"oh, God there's a whole universe in my thumbnail man."
Think you might have mistaken marijuana for mushrooms.
Now if you were staring at your thumbnail, and suddenly realized you didn't know WHY you were staring at said thumbnail... now THAT'S marijuana.
You know, a small subset of the population actually does react to marijuana that strongly. My wife is one of them (and yes, she has experience with stronger stuff like mushrooms too, so she knows what she's talking about).
Personally, I'm rather disappointed by most illicit drugs. Hollywood told me they would have a much stronger effect. I've tried alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms, acid, opium, ecstasy, cocaine, speed, and DMT, and not one of them made me actually lose control of myself or hallucinate in such a way that I couldn't easily differentiate it from reality. I still haven't tried some of the more exotic hallucinogens (like peyote), but I strongly suspect they won't be much different from mushrooms/acid.
No, HUMANS are stupid and selfish. It really has very little to do with age.
Please don't propagate ageism.
Oh, and no matter how young they are, your kids aren't your property. They are fully sentient individuals, and are generally capable of making their own decisions and learning from the bad ones all by themselves. The sooner you realize that, the better your relationship with them will be.
Bruce Sterling brings a more biting social commentary to his opus. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Holy Fire all challenged me to view my own experience of the world in a new light.
Snow Crash and Diamond Age (both excellent books) were written by Neal Stephenson, not Bruce Sterling.
I should think the fear of "falling into a hole - especially a hole with teeth" wouldn't be confined to the male gender. But hey, maybe I'm wrong...?
I bet the professor in question subscribes to a Freudian worldview. Whereas normal individuals see a hole with teeth as... a hole with teeth, Freud would see it as some sort of vagina monster (making it a "male" fear).
Freud was the master of a phenomenon called "projection", where he assumes that everyone else is fucked up in the same way that he is. It would be damn amusing if not for the tragedy of the fact that his flawed introspection-based ideas were so influential that they set back the entire profession of psychology by 100 years.
Sorry Freud, just because you have Oedipus issues doesn't mean everyone does. Logic fail.
I really hate this idea that people with any kind of advantage aren't allowed to participate in athletic competitions. What's the point, then? How far should we take it? Next thing you know, people will be rejected for the "unfair advantage" of simply having spent their life training for the event. (This actually already happens in the olympics to some extent with their ban on "professional" athletes in events like basketball).
Our "world records" are quite meaningless when the individuals with the greatest chance of actually setting one aren't allowed on the field. I also think it's inappropriate to ban athletes that have subjected themselves to chemical augmentation. I would suggest keeping separate "augmented" and "non-augmented" records, but ultimately it's impossible to determine where to draw the line between augmentation and things like tailored dietary supplements. But our records are a joke. We have no idea who the fastest human runner on the planet is, because he's not allowed to officially compete.
Cases like this also illustrate the ridiculousness of gender segregation in athletics. Does anyone with a basic science education actually still believe that there are only two genders? Should we have yet another segregated league for XXY athletes like M. Semenya? If we are going to acknowledge the tendencies for different genders to have different athletic abilities, why not acknowledge the tendencies among different races, age groups, cultures, shoe sizes, etc? I know, let's just put every individual in their own little athletic division and they can set records against themselves all day long. Imagine the profits for Guinness!
Correct. "Perfect" circles exist only as mathematical abstractions, they can never exist in the "real" world. The reason is that the universe (as best as we can tell) is NOT infinitely sub-divisible. You run into the limitations of Planck length.
The concept of pi being an irrational number really drove me crazy when I was a kid. I used to assume it was just a very complex rational number, and that future generations of computing power would reveal the "pattern" or "end" of pi. I cannot even begin to describe the sensation of a weight being lifted when I had the logical epiphany that circles don't actually exist, and therefore pi didn't need to be rational.
BTW, what's up with most of the posts from burners being ACs? I've never thought of Slashdot as an environment where one needs to be secretive about liberal counter-culture affiliations... quite the opposite actually.
I've only been once, back in '01, and I loved it. (Even if it was basically impossible for me to do anything other than sit in a shade structure and drink water when the sun was out. The night, of course, is another story.) I would go more often, but it requires both time AND money, and I find it difficult to actually have both of those things at the same time.
Meh. I (as a person in that age range) am sick of being treated like someone who is expected to be chock full of hormones and therefore incapable of acting otherwise. People don't become adults faster by being told "you don't have to be mature yet" - they mature when people look at them strange and say "What's your problem? Stop acting like a child."
