As far as evolution goes, they are pretty much dead already. They might have a minor effect caused by a distinction between how they relate to blood relatives and others. (they can help a sibling find a spouse, or they can commit a racially-motivated killing)
FYI, there are plenty of countries that do kill gays. It's common among countries that are African or Islamic. Uganda is joining the list right now.
So if you've got a Darwin sticker on your car you shouldn't be in favor of any health care since "only the strong survive."
Let's make a deal: we provide the health care as long as they don't reproduce.
Colorblindness is 100 points of badness, minor hearing loss is 10 points, severe hearing loss is 50 points, total hearing loss is 300 points, diabetes is 50 points, each infection requiring antibiotics is 1 point...
What you seem to be describing is a form of meritocracy. The American dream you describe assumes that with hard work anyone can succeed.
You're mixing up quite a bit here.
Merit: it includes IQ, looks, strength, etc.
American dream: everyone is ALLOWED to attempt success (unlike how some parts of the world work, with castes or nobility)
Nothing says hard work will be enough.
Anyone could be smart, anyone could be hard-working. The worst-case of the society I am describing is one without that possibility. It is utterly unmeritocratic: no matter how hard you work, you would be unable to succeed because you were genetically inferior.
Genetic superiority is one kind of merit.
You fail because you simply aren't smart enough, or haven't enough stamina, or lack the inbuilt emotional intelligence or what have you. The elite would be like an entrenched aristocracy, except instead of being merely more wealthy, they would also be physically and mentally privileged - and they would pass those advantages on to their offspring.
This is how it works right now. Note however that there isn't a sharp line between elite and non-elite, and that the elite barely ever reproduce.
Example: I chose a wife based on exactly those attributes, and she chose me in the same way. If you could add up all the attributes to make an eliteness score, you'd likely find that my score is nearly the same as my wife's score. There is an obvious reason for that: we all chase after the best we think we can catch. Now, unsurprisingly, my kids are turning out like my wife and I. It looks like I have passed my advantages on to my offspring.
Historically the aristocracy were in fact physically different. The rich ate a diet including meat and a variety of other foods. The poor had only a limited diet of nutritionally incomplete foods - with insufficient protein, for example. Imagining eating a gruel of millet and turnips every day. The difference between rich and poor was manifested physically. You could tell a poor person just by looking at him: his status was physically marked on his body. In a physical conflict the rich would be likely to win simply because they were physically superior.
Historically??? You can tell today. Obesity is very common among the poor people who live on corn syrup and trans fats. The rich folk subsist on organic produce and seafood. Lots of desirable things are associated with each other: having money, being educated, being tall, being non-obese, looking attractive, facial symmetry, not having STDs, etc.
The difference is that today the poor are not excluded by law. They are unlikely to succeed, but they are allowed to try. We have social mobility, not a social lottery.
The language of the courtroom is a mix of legal jargon and programmer jargon, glued together with the English of people who went to graduate school. To the jury it's a bunch of babble.
Once you ignore all that, you're left with a sob story. The little guy is hurt. Obviously, money is required. People don't sue unless somebody else did something bad, and the trial only requires a likelyhood for a win, so there you go. SCO wins.
Count the loop nesting, look up any well-studied algorithms, and don't be a dummy about computation/storage hidden behind layers of object-oriented obfuscation. It's easy.
Seldom does anybody need to determine things down to the last byte or CPU cycle. You can't do that anyway unless you use something like assembly. In the time you might spend improving your estimate, computers will get faster and your software project will get later.
Just doing rough estimates puts you way ahead of everybody else, allowing you to avoid severe stupidity. BTW, remember that any libraries you depend on may become worse in future revisions, and you're screwed if you don't have the source code to fix it.
using bluetooth to connect an audio processor to an earpiece would completely destroy the psychoacoustical cues that enable things like direction-perception
Some people have only one ear, you insensitive clod!
Actually, latency wouldn't hurt as long as it is predictable. The less natural things are (equal delay from each ear, microphone in the ear to allow for external ear reflections, etc.) the more you'll need to adjust. You will adjust though; the brain is adaptable.
