And what constitutes a crime can be downright specious, especially if instituted at the behest of special interest groups.
Here's a good example: Say you have a litter of puppies for sale, and you take them to the park to play. California Legislature is presently considering a bill (which will probably pass) that will make this a CRIMINAL ACT, solely because the puppies are offered for sale and can be seen in a public place. (AB1122. You can look it up. http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_1101-1150/ab_1122_cfa_20090420_115409_asm_comm.html)
This misses the real point, which is, "How much money does the deployment and upkeep make for the 3rd party contractor who sold this whole deal to your government??"
I've observed this myself, when evaluating political candidates... as a general rule, the more one thinks he can run my life better than I can, the worse hash he'll make of it.
Tho observationally, prey animals are even worse at multitasking (ie. quick task switching). Most literally can't chew and scan for predators at the same time, and tend to panic each and every time they're forced to task-switch.
It occurs to me that if Big Media *really* wanted to shut down the big torrent sites, the big companies could BUY those sites, for a lot less money than they currently spend trying to intimidate their users.
Methinks they actually DO know that the free advertising is worth much more than the sales lost, but can't admit that because it would radically dilute their arguments toward stricter/longer copyright laws.
This sounds like something fun to do for city officials' cars... then next time they run for office, you can point at all their unpaid parking tickets (since most wind up mysteriously "exempt") as evidence of corruption. Everyone can play!!
Say that again when it's 30 below zero and snowing sideways. Which wouldn't be an entirely unusual condition for Chicago.
Mind you, normally I will walk a few extra blocks rather than feed a meter at all, but there are times when that's just not practical, and an extra block of freezing your ass off is one of them.
Another thing -- that's 5 or 10 minutes you're charged for parking when in fact you're going to and from the parking meter. That's a lot like how cell phones charge you for 15 seconds of twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the damned voicemail announcement to stop yakking so you can leave a message.
I was going to say the same thing -- why is expensive automation better than cheap human labour? Oh, because the expensive automation makes a lot more money for the contractors who make and install it. If that means real humans are out of work over a much longer period than the construction phase, oh well!!
Which reminds me of my first thought upon seeing this story... My solution? Park in some city OTHER than Chicago.
Seriously, if you want to drive people away from downtown businesses, make parking onerous compared to malls, where it's always free and a lot easier to find a spot, too.
Yet the U.S. has a much lower violent crime rate than many of these other countries. What does that say about the types of offenses we put people in prison for?? (And yes, it may say something about their enforcement, or lack of it, as well)
Uh... weapons are going to come from countries that manufacture them. So naturally some come from the U.S. And I'd guess that some of the military surplus that the U.S. sells to its allies, is then resold to black markets like Mexican drug cartels. (I recall reading some years ago that over half of the weapons we provide to our allies wind up in the black market.)
The anti-gun lobby likes to twist this into "the U.S. is providing guns to Mexican criminals" but that's a specious interpretation at best.
That's a possibility, but what do you do about people who have receptor problems, so they get no use out of their high hormone levels?
There are too many variables and I don't really see any perfect way to divide 'em. It may well be that evident-gender is as good as we're going to get.
Weight classes in boxing was exactly what I was thinking of, along with the divisions in baseball (Big League, Class AAA, AA, A, semi-pro, etc.) which are based wholly on level of competence. And if you became sufficiently dominant in your class (say, coming in first over 60% of the time), you'd get moved up to the next class. The idea being to have a fairly-delineated *range* of competition available to everyone involved, without arbitrary divisions based on gender or whatever.
And since there's really no practical way to stop every "enhancement", yes, I think it makes sense to have "enhanced" and "natural" divisions, just as we have "pro" and "amateur" divisions. Always better to have that sort of thing out in the open where it can be monitored and regulated, than driven underground and becoming a "cheat".
There will always be public perception that one class is better than another, just like for so long the only boxing class that mattered was the Heavyweight. But then along came Sugar Ray Leonard, and suddenly you didn't have to be a Big Guy to be in the limelight. That's up to the athletes, to achieve the public's fancy.