I agree. My own experiences as a teenager (a bit over a decade ago) combined with current reflection upon the "adult" world have shown me that the only difference between teenagers and "adults" is how they are treated by the rest of society. Any sane person would be depressed and/or rebellious if treated and viewed the way our culture typically treats and views teenagers. Expectations create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After I moved to SF, I sold my car. No need for it here.
Unless, of course, you ever want to leave SF for any reason. I know there's some decent public transportation to surrounding areas, but it's far from comprehensive, especially after the sun goes down.
Speaking of public transportation, it sure would be nice to get BART up here (I live in Santa Rosa). Fuck you Marin County, fuck you very much.
Santa Rosa's not exactly far from San Francisco. And since it's just Santa Rosa that's close you're fine with them being leveled in an earthquake?
As a lifetime resident of Santa Rosa, I hereby formally approve of your proposal for earthquake-based levelling, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
But I should warn you you're going to need one doozy of a quake to actually level the place. The 1906 "San Francisco" Earthquake hit harder up here than it did in San Francisco, and that one still left 4 buildings standing.
Thomas Jefferson was a bit nerdy, true, but he was disqualified from being the first nerd president because it's a well-known fact that he ran his own fantasy football league. And we all know that fantasy football is the territory of jocks, not nerds.
It may be true that in the modern day fantasy football is the domain of jocks, but back in Jefferson's time it was the equivalent of video games or RPGs.
Don't give up. I've known LOTS of gay geeks in my time. Of course, I live in North California, pretty close to Silicon Valley. Maybe your problem is location?
Actually, as a scientifically-minded agnostic, I have to agree that atheism is definitely a religion.
We really do lack sufficient evidence to comment on the existence of entities powerful enough to be called gods, who could potentially do things like create planets or influence evolution in a specific direction. In fact, given how vast the universe is, I'd even have to bet that something like that is out there somewhere. (Of course, true omnipotence or omniscience are quite impossible.)
Now, non-circular evidence for the existence of the gods of the religions of Earth is non-existent. All signs point to the fact that they are ideas created by men to control other men. It can be argued whether this was conscious pre-meditated intent by a few specific individuals or just an aggregate effect of collective ignorance and natural opportunistic tendencies, but the end result is the same.
Two instances of such an event in less than 60 years does not automatically invalidate the thousands of years prior where such an event had not occurred.
How do you know that no one got hit before that point? We've barely been keeping good records that long.
And what about the possibility of someone getting hit and killed with no witnesses around?
We really just don't have enough information. The sample size is laughably small to be able to extrapolate useful statistics.
Of course, I've never met a statistic that wasn't based on a laughably small sample size, but that's another topic.
P.S. How in the fuck do I make Slashdot make a line break? The "enter" key used to work just fine but now it doesn't. The line spacing looks right in the editor until I hit the preview button, then it magically disappears. I've tried double spacing, html tags... nothing seems to work. Am I just stupid?
I strongly agree with most of what you say, but I have a nitpick:
4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation.
I can't think of a single nasty thing you can do "on the Internet" that isn't already covered under existing laws for meatspace. We don't need separate (and in present practice unequal) laws for crimes that happen to take place via the Internet.
I do agree with your premise that we shouldn't twist weird unrelated laws into place to cover novel situations, I just think the Internet is a bad example.
Animals and fish? I don't think I've ever heard that split before.
You obviously haven't known many Catholics.
Catholics aren't allowed to eat animal meat on Fridays. According to their religious dogma, however, fish do not count as "animals", so they are okay to eat on no-meat day. (This is also why a lot of restaurants offer seafood specials on Friday.)
Thank you so much for your post. I thought I was the only geek that saw through the bullshit that is Mythbusters!
A quick search on YouTube for "split arrow" debunks their claim of it not being possible to pull off the "Robin Hood" shot. They sure didn't try very hard.
I have yet to see an episode of Mythbusters where I didn't have a major problem with their methodology.
It makes me sad that so many people think these guys are applying scientific rigor. They are doing a great disservice to geeks everywhere.
A friend of mine has a son who is a major department head at Amazon, and he's gay. So I have to point out this is not a witch hunt against gays.
Just because Amazon happens to employ gay individuals in positions of relative importance does not mean that the company as a whole isn't on an anti-gay witch hunt to appease the religious right-winger nutjobs. A good capitalist will gleefully oppress their own kind to make a profit.
My standard email address for sites I dont wish to give my real details to is bill@microsoft.com
I like to use nospam@foo.com or abuse@foo.com, where "foo.com" is the actual domain of the site I am entering my info to. (For example, microsoft gets nospam@microsoft.com).
