighbor's hot new lawnmower, sure, but enlightened self-interest lets me step back from my gonads and realize that there is a direct and intrinsic long-term value in my NOT beating him up and taking it, even if I could.
Critics of social contract theory tend to get hung up in the "I never actually agreed to anything" semantics of the 'contract' itself; personally, I feel it neatly explains a great deal of human interrelationships and behavior. Humans are imitative and quick learners. If person A & B live close together in the wilderness (say they are friends) and person C moves near to them, there is liable to be some conflict until person C understands (either through learning or explanation) what the 'rules' between them are. Add persons D, E, F, and G and suddenly there is a community. Nobody's waving a 'contract' for anyone to sign, regulating their behavior, but it IS learned.
If you've ever moved into a new community yourself, you'll know that you very quickly 'hear' about things that you do 'wrong' in their view. Your choice is either move, change your behavior, or ignore the community approbation. In our more individual-isolating 21st century lives, it's easier to get away with this - you don't have to interact with your neighbors much. But it's not consequence free, not by a long shot.
I'm not denying that empathy exists, but I'm not clear that empathy isn't a developed sense of knowing what the other guy is going through, so as to better understand HIS self interest.