At the end of the day, a non-flawless hearing aid isn't like a malfunctioning heart valve or defective contact lens... failure isn't consequence-free, but it's nowhere near the same magnitude of severity
Suppose it picks up wireless telephone handset conversations. Pretty soon everybody knows you as the guy who hears voices. You lose your job, your spouse leaves you, and you end up on the streets pushing a stolen shopping cart full of cans and bottles.
We can sort of classify the languages into "slow" and "not slow" in various ways.
Learning: Pascal is fast. C++ is horribly slow. The rest are moderate.
Compiling: While it can't beat "no compile", Pascal is shockingly fast for people used to something like C or Java. C++ is horribly slow.
Start-up: Pascal again does fine. Here it's joined by C and C++. The interpreted stuff is typicallly an embarassment.
Run-time: Pascal again does fine. Here it's joined by C. C++ can be fast if you treat it like C or if you're a God-like expert in compiler/library details that normal mortals don't understand. The interpreted stuff is typically an embarassment.
This should come as no surprise. Pascal was intended as a teaching language. None of the other languages was designed for teaching, unless you somehow equate Visual Basic with BASIC.
The second choice is probably C, but you'll have some issues teaching about declarations/definitions (inside out) and string-related stuff. The meaning of '=' is also not compatible with normal math notation.
The third choice is probably Java. You get most of the trouble of C, less speed, and greater need for boilerplate sourcecode bloat.
When a crater forms, there is often a spash up in the middle. Sometimes the whole thing fills with LIQUID MAGMA, just like when you drill to the center of the Earth.
Anyway, stuff that fills the crater can be harder than the rim. Years later, the rim erodes away.
Much like a chain saw not being an all purpose cutting tool...
That depends. Short ones can't reach when you need it, but the lumberjack ones are good for everything. You can make ice sculptures, disarm thugs (or disleg them if you prefer), cut your wedding cake, trim your nose hair, or cut down a great big tree.
First of all, you're clearly not an article reader. The point of initially learning with a painfully unstructured language is that you end up appreciating structure more, while being able to tolerate code that has awful structure. IMHO a better choice is assembly, but BASIC does have the advantage of providing faster rewards.
Second of all, many of us dispute the bit about Python not being a toy language. If you build your skills around Python, you'll hit serious trouble if you ever end up needing decent performance or unwrappered OS functionality. If you build your skills around C, whole new possibilities open up to you. You could even write a non-toy OS if you were so inclined.
you can stumble into an ER and they, by law have to treat you regardless of your ability to pay, usefulness to society, or overall cost.
Right, that's why I say "more-or-less".
It is true that the useless people tend to die faster than useful people. To pull some numbers out of my ass, perhaps life expectancy is 45 for useless people and 90 for useful people. We're forced to accept that a few useless people will make it past 100, and a few useful people will die at 20.
The ER isn't everything. Lack of early cancer detection and lack of early heart surgery are among the many things that play a role in killing off the useless.
Depending on one's hierarchy of values, one can redefine fairness to mean enforced equality at the expense of others. That's hardly fair by any reasonable definition. Fairness rightly means that you get the share that you deserve, no more and no less.
It's not one battle. They win many, and you rarely hear of it. They lose many, and you hear of every case that doesn't get stopped elsewhere. (getting "stopped elsewhere" could be that the NSA loses but then Mr. Terrorist gets kneecapped by his local loanshark)
There are plenty of bombings that succeed, every year. We quickly forget anything less dramatic that 9/11, but it's happening. Suppose that is just 1% of the ones that were planned.
I can totally see this working great until it just fails. It's putting high temperature high pressure fuel through a tiny hole. Either you clog the hole with deposits, or you erode it out.
Are you saying the police shouldn't save "bad people" from others?
It was done in the American west. The sheriff/judge would declare somebody to be an outlaw. Once that happened, he was no longer protected by the law. You could cook and eat him if you wanted to.