Soy-based baby formula is probably a major cause of plant allergies in adults (and likely of colic in babies); soy protein is known to be a broad-spectrum allergen. I personally know someone who, after a binge on toasted soy nuts, became allergic to practically all plant proteins. It happened almost immediately after the only time she ever ate lots of soy nuts, so there's little doubt about the trigger.
A lot of these black athletes are from bloodlines that have never been plantation slaves -- many are native Africans. And slaveowners certainly didn't breed for "running fast" nor did they have enough generations to make a real difference (it takes about four generations in dogs just to start a serious shift in a fairly homogenous gene pool, and dogs are highly maleable compared to humans, and have a much shorter generational span). Even with such a selection pressure, there have been more generations of non-slaves who bred as they pleased since, than there ever were of selectively-bred slaves, so whatever effect it had has doubtless long since been diluted beyond notice.
However, if you look broadly at sports (which does not give a damn what race/colour you are, if you can help the team win), "arm positions" tend to be white, while "leg positions" tend to be black. Historically (and speaking very broadly), white/European cultures have tended to be riding cultures that used close-contact weapons, while black/African/Australian cultures have tended to be walking/running cultures that used throwing weapons (which require less sheer muscle mass to be effective). Successful dominant (read: many progeny) males tended to fit their culture's "ideals" in terms of selection. So there was long-term pressure, over thousands of years, for upper-body vs lower-body, driven by the way the environment shaped broad swaths of human cultures. Differences in food-production methods probably also helped drive the selection process; agriculture (much more prevalent in Europe than in Africa) is more of an arm-and-back thing, while hunting sans horses bushman-style is of necessity a leg thing.
So it should come as no surprise that yeah, the preponderance of really good runners are of strong African descent.
Every human type has its advantages, or it wouldn't have developed and survived in our ancestors' far more primitive environments. Sports might be considered a re-creation of a "primitive selection environment".
Is it the phytoestrogens in soy that cause your reaction? If so, you should also avoid flaxseed like the plague, as it has 3 times the phytoestrogens of soy!
As to what's fair -- we divide some sports by preliminary trials, then you compete in your competence class. I think that would be a fair way to deal with the intersex issue -- wouldn't matter if you're M/F/N/combo, if you're up to Class A standards then that's where you compete, if not then Class B, or C, or whatever level. Might wind up with one class being 99% male and another class being 99% female, but so what, if the idea is to start with a level playing field?
[silly thought: Class Z would consist entirely of slashdotters;)
Congrats on the success. Yeah, what most people do, and fail doing, is like that old definition of insanity: "repeating what don't work". If something works, you stick with it, and sometimes you don't have the luxury of other choices -- because they don't work! Well, d'oh!
It's pretty clear that we evolved for a low carb diet, so you gotta wonder why people are so surprised that eating such a diet keeps one in 'wild' (fit) condition, as is necessary to survive without civilization. Today's average obese person couldn't walk far enough to gather enough plant material to avoid starvation.
As, so they're actually parasites? That probably makes the best sense of any explanation thus far!
In the previous post I was thinking that maybe they were like the bacteria in our guts that actually digest our food and produce most of the vitamins we then absorb... well, I suppose m/c could be a symbiote or system stimulus (as some parasites are in the Real World[tm]).
Lucas said flat out, way back in 1977, that C-3PO was intented to be a fussy butler type.
Scalzi's complaints are the same thing we've heard every time a new generation of anal-retentive geeks discovers the original movie. Nothing new there....
Isn't there a scene where someone's (Han's?) blaster runs out of charge? I may be imagining things. But it makes sense that they carry a LOT of charge, compared to a projectile weapon where sheer mass is a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
And what constitutes a crime can be downright specious, especially if instituted at the behest of special interest groups.
Here's a good example: Say you have a litter of puppies for sale, and you take them to the park to play. California Legislature is presently considering a bill (which will probably pass) that will make this a CRIMINAL ACT, solely because the puppies are offered for sale and can be seen in a public place. (AB1122. You can look it up. http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_1101-1150/ab_1122_cfa_20090420_115409_asm_comm.html)
This misses the real point, which is, "How much money does the deployment and upkeep make for the 3rd party contractor who sold this whole deal to your government??"
