.... make up your mind? You used to produce Plutonium and you saw it was good. But then man got greedy and raced upward to the skies and eat from the forbidden fruit. And complicated-gdp-involving-economy-formula was not happy and it convinced you that it was bad. And Plutonium was no more, Savannah Rivers dropped the Rivers and became a p0rn5tar and the fallen from grace NASA purchased plutonium from Russia. Now there is what looks like good news, the saviour will be born, the native plutonium-producer child of NASA. A step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long space exploration. After a jump backward, sort of.
Hmm... Just when they get a whiff of the Higgs they shut down. Curious. Either "those in the know" have to have some time to make sure things like the LHC don't really find it, or they need a little time to reengineer the Higgs so as to make it less detectable.
I don't really know whether it will be or any use to reply to this post, but I will take my chance anyhow.
In extremely few words, shutting down the LHC has nothing to do with finding the Higgs Boson, as of now. The data from the particle collisions is NOT processed in real time. The data is stored and processed at a much slower rate compared to that of which it is produced. Already there's TONS of data that needs to be processed and analysed. The necessary data for determining whether there truly is a Higgs Boson or not is already there, waiting only to be looked at and analysed. The fact our ability to process $DATA is slower than our ability to produce $DATA has nothing to do with 'those in the know redesigning Higgs to fit their needs'.
You should *watch less* conspiracy theory movies, and *read more* real science.
This is the price you pay for being immature. You know you have done something wrong (1.drive drunk 2.smash a car and the incident is the effect of a cause that is you alone, in wrongdoing). You look around, make sure noone sees you and when this turns out to be positive, you keep your fucking mouth shut. QED.
I have an IQ of 150, am a member of a 3 sigma IQ society. But I cannot remember names, and if I had to do manual skilled labor, I would starve to death. There are people with a much lower IQ who I admire greatly for their skill sets and abilities that I will never have
-- MyLongNickName
Actually, this does not make the concept of IQ a myth. It only shows that skillset and perseverance are unrelated to it and that different people put them in a different order on the 'what is more valuable and important' list.
Apple has patented round corners. Apple has patented the double click. Apple has patented the scrollbar. Apple has patented speakers, but only for non-computers.
I'm so tired of this "I can piss while lumping at the same time. Even if you can do it I have patented it so you have to pay me." Fuck these idiots till they die. (Is fuck-till-death patented, by the way?)
It shows quite a lot in general about the writer of any message. Good grammar put into something written shows also the clarity of the idea that needs to be conveyed by the written piece. You can possibly understand that "Me now go home it now is very late" really means "I have to go home now as it is very late for me", but if I saw any of the two on a CV for employee selection, I would definitely consider the later one first.
In japan the importance of language education is on yet another higher level. They use 3 different alphabets there, hiragana, katagana and kanji. The exact same pasage can be written by using hiragana and katagana alone, but also by using all three. The more kanji you throw in, the more it is considered that you are well learned and educated, the more everyone will grant you respect-points.
It is not a matter of feeding your written piece to a spell checker or grammar corrector. This is what this process has succumbed to. The importance of grammar is really what you put into written pieces immediately as you think about it. Correcting yourself with those is always a good thing, but relying on those to fix and covers errors which you know you have in your written piece, that's what will keep you going in the short term of course, but sooner or later your inability to articulate will be discovered. That moment is usually not a very comfortable one.
I really don't understand why there always has to be a mentality of racing, someone has to win, the need for a looser whom the winner can bully and exploit.
Many have pointed out that this "space race" term is a coined one. And even the title of this submission, suggesting that some long asleep 'debates' have now reawakened: "OMG, my moment has come. You shunned me when the cold war was over, but now there's a new enemy/risk and my arguments breathe a new life on your face again". Call me what you will, but I honestly think that some undertakes are beyond the scope and mentality and benefit of private sectors, or free market sort-of-BS. One of these undertakes is the space programs and missions. Another one is healthcare and most of what goes on in medicinal research. Space exploration, currently, is in its infancy, and so it will remain even for the next 100 years. Whatever is achieved today, regardless of who does it, is bound to benefit the entire Earth population as a whole. Having these debates on who is first and inventing races and yacking about privatizing space. And there comes this moment when there comes a nation other than corporate America, which sees things in a completely different view which could be anything else but corporate. I'm not saying whether it is better or worse, but just different. And when this yields results, all of a sudden there emerges the "racing challenger".
