My god, your application of the scientific method is down right idiotic. Lets take your application and use it to determine the validity of Scientology:
Formulation of a question: Are we immortal beings who have forgotten our true nature? Check
Hypothesis: Does auditing events in one's past frees them of their limiting effects, revealing one's true nature? Check
Prediction: If we audit someone they should better remember their true nature. Check
Testing: We have hundreds of thousands of people doing this for over a decade. Check
Analysis: Well we got some people who says it works. But we don't have any fixed numbers? No Check
4 out of 5, 80% Lets mark this under somewhat to.
By this implementation of the scientific method, everything is scientific.
Statistics begs to differ. There is a very strong correlation between poverty and crime rates. While not every poor person is a criminal, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be a criminal.
Entitlement programs like this, while designed to help people, over the long run do the opposite. From a simplistic viewpoint of the world, one can argue we are morally superior for feeding our hungry. On the other hand entitlement programs breed indifference, complacency and poor work ethic. Why should John Doe go out and work 40-60 hour weeks at minimum wage to get by when he can not work and get food stamps, health care, prepaid cell phone, and a government stipend for other bills. By removing the entitlements, these people are then forced to be productive members of society.
Food stamps in particular are a great example of this because of the huge amount of corruption surrounding them. I know people on food stamps going to the grocer and getting steak filets and lobster tail, while I went to college full time and worked part time and ate mostly ramen noodles and macaroni.
I stopped at A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan. Apparently you sir have not heard of electrical resistance. Yes we can do it, but the loss of energy as a function of length means we'd lose power doing something so ridiculous. This isn't a limit of technology, this is a limit of physics and a clear indicator that nothing you say is worth reading.
“People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”
No need for script kiddies, Ebola's symptoms can be described by a zombie like state in its later stages. Apart from multiple organ failure prior to death (walking dead), you experience "sludging" of the brain leaving you incognizant but retaining motor control. Then, the sloughing off of tissue in the esophagus leads to spewing of infected blood. All in all, a nasty way to go, but very comparable to a classic slow zombie.
42 according to the agencies collecting the data, and seeing as they are the only ones that know for sure, Im sure they are a little biased on that number. Also, there is no way to know if these plots were foiled do to direct results from these programs.
Furthermore, you apparently are not familiar with evidence based economics/policy. The possible potential for these are astounding, however in the wrong hands this type of analytics is dangerous. It is population control, pure and simple. The issue with using this information doesn't stem from some innate fear of technology, but of the powers that be. How am I supposed to trust a government to act in the best interest of its people when they do all of this analysis behind closed doors?
My example is this: this data collected is supposed to be used to improve traffic conditions. That is what we are told it is doing. This data could be used to target specific people ie terrorists, criminals, gun owners, foreigners, protesters, Jews, or African Americans. The point being we have no say in how the data is used, so what was once designed to help us can be used against us and with the government we have in place today, I don't see that as much of a stretch.
Its not the collection of the data, its the shady circumstances under which it is collected. All of this huge data collection happening outside the public's eye can be used for nefarious acts, not only by individuals, but by corporations and governments. What better way to control a population than through analytics?
Words change meaning over time. English, last time I checked, but I may be wrong on this, is a living language:
In contemporary usage, the term democracy refers to a government chosen by the people, whether it is direct or representative. The term republic has many different meanings, but today often refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, serving for a limited term, in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state, even if these states also are representative democracies with an elected or appointed head of government such as a prime minister.
The Founding Fathers of the United States rarely praised and often criticized democracy, which in their time tended to specifically mean direct democracy, often without the protection of a Constitution enshrining basic rights;
Dell sells a computer with 32 GB of RAM starting at $2000 and Apple at $2400. Both are desktops, but once it reaches manufacturers like this its pretty common place. Apple even has a 64 GB version available.
As for mobile devices, the HTC one has 2 GB, so using Moore's Law, we are looking at another 15 - 20 years for hand helds to have 20 GB of RAM. That's depending on whether you like David House's 18 months assertion or the more accurate 2 year approach, but according to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, its every three years now, so we are looking at, tops, 30 years.
"The Gun Is Civilization"
By Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat - it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed.
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.
The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation... And that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret.)
So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced.
Oh yeah, because they dont pay taxes in America on that income, and they dont contribute to society while they are here in any way, and dont buy products, groceries, gas, rent etc, while here.
All that money goes back with them when they move home....