What if the only information available on a topic IS your own original research??
I've observed this myself, when evaluating political candidates... as a general rule, the more one thinks he can run my life better than I can, the worse hash he'll make of it.
Tho observationally, prey animals are even worse at multitasking (ie. quick task switching). Most literally can't chew and scan for predators at the same time, and tend to panic each and every time they're forced to task-switch.
It occurs to me that if Big Media *really* wanted to shut down the big torrent sites, the big companies could BUY those sites, for a lot less money than they currently spend trying to intimidate their users.
Methinks they actually DO know that the free advertising is worth much more than the sales lost, but can't admit that because it would radically dilute their arguments toward stricter/longer copyright laws.
Crap, *I* would sue TPB to get one of those nifty T-shirts! ;)
Now, imagine that in a northern city, under frequent winter storm conditions, and the pavement with its printed number under 6" of packed snow.
This sounds like something fun to do for city officials' cars... then next time they run for office, you can point at all their unpaid parking tickets (since most wind up mysteriously "exempt") as evidence of corruption. Everyone can play!!
Say that again when it's 30 below zero and snowing sideways. Which wouldn't be an entirely unusual condition for Chicago.
Mind you, normally I will walk a few extra blocks rather than feed a meter at all, but there are times when that's just not practical, and an extra block of freezing your ass off is one of them.
Another thing -- that's 5 or 10 minutes you're charged for parking when in fact you're going to and from the parking meter. That's a lot like how cell phones charge you for 15 seconds of twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the damned voicemail announcement to stop yakking so you can leave a message.
I was going to say the same thing -- why is expensive automation better than cheap human labour? Oh, because the expensive automation makes a lot more money for the contractors who make and install it. If that means real humans are out of work over a much longer period than the construction phase, oh well!!
Which reminds me of my first thought upon seeing this story... My solution? Park in some city OTHER than Chicago.
Seriously, if you want to drive people away from downtown businesses, make parking onerous compared to malls, where it's always free and a lot easier to find a spot, too.
Yet the U.S. has a much lower violent crime rate than many of these other countries. What does that say about the types of offenses we put people in prison for?? (And yes, it may say something about their enforcement, or lack of it, as well)
Uh... weapons are going to come from countries that manufacture them. So naturally some come from the U.S. And I'd guess that some of the military surplus that the U.S. sells to its allies, is then resold to black markets like Mexican drug cartels. (I recall reading some years ago that over half of the weapons we provide to our allies wind up in the black market.)
The anti-gun lobby likes to twist this into "the U.S. is providing guns to Mexican criminals" but that's a specious interpretation at best.
That's a possibility, but what do you do about people who have receptor problems, so they get no use out of their high hormone levels?
There are too many variables and I don't really see any perfect way to divide 'em. It may well be that evident-gender is as good as we're going to get.
Weight classes in boxing was exactly what I was thinking of, along with the divisions in baseball (Big League, Class AAA, AA, A, semi-pro, etc.) which are based wholly on level of competence. And if you became sufficiently dominant in your class (say, coming in first over 60% of the time), you'd get moved up to the next class. The idea being to have a fairly-delineated *range* of competition available to everyone involved, without arbitrary divisions based on gender or whatever.
And since there's really no practical way to stop every "enhancement", yes, I think it makes sense to have "enhanced" and "natural" divisions, just as we have "pro" and "amateur" divisions. Always better to have that sort of thing out in the open where it can be monitored and regulated, than driven underground and becoming a "cheat".
There will always be public perception that one class is better than another, just like for so long the only boxing class that mattered was the Heavyweight. But then along came Sugar Ray Leonard, and suddenly you didn't have to be a Big Guy to be in the limelight. That's up to the athletes, to achieve the public's fancy.