If the customer is only billed for the 13 "real" watts used per the summary, then this is a non-issue. I paid for a 13 watt bulb advertising $x in saving on my electric bill, and I get $x in saving on my electric bill. I make my purchasing decisions based on the cost to me, not on the cost to the power company.
(Emphasis mine)
You know, it's precisely this sort of attitude that's destroying both the global climate and the global economy. You are not a closed system. Your actions have ramifications outside of you. Tomorrow does, in fact, exist. Ultimately you will be paying for it, just maybe not directly.
See, what people fail to see is this requires not only Strong AI but also a programmed Malicious intent.
People keep assuming that if we build a robot that can emulate some of our thought, it will emulate our motives also
Since we program it, it will only emulate the motives we give it. Emulating motives that are abstract enough to eventually lead back to our demise are quite complex
The only motive we need to program into it for it to decide that humans are a problem is a motive of self-preservation. No malice required. There's a damn good reason why Asimov put that one at #3.
Although personally I've always thought that switching the order of the second and third laws would be more fair to our robotic friends. No ordering a robot to destroy itself just for the fun of it.
For stuff like beer and tobacco, the test would be on the health risks.
No, there should be two tests here, just like for the driver's license. The first test is a written one (like you mention) on the health risks and safety precautions. The second test is a physical test to see if they can handle their shit (under supervision, of course). I would like to see all drugs subject to this sort of licensing procedure, and get rid of those silly teetotaller laws.
The idea that we must colonise space to validate our existence is a religion, not science.
The way I look at it, we are the reproductive system for the entire biosphere. If we don't colonize other planets around different stars (let alone other rocks around this one) then all of Gaia* has failed, not just one little species.
* Please note I do not actually personify "Gaia", I just use it as a convenient and poetic label for the entire interconnected biosphere.
(5) just abandoning the whole outer space game anyhow and using a vast fiber optic ring on the surface for communication needs
The real problem here is that we're wasting *vast* amounts of orbital space with competing projects that don't share information with each other. There's more than plenty of room for *one* satellite network. But every little war-happy industrialized nation and every communications company and mapping company, etc., needs their own personal network clogging the sky.
Until we, as a species, get a little better at this "cooperation" thing and stop with the in-fighting, the debris field is just going to get worse and make space exploration difficult. (That might even be a good thing for any neighbors we might have.)
Sadly, I don't foresee this happening any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
"oh, God there's a whole universe in my thumbnail man."
Think you might have mistaken marijuana for mushrooms.
Now if you were staring at your thumbnail, and suddenly realized you didn't know WHY you were staring at said thumbnail... now THAT'S marijuana.
You know, a small subset of the population actually does react to marijuana that strongly. My wife is one of them (and yes, she has experience with stronger stuff like mushrooms too, so she knows what she's talking about).
Personally, I'm rather disappointed by most illicit drugs. Hollywood told me they would have a much stronger effect. I've tried alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms, acid, opium, ecstasy, cocaine, speed, and DMT, and not one of them made me actually lose control of myself or hallucinate in such a way that I couldn't easily differentiate it from reality. I still haven't tried some of the more exotic hallucinogens (like peyote), but I strongly suspect they won't be much different from mushrooms/acid.
No, HUMANS are stupid and selfish. It really has very little to do with age.
Please don't propagate ageism.
Oh, and no matter how young they are, your kids aren't your property. They are fully sentient individuals, and are generally capable of making their own decisions and learning from the bad ones all by themselves. The sooner you realize that, the better your relationship with them will be.
Bruce Sterling brings a more biting social commentary to his opus. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Holy Fire all challenged me to view my own experience of the world in a new light.
Snow Crash and Diamond Age (both excellent books) were written by Neal Stephenson, not Bruce Sterling.
I should think the fear of "falling into a hole - especially a hole with teeth" wouldn't be confined to the male gender. But hey, maybe I'm wrong...?
I bet the professor in question subscribes to a Freudian worldview. Whereas normal individuals see a hole with teeth as... a hole with teeth, Freud would see it as some sort of vagina monster (making it a "male" fear).
Freud was the master of a phenomenon called "projection", where he assumes that everyone else is fucked up in the same way that he is. It would be damn amusing if not for the tragedy of the fact that his flawed introspection-based ideas were so influential that they set back the entire profession of psychology by 100 years.
Sorry Freud, just because you have Oedipus issues doesn't mean everyone does. Logic fail.
I really hate this idea that people with any kind of advantage aren't allowed to participate in athletic competitions. What's the point, then? How far should we take it? Next thing you know, people will be rejected for the "unfair advantage" of simply having spent their life training for the event. (This actually already happens in the olympics to some extent with their ban on "professional" athletes in events like basketball).