It's a shame that a country like the US is more and more falling to the "four legs good, two legs bad" mentality. Win-Win situations are much more feasible and real than many are willing to admit.
Indeed patents are supposed to be inventive. And I really can't understand how some of you here can't see the inventivess in a shape, or even call it a utility shape. Speaking of which... Let's see... all these are shapes, right? Bent-over. Knees-against-shoulders. Spread-wide. On-fours. On-fours-chest-down.
All right, don't go anywhere, I'll be back! (*running towards the patent office*)
This induced difference in macro- and micro- evolution is on the same ballpark as making a difference between macro- and micro- arithmetic. We don't call macro-arithmetic the calculation 10000+10000 and we don't call micro-arithmetic the calculation 10+10. The same would apply for evolution. Just as arithmetic is called (in a simplified way) the basic operations (such as addition) between any two numbers regardless of which these numbers are, in the same way it is called evolution the basic operations (such as recombination, replication, replacement) between genes, regardless of which these genes are. In arithmetic, the result is a different number. In evolution the result is a different organism. To go on with the analogy, we could agree to call micro-arithmetic when the result of addition is in the same order of magnitude as the operands, and macro-arithmetic when the result is in a different order of magnitude. So is with evolution, micro-evolution we could agree to call when the result is in the same order of magnitude as the operands (read as mutated offspring are able to sexually produce other offspring with the original species) and macro-evolution to call a result that is in a different order of magnitude (mutated offspring are not able to sexually produce other offspring with the original species. We could agree further on to call this mutated offspring a new species).
I should thank God though, for providing me with logic through the natural process of evolution, thus able to see through a pile of divine bullshit, and therefore proclaiming myself an atheist.
Mod parent up please. I was just about to wrote the same thing and he beat me twice: first in the chronologial sense. Second in the politeness department, for I felt more like "Who the f*ck do these US politicians think they are that they self-grant the right to give a school grade to Wikipedia?"
Because a lot of engineers don't have an analytical mind, they have an engineering degree. I used to work with a lot of very religious engineers as well, and I found out more often than not they were good at math, not solving actual problems.
A lot of engineers? What do you mean by "a lot"?
Or maybe what I have learned differs from what you have learned. What I have learned is that statistically speaking, world-wise speaking, if you were to measure the population by groups of profession profiles, the group of engineers and physicists battle each other for the top of the list for having the lowest percentage of believers, and also if you measure for atheist orientation, they battle for top of the list for highest percentage.
Another thing to consider is where one lives. If you live in US for example, I'm sure there are definitely much more engineers with religious beliefs if you compare to Europe.
And last but not least, if you used to work with engineers, well I am an electronics engineer. In the university, in a class of around 30 people, I remember no more than 10 people who would admit they held a soft spot for a deity, but that was mostly because of a tradition and because of their families. Only one became a fanatic and what you could call a 'book basher' during the second year, his father died so who knows what impact that event had on him. And the rest of the people didn't hide it thei strong atheist convictions and would dismiss religion and deity as plain bullshit and prehistoric. After graduation, my work and profession naturally has kept my life in an environment where the people around me, someone they know, or friends of friends of friends and so on, this let's call it part of a population, is extremely rich in either engineers like me, or people with a likewise mentality. After all, I tend to hang around people with strong analytical minds in favor of dumb drones. And I can assure you that these people, are very irreligious and atheist oriented. Of course there are religious ones among them, and they have all the right to be, but again, I assure you, they are a very obvious minority.
So now that we have some agreement on what we can both call "a lot", we can move on to the next chapter.
Well, I could type M$ or Windoze and get mocked. I can not be bothered to bother about it. Go on, try it if you like. I am not inventing stuff out of the blue, there is a reason why there exist the M$ and Windoze terms. This entire discussion thread speaks tons about it, with facts, not fantasy. In a fair way even, there are those who agree and there are those who disagree. Who am I to judgde, after all.
But what really bothers me is someone replying to this post saying: You should not say those things. They are Microsoft Patented.
