You misunderstood the article. The division which handles the Playstation has been constantly in the red, while the profits from Sony's other division give them the money to operate at a loss and still turn a profit overall. The article is saying Sonys overall profits are down, which is worrying because their playstation division is going to go even further in the hole when the ps3 comes out, because of insane manufacturing costs and selling at a loss. What's to keep them afloat?
Sony game division posted a loss this quater. They generally make more money then any other division. The reason this quarter is different is the R&D costs of the PS3. They generally do no lose money. Their PS2 costs are very low and they have been making a profit off the hardware for some time.
because games that require thinking are not very popular. 'strategy' games like starcraft prevail, where the player with the fastest reflexes and best memory (these two units beat a rush of that unit) wins over someone able to actually come up with strategies while playing.
In starcraft/warcraft you have to do both. You have to be a twitch gamer and a thinker. There are people who do the same strat all the time, however they are very easy to beat because they are inflexible.
First, democracy is necessary to fight corruption (once the clean fire of revolution wears off, all one-part states descend to cronyism or worse), but unfortunately not sufficient. I maintain that China is much more corrupt than any democratic country. In India and the Philippines we hear about the corruption because they have a fairly free press, in China the press is certainly bolder than before, but still very wary to criticise the government or CP; they are subject to reprisals if they irritate. When you hear of CP members being charged with corruption it means they've lost out in some internal power-struggle, not that crusading reporters or judiciary have uncovered them.
You have clearly never visited either country. I have visited 2 of them. Chinese corruption isn't as common as you think. In the philipines, if you have enough money you can do anything. Without it, nothing happens. It took us a bottle of jonny walker blue and a cash bribe to get DSL installed when I was there. While in china, every company operated like their counterparts here but faster. The officials at the borders didn't impede us or try and take bribes. Eveything was by the book.
You mistake Democracy for Pancea. Democracy does not cure everything.
Your economy is now pwned by the chinese/asians (to a certain exstent so is mine). Most manufactuering is nwo done in china, almost every product imagineable is now either "made in china" or "made in india". Electronics are now rarely made in the USA. My computer almost had 100% taiwanese parts. It's now just a little late to try and reverse this trend, and you can blame all the short sighted MBA's who thought they'd get a great bonus by financing their competition. At the moment the things the US does well is:
1- work hard 2- has good management 3- has good R&D
#1 is a trait shared by India and China. #2 is something that can be stolen with little or no effort. #3 can also be stolen and at some point improved upon as the japanese showed us was possible in the 80's. The US hegemony is almost over, lasting a scant decade and a half. Who do I blame, yeah I blame the stupid buisiness execs.
300 years ago, the West was probably at least on par technologically wise with China, with all the enlightenment and stuff, while progress in China pretty much stalled.
China had already ceased it's war-like period and had become a very stable and large empire, technological progress did happen but due to the conservative nature of the government and people it was more incremental improvement of exsiting tech. This conservatism came about because the qin emporors forsaw the rise of the merchant class and took steps to limit their power as well as their education system being excessivly conservative. This halted "radical innovation".
The lesson we can take away is that the reactionary outcry to "fix the other problems" before we try to do things like space travel will certainly kill us, as it did the Qin dynasty.
The current Party leadership is very corrupt. The only hope to clean that up is democracy, which is why they fear it; ideologically they're hardly communist at all now.
Sorry to put it to you, but democracies (for instance india or the philipines) can be several orders of magnitude more corrupt. Curruption has less to do with the system of government then it does with how entrenched the organizations of powers are.
and what does this say about the chinese people? they seem to invest great pains in stealing technology rather than creating new ideas. there have been newspaper reports of the chinese taking american cars, reverse engineering them, and then building a chinese version with cheap plastic and parts for nickels on the dollar. and i believe china and tiwan are the two biggest manufacturors of knock-off goods, like pirated gucci bags, or playstation mod chips, or fake rolex watches. too bad we can't kick the RIAA out of the USA and send them to china.
Actually, some of these aren't "Knock offs" per se but actually "surplus" factory output.
The worst problem they have is their fab technology is a couple generations out of date. They are actively seeking suckers... err... fab equipment makers who want to partner with them while they steal.... err.... license their technology.
Taiwan has a lot of fabbing companies, and you thought all this trouble over its independance was just an old grudge...
Taiwanese people are actually chinese, at some point they will partner with Chinese companies.
