It's close. Real close. Once the problem of eliminating the capacitive reluctance inside the hydrocoptic marzelvanes is solved (simply an engineering fix) control of the milford trunions will in the range of 90%. Any day now.
Nonesense on every count. Scientists have largely supported trusting institutions that support science, and institutions that make conclusions that are based on scientific skepticism.
Nobody IS saying that "replace coal now or millions will die" is a scientific conclusion. It is a policy conclusion based on a scientific conclusion. What they do say is that carbon increases heat absorption, we're increasing carbon output, and the temperature and weather is measurably changing. But policy is never a conclusion of the scientific method. Policy is the logical conclusion that rational people make in the face of scientific evidence and in light of facts revealed by the scientific method. The very idea that there should be evidence to support a policy conclusion, as opposed to the fact conclusions upon which the policy conclusion is based, indicates that you basically have no understanding of either science or policy.
I don't know, likewise, any scientist who has ever used any evidence derived from the scientific method to conclude that in a scientific sense that "god doesn't exist." What scientists typically and rightly say is that we don't need god to explain the evidence, that god is not a testable hypothesis, and that god is basically irrelevant to our theories and ideas. Only in the fevered imaginings of fundamentalists are scientists drawing the conclusion from scientific evidence and methods that god doesn't exist. They just don't do that, because by and large they know that this would be absurd.
Hard to imagine that the conversion of gasoline energy to electricity could occur more efficiently through the tires than through the cars electrical system...
I've been product managing and architecting for a years and now I'm out of work at age 52 with no obvious prospects for re-employment. I decided the developers were always having more fun than the managers. So I took my first course in c++ last month at a local community college (2nd quarter CS.... objects, linked lists, pointers, etc.). It was hard, but not impossible.
I have the same questions. Objectively, the idea of becoming a developer in your 50s is ridiculous, absurd, silly. But here's another thing that's even more ridiculous. - Getting up in the morning and having to do things that you don't give a damn about. So with my unemployment checks and savings I'm back to school to see how far I can go in the art of coding.
Will this enable me to support my family? I have serious doubts about it. On the other hand, it's not like there are other options falling out of the trees. It will take a least a year or two before I can even walk in the door and say "Hey I'm an old guy with some new skills... (and a lot of experience around software development)... what terms are you willing to hire me on?" If I do this thing, I'll do it the honest way, not pretending to be a 20 year old developer, and not asking for the salary of the experienced 50 year old project manager that I am.
Will it work? Will anyone bite? Hell if I know. But I do like playing with code, so I'm taking baby steps down that road and we'll see where it leads.
If you use Chrome, it hardly matters whether you type a url, a search term, or a URLish search term. I don't even think about it anymore. Just mash my fingers down on the keyboard and either I get where I meant to go on the first try, or the one more click on the search results and I'm there. Anyone got a problem with that?
This has always been my "vegetarian" ethic. I don't eat animals that I'm not willing to kill. I couldn't kill a cow, so I don't eat cows. I think I could kill a chicken or a fish, and so I eat them. The fact that Zuckerberg has the money and time to put my theoretical schema to the test doesn't bother me. I applaud him.
The problem with meat isn't the killing, it's the lying. He's addressing the lying... and the hiding and the pretending. Good on him. Kol ha'kavod.
Whatcha wanna do here is send small self replicating molecules.... accelerate them at the speed of light toward habitable planets in some kind of accelerator gun... let them land on the distant planet and start evolving... wait a billion years or so and voila... they start sending radio signals announcing their arrival.
It will be "us", but perfectly adapted to wherever "we" land.
In fact, that may be how we got here. We may be the aliens finally reporting back to the mother planet right now.
We value sticking together... we value it in our mutual decision (hers, mine, my spouse's) to be next door neighbors with our mother/mother in law... we value it in our hopes to remain near our children when they are adults... and we raise our children under the guidance of the always apt maxim "be nice to your children, they may be picking your nursing home... or deciding whether you can live next door or in their house."
"ignorant", "stupid", "lie" -- seriously, is there an eye rolling icon big enough for this kind of nonsense?
I was kidding about the firm warning... it's a joke we make, but a joke with a serious point. If our kids move out of state, we plan to follow (some day) and of course we do everything we can to make sure they'll want us, or choose to remain local.
It seems like Google Earth qualifies as a much larger "picture".... continuously linked pixels creating a visual representation of reality resembling that which you would see if you looked with your eyes.
Define "picture" or "photograph" as you will... many map databases integrate images to create images that are vastly larger and more interactive.
>(1) Yes, families do have the option to look after older members to a certain degree, and it's sad that parents in some societies are encouraged to separate themselves from their children and vice versa;
(2) But not everyone has children. Recall also that children are a huge unearnt burden to the state, while older people have already paid their national insurance / social security / whatever contributions and are just getting the care they paid for. We are all better off because we do not breed out of concern about our frailties; >
My preteen children year old are on firm warning... they can move out of state, but we parents are coming after them and moving into their attics/basements/spare rooms. There is no escape. And we live what we talk, taking care of our mother/mother-in-law next door.
Are we better off if people do not breed for the purposes of old age insurance? I doubt it. We are better off if people do not breed excessively out of fear that disease will utterly deprive them of offspring for old age, but it is probably more sustainable to "entrain" children in the care of parents out of a sense of duty, than it is to free them to maximize their income and then tax that income to pay "someone else" to provide elder care.
We might ask "would it not be more efficient for a lawyer or engineer to earn $200 K and pay someone else $50 K to watch an elder?" but that is probably a rare case. The cost of quality care is the cost of middle class income anyway, roughly, so why should this family service be exogenized into the market as opposed to remaining endogenous to the family?