Gladwell has never been one to adhere to scientific principles, he just spits out theories he likes and finds the evidence to support them:
Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not a scientist, and as a result his work is prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking".[56] Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions.[57] Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach.[58][59] Even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, Pinker sums up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning," while accusing him of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in his book Outliers. Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake, Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: "I will call this the Igon Value [sic] Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong."[58][n 1] A writer in The Independent accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights.[60] The Register has accused Gladwell of making arguments by weak analogy and commented that Gladwell has an "aversion for fact", adding that, "Gladwell has made a career out of handing simple, vacuous truths to people and dressing them up with flowery language and an impressionistic take on the scientific method."[61] Gladwell's approach has been satirized by the online site "The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator".[62]
60 hours a week is worked to death? Ive worked in the service industry and behind a desk at 60 hours a week and neither was deadly. 30 hours is a joke. What a horrible mindset we have here.
This is a false assumption. Technology increases jobs, just not of the same type it replaces. We will see a drastic shift from manufacturing positions and things that are increasingly easy to automate, to service oriented jobs, that require human interaction. This is obviously not super long term, where AI can replace the need for human to human interaction for service industries.
To counter the other statement above, a post-consumerist, post-scarcity society, isnt within reach, for a few reasons.People, like all animals, expand to the verge of scarcity in resources. There will always be a flux between new technological break throughs, leading to expansion, and a point of over using our resources, leading to shrinkage. Couple that with the thirst for power of humanity and we will never reach a post-scarcity of society. The best execution of power, and form of control, is creating an artificial scarcity of resources.
The Florida Lotto pays for the Bright Future Scholarships. That pays for every Florida high school student to go to college in state for 50%, 75% or 100% off, and its not hard to get. Yeah, terrible shame.
While unions have a potential upside for some workers, in an unregulated fashion, just as corporations, they will expand and abuse their power. In non-right to work states, this is very prevalent. Unions in such states have become mafia run organizations, bullying business for more contributions and bullying workers to participate and pay into these unions. They play both sides of the isle because they can, not helping either.
The point is Unions, unchecked, are no better than any other organization competing for your money and tend to lead to worse market conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats what I dont get. If he has 20TB of hard drive space as it is, why not double it and use that as a back up?
My god, your application of the scientific method is down right idiotic. Lets take your application and use it to determine the validity of Scientology:
Formulation of a question: Are we immortal beings who have forgotten our true nature? Check
Hypothesis: Does auditing events in one's past frees them of their limiting effects, revealing one's true nature? Check
Prediction: If we audit someone they should better remember their true nature. Check
Testing: We have hundreds of thousands of people doing this for over a decade. Check
Analysis: Well we got some people who says it works. But we don't have any fixed numbers? No Check
4 out of 5, 80% Lets mark this under somewhat to.
By this implementation of the scientific method, everything is scientific.
Statistics begs to differ. There is a very strong correlation between poverty and crime rates. While not every poor person is a criminal, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be a criminal. Entitlement programs like this, while designed to help people, over the long run do the opposite. From a simplistic viewpoint of the world, one can argue we are morally superior for feeding our hungry. On the other hand entitlement programs breed indifference, complacency and poor work ethic. Why should John Doe go out and work 40-60 hour weeks at minimum wage to get by when he can not work and get food stamps, health care, prepaid cell phone, and a government stipend for other bills. By removing the entitlements, these people are then forced to be productive members of society. Food stamps in particular are a great example of this because of the huge amount of corruption surrounding them. I know people on food stamps going to the grocer and getting steak filets and lobster tail, while I went to college full time and worked part time and ate mostly ramen noodles and macaroni.
I stopped at A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan. Apparently you sir have not heard of electrical resistance. Yes we can do it, but the loss of energy as a function of length means we'd lose power doing something so ridiculous. This isn't a limit of technology, this is a limit of physics and a clear indicator that nothing you say is worth reading.
Hon. B. Lynn Winmill: Chief District Judge 208-334-9145
courtesy: http://www.id.uscourts.gov/contactus.htm
-- George Mallory
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/123000-mph-plasma-engine-could-finally-take-astronauts-mars?page=2
These are super efficient and super fast and the fuel is readily available.
No need for script kiddies, Ebola's symptoms can be described by a zombie like state in its later stages. Apart from multiple organ failure prior to death (walking dead), you experience "sludging" of the brain leaving you incognizant but retaining motor control. Then, the sloughing off of tissue in the esophagus leads to spewing of infected blood. All in all, a nasty way to go, but very comparable to a classic slow zombie.