Of course there is a difference between variations within skin tone, hair(wing) color, hair texture, etc; and growing an extra arm or wings
Yes the other obstification. Actually there is no difference, it's all an expression of genes. And you can breed feature out easily. We've made legless/wingless flies. We can also make flies. creating a alternate feature out of an esiting one is also posssible, spine wings and such. Also, the point of evolution isn't to take a fly and make it a man, it's to take a fly and make a better suited fly to it's enviroment. If it happens because this fly has 8 legs instead of six then that is the creation of "an extra arm". The whole idea that it's suppose to randomly sprout useful appendages is one for the truly daft.
I know your comment is more of a joke and less a serious comment. But just want to point out something I've read before. Beauty is actually average... that is, people with average measurements - distance between the eyes, facial features, etc., etc. are perceived to be more beautiful than those with un-average features. Perhaps being average also means you are the most healthy and there are exceptions of course. Because of this, it's possible that ugly + ugly = beautiful, especially if the two ugly's are on opposite ends from average.
You misunderstand, beauty is about symetry. The fact that true symetry is rare shows that it is not "average" as in common and often "ugly" + "ugly" = ugly.
I wonder if this has any impact on the view of racism?
Racism is a *very* touchy subject, and I may get flamed just for bringing it up, but doesn't this sound like butterfly racism? If this were, in fact, a provable, natural, biological mechanism, then, wouldn't we, as biological organisms, be falling prety to much the same effect? Isn't racism a social form of speciation?
What impact would this have on the ACLU? Hiring quotas? The civil rights movement in general?
I'm not suggesting that racism is good. But, might these be related?
I don't belive racism is valid or productive, there is too many counter-examples showing race has little all that much to do with any individuals potential. Smart parents of any race will raise and have generally smart kids.
However I do beleive in culturalism. Some cultures just get more done. Namely some european cultures, East Indian Culture, Chinese Culture and Japanese culture. Others just can't get much done, like Native American culture, Rastafar culture, and various other group havent' been very successful at adapting to the modern world.
It addresses a very similar problem with both creation and evolution: neither is falsifiable.
Natural selection and aspects of micro-evolution ARE falsifiable. Macro-evolution is not. The people that parade evolution around as the "real origin of life" are nothing more than anti-creationists with a near-religious devotion to their Big-Bang god.
And no, I'm not a creationist or an Intelligent Design proponent, that's stupid too.
There is no such thing as Micro-evolution/macro-evolution. Evolution is evolution. We see it. There is no seperating. It is a definition obstification introduced by the pro-ID side to try and discredit the fact we observed evolution in many many studies.
It's the equivilent to you saying "I have just seen brad pitt the movie star downtown" and me saying "brad pitt, you mean the line backer in our senior varsity team, you have not I ran him over in 1998." Your follow up should be "no dumb ass, brad pitt, the guy who married jennifer aniston then slept with angilina jolie".
Oh, wait, I remember... it takes millions of years, doesn't it? (-:
One generation can be enough, so for bacteria 1/2 hour is how long evolution often needs.
True. Which is why the labelling of evolution as "science" rather than "creation myth for Atheists" has long puzzled me.
It's because it has facts and theorems supporting it.
. Just now, after more than a century of holding this as nothing less than an article of faith, we think we might be seeing it happening. Maybe.
Clearly, you haven't been paying attention since darwin mentioned we might have come from apes. There are over 2000 scientific studies re-enforcing evolution as explanation for the current biological state.
And you know what? Each time something like that is noticed, it's written off with a statement along the lines of "we'll eventually find a way of explaining this with evolution, never you mind".
This is what we call science. What do you propose, we accept a theory and never ammend it? it must have been perfect to start with? Complete strawman arguement.
If it turns out that these butterflies speciate -- or not -- it will be no more a proof of evolution than the variation in beak shape amongst Darwin's Finches was. If there's honesty in modern science, it's in the follow-up study to that one, which showed that the beaks changed right back when the environment changed right back.
This is called selection, it is the driving force behind evolution, the genes for normal bills are in the gene pool but a different selective force makes one more common.
That might actually apply to humans as well. I mean take Conservatives and Liberals. They engage in different physiclal activities and (mostly) breed within their own groups. So will the two eventually evolve into seperate species, Homo Conservativis and Homo Liberalis? Probably, however, due to the high population denisty among humans they will also be unable to escape having to interact with each other. So the two resultant species and their behavioral patterns will influence each others evolution won't they? I mean you would for example expect the Homo Conservativis to evolve sophisticated selective hearing in order to avoid hearing anything that Homo Liberals might say that contradicts with their religious ideas while the Homo Liberals will grow thick Neanderthal like skulls due to Homo Conservatives incessantly thumping theim on the head with a Bible.