Our "world records" are quite meaningless when the individuals with the greatest chance of actually setting one aren't allowed on the field. I also think it's inappropriate to ban athletes that have subjected themselves to chemical augmentation. I would suggest keeping separate "augmented" and "non-augmented" records, but ultimately it's impossible to determine where to draw the line between augmentation and things like tailored dietary supplements. But our records are a joke. We have no idea who the fastest human runner on the planet is, because he's not allowed to officially compete.
Cases like this also illustrate the ridiculousness of gender segregation in athletics. Does anyone with a basic science education actually still believe that there are only two genders? Should we have yet another segregated league for XXY athletes like M. Semenya? If we are going to acknowledge the tendencies for different genders to have different athletic abilities, why not acknowledge the tendencies among different races, age groups, cultures, shoe sizes, etc? I know, let's just put every individual in their own little athletic division and they can set records against themselves all day long. Imagine the profits for Guinness!
Correct. "Perfect" circles exist only as mathematical abstractions, they can never exist in the "real" world. The reason is that the universe (as best as we can tell) is NOT infinitely sub-divisible. You run into the limitations of Planck length.
The concept of pi being an irrational number really drove me crazy when I was a kid. I used to assume it was just a very complex rational number, and that future generations of computing power would reveal the "pattern" or "end" of pi. I cannot even begin to describe the sensation of a weight being lifted when I had the logical epiphany that circles don't actually exist, and therefore pi didn't need to be rational.
Thanks. I thought I needed to make that post.
BTW, what's up with most of the posts from burners being ACs? I've never thought of Slashdot as an environment where one needs to be secretive about liberal counter-culture affiliations... quite the opposite actually.
I've only been once, back in '01, and I loved it. (Even if it was basically impossible for me to do anything other than sit in a shade structure and drink water when the sun was out. The night, of course, is another story.) I would go more often, but it requires both time AND money, and I find it difficult to actually have both of those things at the same time.
Meh. I (as a person in that age range) am sick of being treated like someone who is expected to be chock full of hormones and therefore incapable of acting otherwise. People don't become adults faster by being told "you don't have to be mature yet" - they mature when people look at them strange and say "What's your problem? Stop acting like a child."
I agree. My own experiences as a teenager (a bit over a decade ago) combined with current reflection upon the "adult" world have shown me that the only difference between teenagers and "adults" is how they are treated by the rest of society. Any sane person would be depressed and/or rebellious if treated and viewed the way our culture typically treats and views teenagers. Expectations create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After I moved to SF, I sold my car. No need for it here.
Unless, of course, you ever want to leave SF for any reason. I know there's some decent public transportation to surrounding areas, but it's far from comprehensive, especially after the sun goes down.
Speaking of public transportation, it sure would be nice to get BART up here (I live in Santa Rosa). Fuck you Marin County, fuck you very much.
Santa Rosa's not exactly far from San Francisco. And since it's just Santa Rosa that's close you're fine with them being leveled in an earthquake?
As a lifetime resident of Santa Rosa, I hereby formally approve of your proposal for earthquake-based levelling, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
But I should warn you you're going to need one doozy of a quake to actually level the place. The 1906 "San Francisco" Earthquake hit harder up here than it did in San Francisco, and that one still left 4 buildings standing.
Thomas Jefferson was a bit nerdy, true, but he was disqualified from being the first nerd president because it's a well-known fact that he ran his own fantasy football league. And we all know that fantasy football is the territory of jocks, not nerds.
It may be true that in the modern day fantasy football is the domain of jocks, but back in Jefferson's time it was the equivalent of video games or RPGs.
Don't give up. I've known LOTS of gay geeks in my time. Of course, I live in North California, pretty close to Silicon Valley. Maybe your problem is location?
Actually, as a scientifically-minded agnostic, I have to agree that atheism is definitely a religion.
We really do lack sufficient evidence to comment on the existence of entities powerful enough to be called gods, who could potentially do things like create planets or influence evolution in a specific direction. In fact, given how vast the universe is, I'd even have to bet that something like that is out there somewhere. (Of course, true omnipotence or omniscience are quite impossible.)
Now, non-circular evidence for the existence of the gods of the religions of Earth is non-existent. All signs point to the fact that they are ideas created by men to control other men. It can be argued whether this was conscious pre-meditated intent by a few specific individuals or just an aggregate effect of collective ignorance and natural opportunistic tendencies, but the end result is the same.
So apparently the line break problem is only in the preview, and not in the actual post.
I give up.
Two instances of such an event in less than 60 years does not automatically invalidate the thousands of years prior where such an event had not occurred.
How do you know that no one got hit before that point? We've barely been keeping good records that long.