I was about to ask how does this malware gets installed in the phones on the first place. But now after reading your post, I can see this was all a joke so I feel safe again. So... where is the joke anyhow? I don't appreciate you leaving the question half answered, you insensitive clod!
I don't think that life from scratch and FTL are completely interchangeable as analogies for each other. FTL is very subtle and almost reasonable when one goes to prove it theoretically, but to what I know it has been shown to be a fallacy. Life from scratch on the other hand, is still possible in theory: basically some elements that come together to form more complicated compounds. There's a lot more to be known on the practical side: how exactly do these compounds form (aminoacids as part of starforming clouds maybe), how do they combine on the first place (is water needed as a catalyst? Does radiation play a role into the process, for good or for bad?) and many other things. I think that research in trying to form life from scratch can actually tackle the same problems you have mentioned: DNA replication mechanisms, energy generation, organelles, etc. But the tunnel is now being dug from the other end: from the start and simplest and towards the more complicated. We have already made some progress while reducing the complicated. So why not try the other method as well? By definition, they must converge at some point, as part of one mechanism, one theory, the same thing.
Interleaving.... Well, there always is inteleave, I think one can not make a distinction with an axe between elements while learning. I can say though that yes, we did have many one hour sessions of training when we would practice just three extremely basic elements: 1) Move forward (how low/high the body should be, how far apart the feet should be, where was the area that the body center of gravity should project on the ground, etc) 2) Move backward (it is slightly different, not exactly the move forward in reverse) 3) Turn around 180 degrees, switching guard sides. And then, these were combined into a compound sequence: move forward a few steps, turn around, move backward in the same direction. Yet, without having understood and mastered each move individually, one can't be good at the compound sequence. If one has to think on the elements of the sequence, sorry, stop, re-practice the offending single move.
With experience, thus grows the concept of "one thing" when we say "one thing at a time". There comes a moment when "one thing" is an entire kata, a sequence of moves representing an imaginary fight. It is that what is then practiced "one at a time" even though in itself it is made of many moves, many ideas behind it, many elements. Even when to breathe in and when to breathe out do count. So I think it is not a matter of whether there is interleave between the elements being learned. If we want to be rigorous, there always is, in every field of life. What I deem important is the proper classification of "one thing", what to be considered a basic block that needs to be mastered before moving on to the next, how much it will influence the next stage and how potential does it have to screw up a more complex thing if it is not learned and mastered properly.
I agree with the physical skills subject. Having done martial arts for 8 years, I can say that if you want to really learn, at first you need to learn the very basic moves, and repeat them till your mind explodes from boredom. In the meanwhile your also learn from the instructor the philosophy, the logic why it makes sense, some story behind each move, and so on. As time goes by, repetition-till-boredom has actually produced some conditioned instincts for the basic moves which now can just happen without you thinking of moving that way. And here comes the next step: combine them, like lego bricks to form a building. And so on.
On the other hand, I have studied engineering. I never took notes in class. That's what the books are for. In class one listens and understands the logic, and asks some question for things that don't feel right. You follow the professor during the lecture. One can't have a rest (take notes) mentally while the professor is bombarding with new information (lecturing). Then the lecture is over, one goes home and opens the book, and finds himself in the situation: Yes, I remember this. This too. And this too. And let me follow now closely this mathematical trick which didn't quite convince me....
At least this how these things have worked for me.
... you insensitive clod. It is part of increased stability in Win8.
"Look, I have managed to reset this 6 times in just 5 minutes and it is still working."
What I want to see is a big button, right next to the windows logo labeled: "Convert to DRM"
This so true. I mean, there have been now several years (to put it mildly) that in my mind there is a downward and backward push that the USA is imposing on the World. I'm sure they have many good things, they have brilliant minds at work there, state of the art technology is produced there... these are what give it an edge. But damn it, all these don't justify this fervor to push others down when they try to improve themselves. Summing it up: You innovate? Fill this patent application form please, it's cheap, several billions. You produce raw product? Not without us protecting your factories from theft, for a fee. You have natural reserves? Can't sell em around, we have created a global legislation for that, it says you need to use our currency only. You have an idea? You bloody anarchist who wants to experiment with well established routine. You fell head down and now are seeing stars? Not without the stripes. You are an atheist? We shunned Bertrand Russell once, so shut up, you nazi communist materialist ethicless immoral piece of sh!t.