Funyn comment, if it did happen it would be along class lines (ala wells time machine) or along looks. Ungly people tend to breed wiht ugly people. Hotties ten to breed with other hotties or rich uglies. So the ugly get uglier. The rich/beutiful get more so.
Slight problem; people with XYY genes all develop male, so if they mated with each other there wouldn't be any children at all.:)
You talking about a spefic instance, but if XYY has soem survival atvantage and XYY was both passabel to ones male offspring and creates a fertile one then it would become more common. If the selecting factor was strong enough it would be the only version. XYY males doen't preclude XYY + YY.
While we're asking the tough questions, it seems like the one big gun the Divine Design people have left is in the differing number of genes between species. If all offspring have the same number of genes as their parents, and all species on earth are evolved from one original life form, shouldn't all creatures have the same number of genes? Are there any theories out there regarding how genes are added or subtracted over time?
The same mechanism that causes downs or some of the rarer genetic conditions, imperfect cell division. Happens often enough and if it happens in a reproductive cells can lead to "mutant" offspring.
People who dismiss concepts like 'intelligent design' out of hand may often like to refer to themselves as scientific, but in fact dismissing something like that out of hand is the very reverse of scientific.
Your confusing dismissing after evaluating and dismissing out of hand. Havign 0 predictive power, 100% made up rationalization, and lacking any evidence it's very scientific to reject that theory.
Perhaps a redefinition of science is in order, something closer to the definition of religion... 'Thou shalt not challenge the orthodoxy.'
A common logical fallacy used by pro-ID people. How ever using the exact same criteria you use to evaluate all scientific theory, ID fails very very badly. The scientific community is not like the libral literary community, everybody is out to "revolutionize" the community with a new idea. It might be contriversial but if it passes the tests placed on it, it will eventually be accepted.
As someone who took 2.5 years of genetics, speciation is something well understood. At some point breeding between the two populations is physically impossible (due to pysiological/geographic reasons) or does nto result in fertile young (mule). Everythign else is just details.
You raise a good point that there are far too many friendly fire incidents in our military. I would venture to say it is due to overworking the individual soldier and not a lack of competence. Also friendly fire has been around for a long time and will never fully disappear, it is a fact of war.
You are right though, friendly fire is fairly common in the history of war. I agree, and any given soldier is more competent at his job then I would be. They do a nessacary job. I respect US soldiers as much as the canadian ones. I don't want to give you the impression I'm anti-american or anti-soldier. I'm just trying to say the "single" job us soldiers tend not to be able to handle too many inputs. Their better with simplier instructions and less complication. So a armoured suit with real time feed from 16 different people would be about as helpful as noobies using mic's in Counter Strike. Mass chaos and lots of confusing information and instructions.
Some interesting articles I found looking up friendly fire:
Reader's Companion to Military History World War 2 Friendly fire Amicide (Study by US Military) CBC Article on friendly fire in Iraq
You raise a good point that there are far too many friendly fire incidents in our military. I would venture to say it is due to overworking the individual soldier and not a lack of competence. Also friendly fire has been around for a long time and will never fully disappear, it is a fact of war.
My grammar is crap and if someone were to look over even this post I'm sure I've made a few glaring mistakes, but I do find it humorous to open your comment with "your" when "you're" is more appropriate.
I'm a child of the new education system. The content is alright, but the structure is lacking in my writing.
I agree, it's partly over work. It's also poor leadership, military intelligence, and the fact that a lot of the lower echelon of the military comes from the undereducated and disadvantaged who are naturally less competent then say the Isreali army which are made up partly of mandatory reserves and a lot of very very competent professional soldiers.
Overwork/Leadership/Military intelligence are all failings of the brass, while the composition of the ranks has more to do with demographics and the in-ability of the army to appeal to other segments of society. The machine still works as a whole, they compensate for having sub par soldiers by having vastly supurior equipment and the best logistics of any army on earth. They simply out supply the opponents and have a well fed, well dressed but less competent men. Being hungry, tired, and dirty does make a difference in war.
I may just be an average US grunt but I can drive the HMMWV and get my laundry done, while spelling "they're" correctly.