It's not safe to do this because of mistaken identity, but otherwise it's appropriate for the most severe crimes. Lots of people would enjoy killing a pedophile.
Or if they are in a building on fire, the firemen shouldn't save them?
There are neighborhoods where firemen are shot at. I expect that many fire departments quietly give priority to places where that doesn't happen. This can be done when deciding where to locate a firehouse and/or when prioritizing where to send the trucks.
When you live in a civilized society with rule of law, everyone gets certain protections, certain freedoms, even free access to various resources.
No, that's uncivilized. Civilization exists to protect the useful from the useless. If we didn't need police/military to protect us, we'd have never accepted the loss of freedom required to form a civilization. Civilization is all about stopping the useless people from taking our resources; it's not about handing over our resources to the useless.
Or should they save a well-heeled politician who has lied and thus caused the death of tens of thousands of people for the benefit of himself and his friends (and not the nation)?
That's the inevitable imperfection. It's like autoimmune disease: we have an immune system to protect our body, but sometimes it attacks us.
Religeon isn't a race. It's a choice, except maybe in the dozen countries where leaving Islam carries the death penalty.
As for the Chinese spies, that's a nationality plus an occupation. I have a great deal of awe regarding how they kick our asses. I sincerely wish we could return the favor.
Failure to admit the existance of cultural/ideological enemies is a sure way to lose.
The sad thing is that the NSA rarely gets credit for all the shit they stop. Usually they can't talk because that would reveal methods. All they ever get is blame for the times they fail.
The job is similar to fixing bridge corrosion, preventing food poisoning, finding cracks in aircraft wings, and so on. Nobody appreciates when you do well, but they sure bitch about the fuckups.
The next time bad shit happens, thank the NSA for all the times they made sure it didn't happen.
Point number two is a valid, albeit disturbing point. Are you really suggesting we through our inaction let people die because they aren't valuable members of society? Wouldn't surprise me if you were.
Sure.
This is more-or-less a feature of the current US health care system. People seldom admit that they like this feature, but there is clearly a reason why so many people don't want to change healthcare much. They don't want to lose this feature in the upgrade.
The feature isn't well-implemented. It isn't based on predicted value, and it doesn't count certain non-monetary things like child raising. Still, it more-or-less works: useless people tend to die faster than useful people.
Also, as viewed from the perspective of poor republicans, it is insulting and shameful to get a handout. It feels shitty to be taking something you didn't earn.
There are a lot of psychopaths here on slashdot.
I think "psychopath" is far from accurate. That would involve saying nice things to you while backstabbing you and internally mocking you.
Better: brutally honest, fair, and coldly rational
Note that it isn't fair to treat useful people as badly as we treat useless people.
IMHO, this is completely unfair. It's revolting. It's as disgusting as anything could ever be.
Try reading my examples if you haven't yet. It's obvious that one person is deserving and the other is not. (me: WTF???) I suspect you're just being stubborn; you know that one of those people deserves better than the other.
Everyone gets an equal chance to show how deserving or how undeserving they are.
It looks like you disagree with yourself. I thought you wanted to ignore how deserving or undeserving somebody might be.
Given that one man has shown himself to be deserving, let's spend $millions on him. For the undeserving, we spend $0.
AIDS has been redefined. The definition now requires the presence of HIV.
IMHO, that's cheating. It's "winning" the argument by changing the definition.
There are plenty of ways that one can aquire an immunodeficiency syndrome. They were all AIDS until some wiseass redefined AIDS to exclude everything except the most common situation.
Mental abilities are largely genetic. The environment can make you dumb, but it can't ensure you will be smart.
If she's busy unlocking the secrets of the universe or finding cures for cancer, then she is genetically superior in at least one way. That can make up for her defects.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't kill sterile couples, nor gays, do we?
As far as evolution goes, they are pretty much dead already. They might have a minor effect caused by a distinction between how they relate to blood relatives and others. (they can help a sibling find a spouse, or they can commit a racially-motivated killing)
FYI, there are plenty of countries that do kill gays. It's common among countries that are African or Islamic. Uganda is joining the list right now.