Really, I don't like to generalise, but it is in moments like this when from the depths of my being comes roaring: Who do you think you are, you prime thief of the entire World? Live and let live, you idiotic cowboy!
They could by all means be that. Or it could be that the "3 million +" emails that are being used as a threat are only the loud part of the breach, by the same logic therefore, the less dangerous part.
I agree with the post and its analysis. But there is one element which in my opinion is left under the shadows because it is elusive, but very important.
The USA has since always taking people from all around the world, not only the education. While all the other countries mentioned: Russia, Europe, China; have always know what does it mean brain-drain or a relative lack of engineers in the Balance of All Things(TM), the USA has always been the place where this intellectual fallout from everywhere else landed, layered and piled up. Why and how, it's also a matter of history and not as simple as finding The Reason Why And How. But I believe education plays a big role in this. It is not very apparent when you import ready-made products of good education from elsewhere, but it darn is important!
I can see some discussions which kind of mention the recent virus experiment, or the weapon technology, as a way to partly agree with what TFA is about.
How I see all this is under a different light though. Scientific research is science. It is not something which necessarily has to do with weapon, or war, or terrorism and such. Technology is simply technology and it remains such no matter how one puts it into use. It is like withholding information on how to produce high quality steel because it will be used to make very sharp swords, or nuclear energy and research is bad and information about it should be restricted because such knowledge is involved in producing bombs. One doesn't need a knife to commit murder, a fork can serve just as well.
Awareness and choice on how technology is used has nothing to do with technology itself. If the concern is at such level that technology will be used for harm, the problem lies with the functioning of the social system, or what values the population has come to appreciate, or what classifies as justice and the feeling of whether it is applied justly or selectively, and so on. It most probably is not a problem of technology. Trying to solve whatever problem it really is by covering it with the veil of 'harmful tech' is burying the head in sand towards the real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
... please abort. The hype of most anything usually last only three days. Tomorrow will be 1st no more and we will have normality restored.
.... make up your mind?
You used to produce Plutonium and you saw it was good. But then man got greedy and raced upward to the skies and eat from the forbidden fruit. And complicated-gdp-involving-economy-formula was not happy and it convinced you that it was bad. And Plutonium was no more, Savannah Rivers dropped the Rivers and became a p0rn5tar and the fallen from grace NASA purchased plutonium from Russia. Now there is what looks like good news, the saviour will be born, the native plutonium-producer child of NASA. A step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long space exploration. After a jump backward, sort of.
I wish we just got rid of the jumps backward.
Hmm... Just when they get a whiff of the Higgs they shut down. Curious. Either "those in the know" have to have some time to make sure things like the LHC don't really find it, or they need a little time to reengineer the Higgs so as to make it less detectable.
I don't really know whether it will be or any use to reply to this post, but I will take my chance anyhow.
In extremely few words, shutting down the LHC has nothing to do with finding the Higgs Boson, as of now. The data from the particle collisions is NOT processed in real time. The data is stored and processed at a much slower rate compared to that of which it is produced. Already there's TONS of data that needs to be processed and analysed. The necessary data for determining whether there truly is a Higgs Boson or not is already there, waiting only to be looked at and analysed. The fact our ability to process $DATA is slower than our ability to produce $DATA has nothing to do with 'those in the know redesigning Higgs to fit their needs'.
You should *watch less* conspiracy theory movies, and *read more* real science.
*rubbing hands evilly*
And them Standard Model bastards will see how dead SuSy is. Mwwwaaahahahahaa....
This is the price you pay for being immature.
You know you have done something wrong (1.drive drunk 2.smash a car and the incident is the effect of a cause that is you alone, in wrongdoing). You look around, make sure noone sees you and when this turns out to be positive, you keep your fucking mouth shut. QED.
I have an IQ of 150, am a member of a 3 sigma IQ society. But I cannot remember names, and if I had to do manual skilled labor, I would starve to death. There are people with a much lower IQ who I admire greatly for their skill sets and abilities that I will never have
-- MyLongNickName
Actually, this does not make the concept of IQ a myth. It only shows that skillset and perseverance are unrelated to it and that different people put them in a different order on the 'what is more valuable and important' list.