Your an average military grunt, and I'm dyslexic and have poor writing skills when I don't double check.
It's a comment on the structure as well as the average competence of your military. A lot of your allies are still upset over the "friendly fire" incidents we get when operating with you.
Now picture giving each squad a direct link to their officers _all_ the time. Bidirectional. You can know _exactly_ what's happening at each point, in real time, and the soldiers can know exactly what's expected of them. You can instantly see when your troops are being pinned and flanked, and how, and you can tell them exactly how to counter it. Better yet they too can see a bigger picture and react in a more intelligent manner - By copying and pasting from old slashdot stories.
Some soldiers(Marines) could handle it, your average US grunt could not. US soldiers aren't known to be the sharpest stick in the shed, thats why other armies ridicule you guys for havign each grunt do exactly one job. Because thier not bright enough to drive a jeep and do laundry...
There would be little to no reaction to a staged fight.
Maybe not in France, but in the US when a man slugs a woman in the face on national televison, all hell will break loose. Do it outside of an tacitly approved staged-fight-venue like the Jerry Springer Show, and expect all your advertisers to cancel their contracts within minutes.
If you really want to see us act like troglodytes, just simulate a gang rape on stage at the next Superbowl halftime show. We're quite unenlightened in that regard...
Look here are two equivilent actions:
Justin Timberlake rips off part of janet jacksons costume. It's staged. Everything is covered, it's obviously stage. It's cheaky, and doesn't mean much.
Justin Timberlake stages a fight with christina agulara. It's staged. Everything is covered, it's obviously staged. It's cheaky, and doesn't mean much.
Which one do you think the american public will flip out about?
Collectively, the US populace behaves like a hard working but socially awkward and emotionally immature 13 year old boy. Canada is their Shy but more mature younger brother, Europe is their slightly sluttier but wiser older sister. Japan is low self esteem kid down the road that got into a fight with them, lost, but does better in school. China is a their neighborhood rival, along with russia, all three act like bullies and have varying maturity levels....
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstood the article. The division which handles the Playstation has been constantly in the red, while the profits from Sony's other division give them the money to operate at a loss and still turn a profit overall. The article is saying Sonys overall profits are down, which is worrying because their playstation division is going to go even further in the hole when the ps3 comes out, because of insane manufacturing costs and selling at a loss. What's to keep them afloat?
Sony game division posted a loss this quater. They generally make more money then any other division. The reason this quarter is different is the R&D costs of the PS3. They generally do no lose money. Their PS2 costs are very low and they have been making a profit off the hardware for some time.
because games that require thinking are not very popular. 'strategy' games like starcraft prevail, where the player with the fastest reflexes and best memory (these two units beat a rush of that unit) wins over someone able to actually come up with strategies while playing.
In starcraft/warcraft you have to do both. You have to be a twitch gamer and a thinker. There are people who do the same strat all the time, however they are very easy to beat because they are inflexible.
I live in China and have visited the Phillipines a few times. So I'll just ignore you now.
I've done business in both. China needs a lot less lubrication.
First, democracy is necessary to fight corruption (once the clean fire of revolution wears off, all one-part states descend to cronyism or worse), but unfortunately not sufficient. I maintain that China is much more corrupt than any democratic country. In India and the Philippines we hear about the corruption because they have a fairly free press, in China the press is certainly bolder than before, but still very wary to criticise the government or CP; they are subject to reprisals if they irritate. When you hear of CP members being charged with corruption it means they've lost out in some internal power-struggle, not that crusading reporters or judiciary have uncovered them.
You have clearly never visited either country. I have visited 2 of them. Chinese corruption isn't as common as you think. In the philipines, if you have enough money you can do anything. Without it, nothing happens. It took us a bottle of jonny walker blue and a cash bribe to get DSL installed when I was there. While in china, every company operated like their counterparts here but faster. The officials at the borders didn't impede us or try and take bribes. Eveything was by the book.
You mistake Democracy for Pancea. Democracy does not cure everything.
Your economy is now pwned by the chinese/asians (to a certain exstent so is mine). Most manufactuering is nwo done in china, almost every product imagineable is now either "made in china" or "made in india". Electronics are now rarely made in the USA. My computer almost had 100% taiwanese parts. It's now just a little late to try and reverse this trend, and you can blame all the short sighted MBA's who thought they'd get a great bonus by financing their competition. At the moment the things the US does well is:
1- work hard
2- has good management
3- has good R&D
#1 is a trait shared by India and China. #2 is something that can be stolen with little or no effort. #3 can also be stolen and at some point improved upon as the japanese showed us was possible in the 80's. The US hegemony is almost over, lasting a scant decade and a half. Who do I blame, yeah I blame the stupid buisiness execs.