Furthermore, you apparently are not familiar with evidence based economics/policy. The possible potential for these are astounding, however in the wrong hands this type of analytics is dangerous. It is population control, pure and simple. The issue with using this information doesn't stem from some innate fear of technology, but of the powers that be. How am I supposed to trust a government to act in the best interest of its people when they do all of this analysis behind closed doors?
My example is this: this data collected is supposed to be used to improve traffic conditions. That is what we are told it is doing. This data could be used to target specific people ie terrorists, criminals, gun owners, foreigners, protesters, Jews, or African Americans. The point being we have no say in how the data is used, so what was once designed to help us can be used against us and with the government we have in place today, I don't see that as much of a stretch.
Its not the collection of the data, its the shady circumstances under which it is collected. All of this huge data collection happening outside the public's eye can be used for nefarious acts, not only by individuals, but by corporations and governments. What better way to control a population than through analytics?
Essentially, I'm judging someone else by comparing their behaviour to mine.
Enough said
This isnt true. Check out this study:
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/PopulationSize.pdf
If the population shrinks enough, ie massive plague or apocalyptic type stuff, technology will regress, even to a stone age like state.
In contemporary usage, the term democracy refers to a government chosen by the people, whether it is direct or representative. The term republic has many different meanings, but today often refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, serving for a limited term, in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state, even if these states also are representative democracies with an elected or appointed head of government such as a prime minister.
The Founding Fathers of the United States rarely praised and often criticized democracy, which in their time tended to specifically mean direct democracy, often without the protection of a Constitution enshrining basic rights;
wikipedia
I want my own replicant
He must have a very loving family
Dell sells a computer with 32 GB of RAM starting at $2000 and Apple at $2400. Both are desktops, but once it reaches manufacturers like this its pretty common place. Apple even has a 64 GB version available.
As for mobile devices, the HTC one has 2 GB, so using Moore's Law, we are looking at another 15 - 20 years for hand helds to have 20 GB of RAM. That's depending on whether you like David House's 18 months assertion or the more accurate 2 year approach, but according to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, its every three years now, so we are looking at, tops, 30 years.
"The Gun Is Civilization"
By Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat - it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed.
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.
The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation... And that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret.)
So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced.
Oh yeah, because they dont pay taxes in America on that income, and they dont contribute to society while they are here in any way, and dont buy products, groceries, gas, rent etc, while here.
All that money goes back with them when they move home....
Its not shipping overseas if we bring the talent here via H1B visas.
Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not a scientist, and as a result his work is prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking".[56] Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions.[57] Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach.[58][59] Even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, Pinker sums up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning," while accusing him of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in his book Outliers. Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake, Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: "I will call this the Igon Value [sic] Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong."[58][n 1] A writer in The Independent accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights.[60] The Register has accused Gladwell of making arguments by weak analogy and commented that Gladwell has an "aversion for fact", adding that, "Gladwell has made a career out of handing simple, vacuous truths to people and dressing them up with flowery language and an impressionistic take on the scientific method."[61] Gladwell's approach has been satirized by the online site "The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator".[62]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell
60 hours a week is worked to death? Ive worked in the service industry and behind a desk at 60 hours a week and neither was deadly. 30 hours is a joke. What a horrible mindset we have here.
This is a false assumption. Technology increases jobs, just not of the same type it replaces. We will see a drastic shift from manufacturing positions and things that are increasingly easy to automate, to service oriented jobs, that require human interaction. This is obviously not super long term, where AI can replace the need for human to human interaction for service industries.
To counter the other statement above, a post-consumerist, post-scarcity society, isnt within reach, for a few reasons.People, like all animals, expand to the verge of scarcity in resources. There will always be a flux between new technological break throughs, leading to expansion, and a point of over using our resources, leading to shrinkage. Couple that with the thirst for power of humanity and we will never reach a post-scarcity of society. The best execution of power, and form of control, is creating an artificial scarcity of resources.
The Florida Lotto pays for the Bright Future Scholarships. That pays for every Florida high school student to go to college in state for 50%, 75% or 100% off, and its not hard to get. Yeah, terrible shame.
The book 'The Jungle' did more to correct those than Unions.
To the Anonymous Coward,
While unions have a potential upside for some workers, in an unregulated fashion, just as corporations, they will expand and abuse their power. In non-right to work states, this is very prevalent. Unions in such states have become mafia run organizations, bullying business for more contributions and bullying workers to participate and pay into these unions. They play both sides of the isle because they can, not helping either.
The point is Unions, unchecked, are no better than any other organization competing for your money and tend to lead to worse market conditions.