And what about the possibility of someone getting hit and killed with no witnesses around?
We really just don't have enough information. The sample size is laughably small to be able to extrapolate useful statistics.
Of course, I've never met a statistic that wasn't based on a laughably small sample size, but that's another topic.
P.S. How in the fuck do I make Slashdot make a line break? The "enter" key used to work just fine but now it doesn't. The line spacing looks right in the editor until I hit the preview button, then it magically disappears. I've tried double spacing, html tags... nothing seems to work. Am I just stupid?
I strongly agree with most of what you say, but I have a nitpick:
4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation.
I can't think of a single nasty thing you can do "on the Internet" that isn't already covered under existing laws for meatspace. We don't need separate (and in present practice unequal) laws for crimes that happen to take place via the Internet.
I do agree with your premise that we shouldn't twist weird unrelated laws into place to cover novel situations, I just think the Internet is a bad example.
Animals and fish? I don't think I've ever heard that split before.
You obviously haven't known many Catholics.
Catholics aren't allowed to eat animal meat on Fridays. According to their religious dogma, however, fish do not count as "animals", so they are okay to eat on no-meat day. (This is also why a lot of restaurants offer seafood specials on Friday.)
Thank you so much for your post. I thought I was the only geek that saw through the bullshit that is Mythbusters!
A quick search on YouTube for "split arrow" debunks their claim of it not being possible to pull off the "Robin Hood" shot. They sure didn't try very hard.
I have yet to see an episode of Mythbusters where I didn't have a major problem with their methodology.
It makes me sad that so many people think these guys are applying scientific rigor. They are doing a great disservice to geeks everywhere.
A friend of mine has a son who is a major department head at Amazon, and he's gay. So I have to point out this is not a witch hunt against gays.
Just because Amazon happens to employ gay individuals in positions of relative importance does not mean that the company as a whole isn't on an anti-gay witch hunt to appease the religious right-winger nutjobs. A good capitalist will gleefully oppress their own kind to make a profit.
My standard email address for sites I dont wish to give my real details to is bill@microsoft.com
I like to use nospam@foo.com or abuse@foo.com, where "foo.com" is the actual domain of the site I am entering my info to. (For example, microsoft gets nospam@microsoft.com).
If the customer is only billed for the 13 "real" watts used per the summary, then this is a non-issue. I paid for a 13 watt bulb advertising $x in saving on my electric bill, and I get $x in saving on my electric bill. I make my purchasing decisions based on the cost to me, not on the cost to the power company.
(Emphasis mine)
You know, it's precisely this sort of attitude that's destroying both the global climate and the global economy. You are not a closed system. Your actions have ramifications outside of you. Tomorrow does, in fact, exist. Ultimately you will be paying for it, just maybe not directly.
See, what people fail to see is this requires not only Strong AI but also a programmed Malicious intent.
People keep assuming that if we build a robot that can emulate some of our thought, it will emulate our motives also
Since we program it, it will only emulate the motives we give it. Emulating motives that are abstract enough to eventually lead back to our demise are quite complex
The only motive we need to program into it for it to decide that humans are a problem is a motive of self-preservation. No malice required. There's a damn good reason why Asimov put that one at #3.
Although personally I've always thought that switching the order of the second and third laws would be more fair to our robotic friends. No ordering a robot to destroy itself just for the fun of it.
For stuff like beer and tobacco, the test would be on the health risks.
No, there should be two tests here, just like for the driver's license. The first test is a written one (like you mention) on the health risks and safety precautions. The second test is a physical test to see if they can handle their shit (under supervision, of course). I would like to see all drugs subject to this sort of licensing procedure, and get rid of those silly teetotaller laws.
The idea that we must colonise space to validate our existence is a religion, not science.
The way I look at it, we are the reproductive system for the entire biosphere. If we don't colonize other planets around different stars (let alone other rocks around this one) then all of Gaia* has failed, not just one little species.
* Please note I do not actually personify "Gaia", I just use it as a convenient and poetic label for the entire interconnected biosphere.
(5) just abandoning the whole outer space game anyhow and using a vast fiber optic ring on the surface for communication needs
The real problem here is that we're wasting *vast* amounts of orbital space with competing projects that don't share information with each other. There's more than plenty of room for *one* satellite network. But every little war-happy industrialized nation and every communications company and mapping company, etc., needs their own personal network clogging the sky.
Until we, as a species, get a little better at this "cooperation" thing and stop with the in-fighting, the debris field is just going to get worse and make space exploration difficult. (That might even be a good thing for any neighbors we might have.)
Sadly, I don't foresee this happening any time soon.