Apple has patented round corners. Apple has patented the double click. Apple has patented the scrollbar. Apple has patented speakers, but only for non-computers.
I'm so tired of this "I can piss while lumping at the same time. Even if you can do it I have patented it so you have to pay me." Fuck these idiots till they die. (Is fuck-till-death patented, by the way?)
Grammar does matter.
It shows quite a lot in general about the writer of any message. Good grammar put into something written shows also the clarity of the idea that needs to be conveyed by the written piece. You can possibly understand that "Me now go home it now is very late" really means "I have to go home now as it is very late for me", but if I saw any of the two on a CV for employee selection, I would definitely consider the later one first.
In japan the importance of language education is on yet another higher level. They use 3 different alphabets there, hiragana, katagana and kanji. The exact same pasage can be written by using hiragana and katagana alone, but also by using all three. The more kanji you throw in, the more it is considered that you are well learned and educated, the more everyone will grant you respect-points.
It is not a matter of feeding your written piece to a spell checker or grammar corrector. This is what this process has succumbed to. The importance of grammar is really what you put into written pieces immediately as you think about it. Correcting yourself with those is always a good thing, but relying on those to fix and covers errors which you know you have in your written piece, that's what will keep you going in the short term of course, but sooner or later your inability to articulate will be discovered. That moment is usually not a very comfortable one.
I really don't understand why there always has to be a mentality of racing, someone has to win, the need for a looser whom the winner can bully and exploit.
Many have pointed out that this "space race" term is a coined one. And even the title of this submission, suggesting that some long asleep 'debates' have now reawakened: "OMG, my moment has come. You shunned me when the cold war was over, but now there's a new enemy/risk and my arguments breathe a new life on your face again".
Call me what you will, but I honestly think that some undertakes are beyond the scope and mentality and benefit of private sectors, or free market sort-of-BS. One of these undertakes is the space programs and missions. Another one is healthcare and most of what goes on in medicinal research.
Space exploration, currently, is in its infancy, and so it will remain even for the next 100 years. Whatever is achieved today, regardless of who does it, is bound to benefit the entire Earth population as a whole. Having these debates on who is first and inventing races and yacking about privatizing space. And there comes this moment when there comes a nation other than corporate America, which sees things in a completely different view which could be anything else but corporate. I'm not saying whether it is better or worse, but just different. And when this yields results, all of a sudden there emerges the "racing challenger".
It's a shame that a country like the US is more and more falling to the "four legs good, two legs bad" mentality. Win-Win situations are much more feasible and real than many are willing to admit.
Indeed patents are supposed to be inventive. And I really can't understand how some of you here can't see the inventivess in a shape, or even call it a utility shape.
Speaking of which... Let's see... all these are shapes, right? Bent-over. Knees-against-shoulders. Spread-wide. On-fours. On-fours-chest-down.
All right, don't go anywhere, I'll be back!
(*running towards the patent office*)
I second this.
This induced difference in macro- and micro- evolution is on the same ballpark as making a difference between macro- and micro- arithmetic. We don't call macro-arithmetic the calculation 10000+10000 and we don't call micro-arithmetic the calculation 10+10. The same would apply for evolution. Just as arithmetic is called (in a simplified way) the basic operations (such as addition) between any two numbers regardless of which these numbers are, in the same way it is called evolution the basic operations (such as recombination, replication, replacement) between genes, regardless of which these genes are. In arithmetic, the result is a different number. In evolution the result is a different organism. To go on with the analogy, we could agree to call micro-arithmetic when the result of addition is in the same order of magnitude as the operands, and macro-arithmetic when the result is in a different order of magnitude. So is with evolution, micro-evolution we could agree to call when the result is in the same order of magnitude as the operands (read as mutated offspring are able to sexually produce other offspring with the original species) and macro-evolution to call a result that is in a different order of magnitude (mutated offspring are not able to sexually produce other offspring with the original species. We could agree further on to call this mutated offspring a new species).
I should thank God though, for providing me with logic through the natural process of evolution, thus able to see through a pile of divine bullshit, and therefore proclaiming myself an atheist.