300 years ago, the West was probably at least on par technologically wise with China, with all the enlightenment and stuff, while progress in China pretty much stalled.
China had already ceased it's war-like period and had become a very stable and large empire, technological progress did happen but due to the conservative nature of the government and people it was more incremental improvement of exsiting tech. This conservatism came about because the qin emporors forsaw the rise of the merchant class and took steps to limit their power as well as their education system being excessivly conservative. This halted "radical innovation".
The lesson we can take away is that the reactionary outcry to "fix the other problems" before we try to do things like space travel will certainly kill us, as it did the Qin dynasty.
The current Party leadership is very corrupt. The only hope to clean that up is democracy, which is why they fear it; ideologically they're hardly communist at all now.
Sorry to put it to you, but democracies (for instance india or the philipines) can be several orders of magnitude more corrupt. Curruption has less to do with the system of government then it does with how entrenched the organizations of powers are.
and what does this say about the chinese people? they seem to invest great pains in stealing technology rather than creating new ideas. there have been newspaper reports of the chinese taking american cars, reverse engineering them, and then building a chinese version with cheap plastic and parts for nickels on the dollar. and i believe china and tiwan are the two biggest manufacturors of knock-off goods, like pirated gucci bags, or playstation mod chips, or fake rolex watches. too bad we can't kick the RIAA out of the USA and send them to china.
Actually, some of these aren't "Knock offs" per se but actually "surplus" factory output.
The worst problem they have is their fab technology is a couple generations out of date. They are actively seeking suckers... err ... fab equipment makers who want to partner with them while they steal .... err .... license their technology.
Taiwan has a lot of fabbing companies, and you thought all this trouble over its independance was just an old grudge...
Taiwanese people are actually chinese, at some point they will partner with Chinese companies.
Of course there is a difference between variations within skin tone, hair(wing) color, hair texture, etc; and growing an extra arm or wings
Yes the other obstification. Actually there is no difference, it's all an expression of genes. And you can breed feature out easily. We've made legless/wingless flies. We can also make flies. creating a alternate feature out of an esiting one is also posssible, spine wings and such. Also, the point of evolution isn't to take a fly and make it a man, it's to take a fly and make a better suited fly to it's enviroment. If it happens because this fly has 8 legs instead of six then that is the creation of "an extra arm". The whole idea that it's suppose to randomly sprout useful appendages is one for the truly daft.
I know your comment is more of a joke and less a serious comment. But just want to point out something I've read before. Beauty is actually average... that is, people with average measurements - distance between the eyes, facial features, etc., etc. are perceived to be more beautiful than those with un-average features. Perhaps being average also means you are the most healthy and there are exceptions of course. Because of this, it's possible that ugly + ugly = beautiful, especially if the two ugly's are on opposite ends from average.
You misunderstand, beauty is about symetry. The fact that true symetry is rare shows that it is not "average" as in common and often "ugly" + "ugly" = ugly.
I wonder if this has any impact on the view of racism?
Racism is a *very* touchy subject, and I may get flamed just for bringing it up, but doesn't this sound like butterfly racism? If this were, in fact, a provable, natural, biological mechanism, then, wouldn't we, as biological organisms, be falling prety to much the same effect? Isn't racism a social form of speciation?
What impact would this have on the ACLU? Hiring quotas? The civil rights movement in general?
I'm not suggesting that racism is good. But, might these be related?
I don't belive racism is valid or productive, there is too many counter-examples showing race has little all that much to do with any individuals potential. Smart parents of any race will raise and have generally smart kids.
However I do beleive in culturalism. Some cultures just get more done. Namely some european cultures, East Indian Culture, Chinese Culture and Japanese culture. Others just can't get much done, like Native American culture, Rastafar culture, and various other group havent' been very successful at adapting to the modern world.
Mod parent up.
It addresses a very similar problem with both creation and evolution: neither is falsifiable.
Natural selection and aspects of micro-evolution ARE falsifiable. Macro-evolution is not. The people that parade evolution around as the "real origin of life" are nothing more than anti-creationists with a near-religious devotion to their Big-Bang god.