So if you've got a Darwin sticker on your car you shouldn't be in favor of any health care since "only the strong survive."
Let's make a deal: we provide the health care as long as they don't reproduce.
Colorblindness is 100 points of badness, minor hearing loss is 10 points, severe hearing loss is 50 points, total hearing loss is 300 points, diabetes is 50 points, each infection requiring antibiotics is 1 point...
When you reach 1000 points, we sterilize you.
What you seem to be describing is a form of meritocracy. The American dream you describe assumes that with hard work anyone can succeed.
You're mixing up quite a bit here.
Merit: it includes IQ, looks, strength, etc.
American dream: everyone is ALLOWED to attempt success (unlike how some parts of the world work, with castes or nobility)
Nothing says hard work will be enough.
Anyone could be smart, anyone could be hard-working. The worst-case of the society I am describing is one without that possibility. It is utterly unmeritocratic: no matter how hard you work, you would be unable to succeed because you were genetically inferior.
Genetic superiority is one kind of merit.
You fail because you simply aren't smart enough, or haven't enough stamina, or lack the inbuilt emotional intelligence or what have you. The elite would be like an entrenched aristocracy, except instead of being merely more wealthy, they would also be physically and mentally privileged - and they would pass those advantages on to their offspring.
This is how it works right now. Note however that there isn't a sharp line between elite and non-elite, and that the elite barely ever reproduce.
Example: I chose a wife based on exactly those attributes, and she chose me in the same way. If you could add up all the attributes to make an eliteness score, you'd likely find that my score is nearly the same as my wife's score. There is an obvious reason for that: we all chase after the best we think we can catch. Now, unsurprisingly, my kids are turning out like my wife and I. It looks like I have passed my advantages on to my offspring.
Historically the aristocracy were in fact physically different. The rich ate a diet including meat and a variety of other foods. The poor had only a limited diet of nutritionally incomplete foods - with insufficient protein, for example. Imagining eating a gruel of millet and turnips every day. The difference between rich and poor was manifested physically. You could tell a poor person just by looking at him: his status was physically marked on his body. In a physical conflict the rich would be likely to win simply because they were physically superior.
Historically??? You can tell today. Obesity is very common among the poor people who live on corn syrup and trans fats. The rich folk subsist on organic produce and seafood. Lots of desirable things are associated with each other: having money, being educated, being tall, being non-obese, looking attractive, facial symmetry, not having STDs, etc.
The difference is that today the poor are not excluded by law. They are unlikely to succeed, but they are allowed to try. We have social mobility, not a social lottery.
The language of the courtroom is a mix of legal jargon and programmer jargon, glued together with the English of people who went to graduate school. To the jury it's a bunch of babble.
Once you ignore all that, you're left with a sob story. The little guy is hurt. Obviously, money is required. People don't sue unless somebody else did something bad, and the trial only requires a likelyhood for a win, so there you go. SCO wins.
There is a reason SCO demanded a jury.
Count the loop nesting, look up any well-studied algorithms, and don't be a dummy about computation/storage hidden behind layers of object-oriented obfuscation. It's easy.
Seldom does anybody need to determine things down to the last byte or CPU cycle. You can't do that anyway unless you use something like assembly. In the time you might spend improving your estimate, computers will get faster and your software project will get later.
Just doing rough estimates puts you way ahead of everybody else, allowing you to avoid severe stupidity. BTW, remember that any libraries you depend on may become worse in future revisions, and you're screwed if you don't have the source code to fix it.
using bluetooth to connect an audio processor to an earpiece would completely destroy the psychoacoustical cues that enable things like direction-perception
Some people have only one ear, you insensitive clod!
Actually, latency wouldn't hurt as long as it is predictable. The less natural things are (equal delay from each ear, microphone in the ear to allow for external ear reflections, etc.) the more you'll need to adjust. You will adjust though; the brain is adaptable.