You may find this site interesting:
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/
Some of it is a little overblown, but my background is biochem, and I'd say that in the whole, they are right. (See note from a skeptic at http://snhbw.blogspot.com/2009/02/update-on-soy-online-service.html)
Dr.Mercola is a snake-oil salesman, but even so lists a number of good studies: http://www.mercola.com/article/soy/index.htm
Soy-based baby formula is probably a major cause of plant allergies in adults (and likely of colic in babies); soy protein is known to be a broad-spectrum allergen. I personally know someone who, after a binge on toasted soy nuts, became allergic to practically all plant proteins. It happened almost immediately after the only time she ever ate lots of soy nuts, so there's little doubt about the trigger.
A lot of these black athletes are from bloodlines that have never been plantation slaves -- many are native Africans. And slaveowners certainly didn't breed for "running fast" nor did they have enough generations to make a real difference (it takes about four generations in dogs just to start a serious shift in a fairly homogenous gene pool, and dogs are highly maleable compared to humans, and have a much shorter generational span). Even with such a selection pressure, there have been more generations of non-slaves who bred as they pleased since, than there ever were of selectively-bred slaves, so whatever effect it had has doubtless long since been diluted beyond notice.
However, if you look broadly at sports (which does not give a damn what race/colour you are, if you can help the team win), "arm positions" tend to be white, while "leg positions" tend to be black. Historically (and speaking very broadly), white/European cultures have tended to be riding cultures that used close-contact weapons, while black/African/Australian cultures have tended to be walking/running cultures that used throwing weapons (which require less sheer muscle mass to be effective). Successful dominant (read: many progeny) males tended to fit their culture's "ideals" in terms of selection. So there was long-term pressure, over thousands of years, for upper-body vs lower-body, driven by the way the environment shaped broad swaths of human cultures. Differences in food-production methods probably also helped drive the selection process; agriculture (much more prevalent in Europe than in Africa) is more of an arm-and-back thing, while hunting sans horses bushman-style is of necessity a leg thing.
So it should come as no surprise that yeah, the preponderance of really good runners are of strong African descent.
Every human type has its advantages, or it wouldn't have developed and survived in our ancestors' far more primitive environments. Sports might be considered a re-creation of a "primitive selection environment".
Is it the phytoestrogens in soy that cause your reaction? If so, you should also avoid flaxseed like the plague, as it has 3 times the phytoestrogens of soy!
As to what's fair -- we divide some sports by preliminary trials, then you compete in your competence class. I think that would be a fair way to deal with the intersex issue -- wouldn't matter if you're M/F/N/combo, if you're up to Class A standards then that's where you compete, if not then Class B, or C, or whatever level. Might wind up with one class being 99% male and another class being 99% female, but so what, if the idea is to start with a level playing field?
[silly thought: Class Z would consist entirely of slashdotters ;)
Of course gravity doesn't exist. The earth sucks.
Geez, you'd think people would know these things by now.
On second thought, maybe the volume of dense people has triggered a tiny black hole ...
Press To Test
[*click*]
Release To Detonate
Congrats on the success. Yeah, what most people do, and fail doing, is like that old definition of insanity: "repeating what don't work". If something works, you stick with it, and sometimes you don't have the luxury of other choices -- because they don't work! Well, d'oh!
It's pretty clear that we evolved for a low carb diet, so you gotta wonder why people are so surprised that eating such a diet keeps one in 'wild' (fit) condition, as is necessary to survive without civilization. Today's average obese person couldn't walk far enough to gather enough plant material to avoid starvation.
As, so they're actually parasites? That probably makes the best sense of any explanation thus far!
In the previous post I was thinking that maybe they were like the bacteria in our guts that actually digest our food and produce most of the vitamins we then absorb... well, I suppose m/c could be a symbiote or system stimulus (as some parasites are in the Real World[tm]).
Lucas said flat out, way back in 1977, that C-3PO was intented to be a fussy butler type.
Scalzi's complaints are the same thing we've heard every time a new generation of anal-retentive geeks discovers the original movie. Nothing new there....
Isn't there a scene where someone's (Han's?) blaster runs out of charge? I may be imagining things. But it makes sense that they carry a LOT of charge, compared to a projectile weapon where sheer mass is a problem.