And no, I'm not a creationist or an Intelligent Design proponent, that's stupid too.
There is no such thing as Micro-evolution/macro-evolution. Evolution is evolution. We see it. There is no seperating. It is a definition obstification introduced by the pro-ID side to try and discredit the fact we observed evolution in many many studies.
It's the equivilent to you saying "I have just seen brad pitt the movie star downtown" and me saying "brad pitt, you mean the line backer in our senior varsity team, you have not I ran him over in 1998." Your follow up should be "no dumb ass, brad pitt, the guy who married jennifer aniston then slept with angilina jolie".
What, a hundred and fifty years isn't enough?
Oh, wait, I remember... it takes millions of years, doesn't it? (-:
One generation can be enough, so for bacteria 1/2 hour is how long evolution often needs.
True. Which is why the labelling of evolution as "science" rather than "creation myth for Atheists" has long puzzled me.
It's because it has facts and theorems supporting it.
. Just now, after more than a century of holding this as nothing less than an article of faith, we think we might be seeing it happening. Maybe.
Clearly, you haven't been paying attention since darwin mentioned we might have come from apes. There are over 2000 scientific studies re-enforcing evolution as explanation for the current biological state.
And you know what? Each time something like that is noticed, it's written off with a statement along the lines of "we'll eventually find a way of explaining this with evolution, never you mind".
This is what we call science. What do you propose, we accept a theory and never ammend it? it must have been perfect to start with? Complete strawman arguement.
If it turns out that these butterflies speciate -- or not -- it will be no more a proof of evolution than the variation in beak shape amongst Darwin's Finches was. If there's honesty in modern science, it's in the follow-up study to that one, which showed that the beaks changed right back when the environment changed right back.
This is called selection, it is the driving force behind evolution, the genes for normal bills are in the gene pool but a different selective force makes one more common.
That might actually apply to humans as well. I mean take Conservatives and Liberals. They engage in different physiclal activities and (mostly) breed within their own groups. So will the two eventually evolve into seperate species, Homo Conservativis and Homo Liberalis? Probably, however, due to the high population denisty among humans they will also be unable to escape having to interact with each other. So the two resultant species and their behavioral patterns will influence each others evolution won't they? I mean you would for example expect the Homo Conservativis to evolve sophisticated selective hearing in order to avoid hearing anything that Homo Liberals might say that contradicts with their religious ideas while the Homo Liberals will grow thick Neanderthal like skulls due to Homo Conservatives incessantly thumping theim on the head with a Bible.
Funyn comment, if it did happen it would be along class lines (ala wells time machine) or along looks. Ungly people tend to breed wiht ugly people. Hotties ten to breed with other hotties or rich uglies. So the ugly get uglier. The rich/beutiful get more so.
Slight problem; people with XYY genes all develop male, so if they mated with each other there wouldn't be any children at all. :)
You talking about a spefic instance, but if XYY has soem survival atvantage and XYY was both passabel to ones male offspring and creates a fertile one then it would become more common. If the selecting factor was strong enough it would be the only version. XYY males doen't preclude XYY + YY.
While we're asking the tough questions, it seems like the one big gun the Divine Design people have left is in the differing number of genes between species. If all offspring have the same number of genes as their parents, and all species on earth are evolved from one original life form, shouldn't all creatures have the same number of genes? Are there any theories out there regarding how genes are added or subtracted over time?
The same mechanism that causes downs or some of the rarer genetic conditions, imperfect cell division. Happens often enough and if it happens in a reproductive cells can lead to "mutant" offspring.
People who dismiss concepts like 'intelligent design' out of hand may often like to refer to themselves as scientific, but in fact dismissing something like that out of hand is the very reverse of scientific.
Your confusing dismissing after evaluating and dismissing out of hand. Havign 0 predictive power, 100% made up rationalization, and lacking any evidence it's very scientific to reject that theory.
Perhaps a redefinition of science is in order, something closer to the definition of religion... 'Thou shalt not challenge the orthodoxy.'
A common logical fallacy used by pro-ID people. How ever using the exact same criteria you use to evaluate all scientific theory, ID fails very very badly. The scientific community is not like the libral literary community, everybody is out to "revolutionize" the community with a new idea. It might be contriversial but if it passes the tests placed on it, it will eventually be accepted.