At the end of the day, a non-flawless hearing aid isn't like a malfunctioning heart valve or defective contact lens... failure isn't consequence-free, but it's nowhere near the same magnitude of severity
Suppose it picks up wireless telephone handset conversations. Pretty soon everybody knows you as the guy who hears voices. You lose your job, your spouse leaves you, and you end up on the streets pushing a stolen shopping cart full of cans and bottles.
This is a student's programming contest, right? Why are you even concerned about compile time or "startup" time?
Normally there is a time limit during which the competition runs. The faster your tools are, the more time you have to write code.
A kid might need 50 tries to get his program right.
We can sort of classify the languages into "slow" and "not slow" in various ways.
This should come as no surprise. Pascal was intended as a teaching language. None of the other languages was designed for teaching, unless you somehow equate Visual Basic with BASIC.
The second choice is probably C, but you'll have some issues teaching about declarations/definitions (inside out) and string-related stuff. The meaning of '=' is also not compatible with normal math notation.
The third choice is probably Java. You get most of the trouble of C, less speed, and greater need for boilerplate sourcecode bloat.
When a crater forms, there is often a spash up in the middle. Sometimes the whole thing fills with LIQUID MAGMA, just like when you drill to the center of the Earth.
Anyway, stuff that fills the crater can be harder than the rim. Years later, the rim erodes away.
It's like a fossel impression.
Much like a chain saw not being an all purpose cutting tool...
That depends. Short ones can't reach when you need it, but the lumberjack ones are good for everything. You can make ice sculptures, disarm thugs (or disleg them if you prefer), cut your wedding cake, trim your nose hair, or cut down a great big tree.
most of us have been writing software without using goto for the last two decades
Us goto-loving programmers don't take two decades or more to write software. We just go to it.
First of all, you're clearly not an article reader. The point of initially learning with a painfully unstructured language is that you end up appreciating structure more, while being able to tolerate code that has awful structure. IMHO a better choice is assembly, but BASIC does have the advantage of providing faster rewards.
Second of all, many of us dispute the bit about Python not being a toy language. If you build your skills around Python, you'll hit serious trouble if you ever end up needing decent performance or unwrappered OS functionality. If you build your skills around C, whole new possibilities open up to you. You could even write a non-toy OS if you were so inclined.
you can stumble into an ER and they, by law have to treat you regardless of your ability to pay, usefulness to society, or overall cost.
Right, that's why I say "more-or-less".
It is true that the useless people tend to die faster than useful people. To pull some numbers out of my ass, perhaps life expectancy is 45 for useless people and 90 for useful people. We're forced to accept that a few useless people will make it past 100, and a few useful people will die at 20.
The ER isn't everything. Lack of early cancer detection and lack of early heart surgery are among the many things that play a role in killing off the useless.
Depending on one's hierarchy of values, one can redefine fairness to mean enforced equality at the expense of others. That's hardly fair by any reasonable definition. Fairness rightly means that you get the share that you deserve, no more and no less.
It's not one battle. They win many, and you rarely hear of it. They lose many, and you hear of every case that doesn't get stopped elsewhere. (getting "stopped elsewhere" could be that the NSA loses but then Mr. Terrorist gets kneecapped by his local loanshark)
There are plenty of bombings that succeed, every year. We quickly forget anything less dramatic that 9/11, but it's happening. Suppose that is just 1% of the ones that were planned.
I can totally see this working great until it just fails. It's putting high temperature high pressure fuel through a tiny hole. Either you clog the hole with deposits, or you erode it out.
Are you saying the police shouldn't save "bad people" from others?
It was done in the American west. The sheriff/judge would declare somebody to be an outlaw. Once that happened, he was no longer protected by the law. You could cook and eat him if you wanted to.
It's not safe to do this because of mistaken identity, but otherwise it's appropriate for the most severe crimes. Lots of people would enjoy killing a pedophile.
Or if they are in a building on fire, the firemen shouldn't save them?
There are neighborhoods where firemen are shot at. I expect that many fire departments quietly give priority to places where that doesn't happen. This can be done when deciding where to locate a firehouse and/or when prioritizing where to send the trucks.