Mod parent up please. I was just about to wrote the same thing and he beat me twice: first in the chronologial sense. Second in the politeness department, for I felt more like "Who the f*ck do these US politicians think they are that they self-grant the right to give a school grade to Wikipedia?"
Because a lot of engineers don't have an analytical mind, they have an engineering degree. I used to work with a lot of very religious engineers as well, and I found out more often than not they were good at math, not solving actual problems.
A lot of engineers? What do you mean by "a lot"?
Or maybe what I have learned differs from what you have learned. What I have learned is that statistically speaking, world-wise speaking, if you were to measure the population by groups of profession profiles, the group of engineers and physicists battle each other for the top of the list for having the lowest percentage of believers, and also if you measure for atheist orientation, they battle for top of the list for highest percentage.
Another thing to consider is where one lives. If you live in US for example, I'm sure there are definitely much more engineers with religious beliefs if you compare to Europe.
And last but not least, if you used to work with engineers, well I am an electronics engineer. In the university, in a class of around 30 people, I remember no more than 10 people who would admit they held a soft spot for a deity, but that was mostly because of a tradition and because of their families. Only one became a fanatic and what you could call a 'book basher' during the second year, his father died so who knows what impact that event had on him. And the rest of the people didn't hide it thei strong atheist convictions and would dismiss religion and deity as plain bullshit and prehistoric. After graduation, my work and profession naturally has kept my life in an environment where the people around me, someone they know, or friends of friends of friends and so on, this let's call it part of a population, is extremely rich in either engineers like me, or people with a likewise mentality. After all, I tend to hang around people with strong analytical minds in favor of dumb drones. And I can assure you that these people, are very irreligious and atheist oriented. Of course there are religious ones among them, and they have all the right to be, but again, I assure you, they are a very obvious minority.
So now that we have some agreement on what we can both call "a lot", we can move on to the next chapter.
Well, I could type M$ or Windoze and get mocked. I can not be bothered to bother about it. Go on, try it if you like. I am not inventing stuff out of the blue, there is a reason why there exist the M$ and Windoze terms. This entire discussion thread speaks tons about it, with facts, not fantasy. In a fair way even, there are those who agree and there are those who disagree. Who am I to judgde, after all.
But what really bothers me is someone replying to this post saying: You should not say those things. They are Microsoft Patented.
I was about to ask how does this malware gets installed in the phones on the first place. But now after reading your post, I can see this was all a joke so I feel safe again.
So... where is the joke anyhow? I don't appreciate you leaving the question half answered, you insensitive clod!
I don't think that life from scratch and FTL are completely interchangeable as analogies for each other. FTL is very subtle and almost reasonable when one goes to prove it theoretically, but to what I know it has been shown to be a fallacy. Life from scratch on the other hand, is still possible in theory: basically some elements that come together to form more complicated compounds. There's a lot more to be known on the practical side: how exactly do these compounds form (aminoacids as part of starforming clouds maybe), how do they combine on the first place (is water needed as a catalyst? Does radiation play a role into the process, for good or for bad?) and many other things.
I think that research in trying to form life from scratch can actually tackle the same problems you have mentioned: DNA replication mechanisms, energy generation, organelles, etc. But the tunnel is now being dug from the other end: from the start and simplest and towards the more complicated. We have already made some progress while reducing the complicated. So why not try the other method as well? By definition, they must converge at some point, as part of one mechanism, one theory, the same thing.
Interleaving.... Well, there always is inteleave, I think one can not make a distinction with an axe between elements while learning. I can say though that yes, we did have many one hour sessions of training when we would practice just three extremely basic elements: 1) Move forward (how low/high the body should be, how far apart the feet should be, where was the area that the body center of gravity should project on the ground, etc) 2) Move backward (it is slightly different, not exactly the move forward in reverse) 3) Turn around 180 degrees, switching guard sides. And then, these were combined into a compound sequence: move forward a few steps, turn around, move backward in the same direction. Yet, without having understood and mastered each move individually, one can't be good at the compound sequence. If one has to think on the elements of the sequence, sorry, stop, re-practice the offending single move.