As someone who took 2.5 years of genetics, speciation is something well understood. At some point breeding between the two populations is physically impossible (due to pysiological/geographic reasons) or does nto result in fertile young (mule). Everythign else is just details.
companies like Apple (distant second and good),
Minor correction:
companies like Apple (distant second and good at hiding the fact that it's evil),
You raise a good point that there are far too many friendly fire incidents in our military. I would venture to say it is due to overworking the individual soldier and not a lack of competence. Also friendly fire has been around for a long time and will never fully disappear, it is a fact of war.
You are right though, friendly fire is fairly common in the history of war. I agree, and any given soldier is more competent at his job then I would be. They do a nessacary job. I respect US soldiers as much as the canadian ones. I don't want to give you the impression I'm anti-american or anti-soldier. I'm just trying to say the "single" job us soldiers tend not to be able to handle too many inputs. Their better with simplier instructions and less complication. So a armoured suit with real time feed from 16 different people would be about as helpful as noobies using mic's in Counter Strike. Mass chaos and lots of confusing information and instructions.
Some interesting articles I found looking up friendly fire:
Reader's Companion to Military History
World War 2 Friendly fire
Amicide (Study by US Military)
CBC Article on friendly fire in Iraq
You raise a good point that there are far too many friendly fire incidents in our military. I would venture to say it is due to overworking the individual soldier and not a lack of competence. Also friendly fire has been around for a long time and will never fully disappear, it is a fact of war.
My grammar is crap and if someone were to look over even this post I'm sure I've made a few glaring mistakes, but I do find it humorous to open your comment with "your" when "you're" is more appropriate.
I'm a child of the new education system. The content is alright, but the structure is lacking in my writing.
I agree, it's partly over work. It's also poor leadership, military intelligence, and the fact that a lot of the lower echelon of the military comes from the undereducated and disadvantaged who are naturally less competent then say the Isreali army which are made up partly of mandatory reserves and a lot of very very competent professional soldiers.
Overwork/Leadership/Military intelligence are all failings of the brass, while the composition of the ranks has more to do with demographics and the in-ability of the army to appeal to other segments of society. The machine still works as a whole, they compensate for having sub par soldiers by having vastly supurior equipment and the best logistics of any army on earth. They simply out supply the opponents and have a well fed, well dressed but less competent men. Being hungry, tired, and dirty does make a difference in war.
I may just be an average US grunt but I can drive the HMMWV and get my laundry done, while spelling "they're" correctly.
Your an average military grunt, and I'm dyslexic and have poor writing skills when I don't double check.
It's a comment on the structure as well as the average competence of your military. A lot of your allies are still upset over the "friendly fire" incidents we get when operating with you.
Now picture giving each squad a direct link to their officers _all_ the time. Bidirectional. You can know _exactly_ what's happening at each point, in real time, and the soldiers can know exactly what's expected of them. You can instantly see when your troops are being pinned and flanked, and how, and you can tell them exactly how to counter it. Better yet they too can see a bigger picture and react in a more intelligent manner - By copying and pasting from old slashdot stories.
Some soldiers(Marines) could handle it, your average US grunt could not. US soldiers aren't known to be the sharpest stick in the shed, thats why other armies ridicule you guys for havign each grunt do exactly one job. Because thier not bright enough to drive a jeep and do laundry...
There would be little to no reaction to a staged fight.
Maybe not in France, but in the US when a man slugs a woman in the face on national televison, all hell will break loose. Do it outside of an tacitly approved staged-fight-venue like the Jerry Springer Show, and expect all your advertisers to cancel their contracts within minutes.
If you really want to see us act like troglodytes, just simulate a gang rape on stage at the next Superbowl halftime show. We're quite unenlightened in that regard...
Look here are two equivilent actions:
Justin Timberlake rips off part of janet jacksons costume. It's staged. Everything is covered, it's obviously stage. It's cheaky, and doesn't mean much.
Justin Timberlake stages a fight with christina agulara. It's staged. Everything is covered, it's obviously staged. It's cheaky, and doesn't mean much.
Which one do you think the american public will flip out about?
Collectively, the US populace behaves like a hard working but socially awkward and emotionally immature 13 year old boy. Canada is their Shy but more mature younger brother, Europe is their slightly sluttier but wiser older sister. Japan is low self esteem kid down the road that got into a fight with them, lost, but does better in school. China is a their neighborhood rival, along with russia, all three act like bullies and have varying maturity levels....
there stretchign an anology for you.