When you live in a civilized society with rule of law, everyone gets certain protections, certain freedoms, even free access to various resources.
No, that's uncivilized. Civilization exists to protect the useful from the useless. If we didn't need police/military to protect us, we'd have never accepted the loss of freedom required to form a civilization. Civilization is all about stopping the useless people from taking our resources; it's not about handing over our resources to the useless.
Or should they save a well-heeled politician who has lied and thus caused the death of tens of thousands of people for the benefit of himself and his friends (and not the nation)?
That's the inevitable imperfection. It's like autoimmune disease: we have an immune system to protect our body, but sometimes it attacks us.
Religeon isn't a race. It's a choice, except maybe in the dozen countries where leaving Islam carries the death penalty.
As for the Chinese spies, that's a nationality plus an occupation. I have a great deal of awe regarding how they kick our asses. I sincerely wish we could return the favor.
Failure to admit the existance of cultural/ideological enemies is a sure way to lose.
If that isn't motivation, nothing is.
The sad thing is that the NSA rarely gets credit for all the shit they stop. Usually they can't talk because that would reveal methods. All they ever get is blame for the times they fail.
The job is similar to fixing bridge corrosion, preventing food poisoning, finding cracks in aircraft wings, and so on. Nobody appreciates when you do well, but they sure bitch about the fuckups.
The next time bad shit happens, thank the NSA for all the times they made sure it didn't happen.
This isn't some lazy Amtrack, HUD, or even NASA.
Winning means you beat the towelheads and the Chinese spies. Losing means you don't, and lots of bad shit happens to us.
Point number two is a valid, albeit disturbing point. Are you really suggesting we through our inaction let people die because they aren't valuable members of society? Wouldn't surprise me if you were.
Sure.
This is more-or-less a feature of the current US health care system. People seldom admit that they like this feature, but there is clearly a reason why so many people don't want to change healthcare much. They don't want to lose this feature in the upgrade.
The feature isn't well-implemented. It isn't based on predicted value, and it doesn't count certain non-monetary things like child raising. Still, it more-or-less works: useless people tend to die faster than useful people.
Also, as viewed from the perspective of poor republicans, it is insulting and shameful to get a handout. It feels shitty to be taking something you didn't earn.
There are a lot of psychopaths here on slashdot.
I think "psychopath" is far from accurate. That would involve saying nice things to you while backstabbing you and internally mocking you.
Better: brutally honest, fair, and coldly rational
Note that it isn't fair to treat useful people as badly as we treat useless people.
Yes. The same for everybody. And why not?
IMHO, this is completely unfair. It's revolting. It's as disgusting as anything could ever be.
Try reading my examples if you haven't yet. It's obvious that one person is deserving and the other is not. (me: WTF???) I suspect you're just being stubborn; you know that one of those people deserves better than the other.
Everyone gets an equal chance to show how deserving or how undeserving they are.
It looks like you disagree with yourself. I thought you wanted to ignore how deserving or undeserving somebody might be.
Given that one man has shown himself to be deserving, let's spend $millions on him. For the undeserving, we spend $0.
We use chemicals, not radiation. The disease is called leukemia; it is cancer of the immune system.
AIDS has been cured this way. The patient already had leukemia. They got the AIDS cure thrown in for free. :-)
AIDS dementia will kill you if you somehow survive without much of your immune system.
The really horrible thing is that the early stages of AIDS's attack on the brain cause risk-taking behavior and desire for sex.
AIDS has been redefined. The definition now requires the presence of HIV.
IMHO, that's cheating. It's "winning" the argument by changing the definition.
There are plenty of ways that one can aquire an immunodeficiency syndrome. They were all AIDS until some wiseass redefined AIDS to exclude everything except the most common situation.
Mental abilities are largely genetic. The environment can make you dumb, but it can't ensure you will be smart.
If she's busy unlocking the secrets of the universe or finding cures for cancer, then she is genetically superior in at least one way. That can make up for her defects.