With experience, thus grows the concept of "one thing" when we say "one thing at a time". There comes a moment when "one thing" is an entire kata, a sequence of moves representing an imaginary fight. It is that what is then practiced "one at a time" even though in itself it is made of many moves, many ideas behind it, many elements. Even when to breathe in and when to breathe out do count. So I think it is not a matter of whether there is interleave between the elements being learned. If we want to be rigorous, there always is, in every field of life. What I deem important is the proper classification of "one thing", what to be considered a basic block that needs to be mastered before moving on to the next, how much it will influence the next stage and how potential does it have to screw up a more complex thing if it is not learned and mastered properly.
I agree with the physical skills subject. Having done martial arts for 8 years, I can say that if you want to really learn, at first you need to learn the very basic moves, and repeat them till your mind explodes from boredom. In the meanwhile your also learn from the instructor the philosophy, the logic why it makes sense, some story behind each move, and so on. As time goes by, repetition-till-boredom has actually produced some conditioned instincts for the basic moves which now can just happen without you thinking of moving that way. And here comes the next step: combine them, like lego bricks to form a building. And so on. On the other hand, I have studied engineering. I never took notes in class. That's what the books are for. In class one listens and understands the logic, and asks some question for things that don't feel right. You follow the professor during the lecture. One can't have a rest (take notes) mentally while the professor is bombarding with new information (lecturing). Then the lecture is over, one goes home and opens the book, and finds himself in the situation: Yes, I remember this. This too. And this too. And let me follow now closely this mathematical trick which didn't quite convince me. ...
At least this how these things have worked for me.
... you insensitive clod. It is part of increased stability in Win8. "Look, I have managed to reset this 6 times in just 5 minutes and it is still working." What I want to see is a big button, right next to the windows logo labeled: "Convert to DRM"
This so true. I mean, there have been now several years (to put it mildly) that in my mind there is a downward and backward push that the USA is imposing on the World. I'm sure they have many good things, they have brilliant minds at work there, state of the art technology is produced there... these are what give it an edge. But damn it, all these don't justify this fervor to push others down when they try to improve themselves. Summing it up: You innovate? Fill this patent application form please, it's cheap, several billions. You produce raw product? Not without us protecting your factories from theft, for a fee. You have natural reserves? Can't sell em around, we have created a global legislation for that, it says you need to use our currency only. You have an idea? You bloody anarchist who wants to experiment with well established routine. You fell head down and now are seeing stars? Not without the stripes. You are an atheist? We shunned Bertrand Russell once, so shut up, you nazi communist materialist ethicless immoral piece of sh!t. Really, I don't like to generalise, but it is in moments like this when from the depths of my being comes roaring: Who do you think you are, you prime thief of the entire World? Live and let live, you idiotic cowboy!
They could by all means be that. Or it could be that the "3 million +" emails that are being used as a threat are only the loud part of the breach, by the same logic therefore, the less dangerous part.
I agree with the post and its analysis. But there is one element which in my opinion is left under the shadows because it is elusive, but very important. The USA has since always taking people from all around the world, not only the education. While all the other countries mentioned: Russia, Europe, China; have always know what does it mean brain-drain or a relative lack of engineers in the Balance of All Things(TM), the USA has always been the place where this intellectual fallout from everywhere else landed, layered and piled up. Why and how, it's also a matter of history and not as simple as finding The Reason Why And How. But I believe education plays a big role in this. It is not very apparent when you import ready-made products of good education from elsewhere, but it darn is important!
I can see some discussions which kind of mention the recent virus experiment, or the weapon technology, as a way to partly agree with what TFA is about. How I see all this is under a different light though. Scientific research is science. It is not something which necessarily has to do with weapon, or war, or terrorism and such. Technology is simply technology and it remains such no matter how one puts it into use. It is like withholding information on how to produce high quality steel because it will be used to make very sharp swords, or nuclear energy and research is bad and information about it should be restricted because such knowledge is involved in producing bombs. One doesn't need a knife to commit murder, a fork can serve just as well. Awareness and choice on how technology is used has nothing to do with technology itself. If the concern is at such level that technology will be used for harm, the problem lies with the functioning of the social system, or what values the population has come to appreciate, or what classifies as justice and the feeling of whether it is applied justly or selectively, and so on. It most probably is not a problem of technology. Trying to solve whatever problem it really is by covering it with the veil of 'harmful tech' is burying the head in sand towards the real problem.