Well there is ONE very good reason and that is that women are the vastly predominant providers of elder care services. Marketizing those services enables women to have public careers as opposed to be locked into the family care giver role... mother to children, nurse to elders... for their entire life. Families are only "free" if you ignore the lost opportunities they tend to cause for women.
Sorry, but sometimes the stupid just burns: "They are merely two different brands of corporatism that use different approaches to achieve the same goal of statism."
No, corporatism is its own goal, and the very opposite of statism. In a corporatist reality, our reality, the corporations control the state. It expresses their interests. Any reasonable definition of statism must put corporations in service of a powerful central state, and no sane observer could imagine that we have that or are moving in that direction.
There is only one political party... the left third of the Democratic party... and the rest is just one big corporate funded subsidiary of powerful interests.... 100% of the Republicans and 2/3 of the Democrats, doing corporate bidding.
As for Obama... well he believes in the art of the possible... does what the corporate party requires of him... and lacks the will to attack the paymasters of Congress. When people worry about "statism" I just laugh. They have no idea. We should be so lucky as to have a strong central government, able to see a need and levy a tax to fund an efficient government office to solve the problem. It can be done, but we way too far gone for it to happen.
... but I do know that 1) genotypes are a direct function of enviro-types 2) the envirotype of 2010 and and of 1900 to the present (antibiotics, changed cultural mores etc.) is pretty different from anything that proceeded it, so of course the genotype will adjust.... if that envirotype hangs around long enough.
On the other hand, while the Western envirotype has shifted, has the planetary envirotype shifted? Isn't the normative human environment still China, India, Africa and Brazil? Must be, because that's where the people live. So whatever evolution is happening for the species as a whole, it is surely happening because of environmental changes facing people living in places other than Europe and the U.S.
Seems to me that for human evolution to occur in a meaningful sense you'd need a big change in some fundamental environmental factors, and they would have to effect most of the planet, particularly the places where most of the people live.
Given climate change and global warming, I'm not even sure we'll be around long enough to measure such effects. 2500 indeed! Good luck getting to 2200, planet earth.
Then of course you can get into different scenarios. What if Asia and Africa are wiped out by global warming, and Framingham Europeans are really a population bottleneck? Well then you could have evolutionary changes to adopt to Framingham environtypes... but only if they persisted over generations.
In retrospect, the antibiotic technology based stage of human evolution may prove to be quite temporary... a few generations. Do you really believe that antibiotics are forever? I suggest you have forgotten the evolutionary potential of bacteria.
The world of 20th and 21st century America and Europe is probably a deviation from the basic human condition of the past (certainly) and African villages and Mad Max warriors and Ghengis Kahn is more like the real future (I predict) and so the forms that evolve to live in the modern world are probably dead ends any way.
I know that you tech optimists find that improbable. You think antibiotics and high energy society are forever. I think African villages and are closer to forever, and that if there is a long run that's more what it looks like. The human forms that can survive in that world will continue to be the face of humanity.
Intel X25-M G2 (80gb) is a transformative computing experience. Applications boot "instantly". Of course I don't keep data files on an 80gb ssd drive... that's all over on standard 1TB platter. Once I upgrade to Win7 with TRIM I'm hoping for performance to be maintained for a good long while.
Round this neighborhood of inner eastside PDX lots of folks are unschooling. The ones I know are middle and upper income, or at least highly educated and downwardly mobile. They bring a lot to the table for their kids.
Plenty of kids need to be rescued by public schools from their home environments, but many home environments are richer than the available public school or private school environment, particularly if you appreciate all the kinds of ladders that kids can use to grow.
The work of education is providing the ladders to climb on. Only the child can climb the ladders.
Did you ever stop to think.... how incredibly neurotically self obsessed you'd have to be to want to ""to live our lives with CONSTANT monitoring of our body's medical status?"
Did you ever stop to think what an incredibly low level of bodily awareness you would have to have to need constant monitoring, and to be unable to feel your body without the aid of a machine?
Go take a walk around the block and your body will tell you what you need to know.
If you RTFRTTA (read the f---ing response to the article) it seems fairly plausible, even from this fascist administration, and even if printed in the batshit crazy moonie owned out and out fascist nutcase meshugga looney tunes Washington Times.
"By: S&Tspokesman
Shocking, but False
Sometimes it just amazes me how these stories evolve. Let me start off by saying that the Department of Homeland Securityâ(TM)s Science & Technology Directorate nor TSA have been pursuing shock bracelets for airline passengers as alleged by the Washington Times Blog.
This allegation stemmed from a misleading video posted on the Lamberd Website which depicts an ID bracelet that would contain identifying information as well as the ability to stun the wearer. The company claims to connect use of such a device to DHS and TSA, but no discussions between these agencies has ever taken place.
This all originated from a meeting held two years ago with a private company representative (not Lamberd) who proposed bracelet technology in response to the TSA's desire to find less-than-lethal means to detain an apprehended suspect.
The bracelet was never intended to replace boarding passes, contain ID information or be worn by all passengers as asserted in the Lamberd video and discussed in the Washington Times Blog.
The hypothetical use of the bracelet would have been for transporting already apprehended prisoners and detainees at prisons and border patrol facilities, and DHS was looking to see if there were potential air travel applications for apprehended suspects.
This concept was never funded or supported by the DHS or TSA and hasnâ(TM)t even been discussed for two years. The letter circulating throughout the blogosphere from Paul Ruwaldt was not addressed to Lamberd and merely states the DHS was interested in learning more about the technology. Neither side followed up.
DHS/TSA does NOT support the asserted use and has not pursued the development of such technology."
Slashdot Mirror
"Just as scary, we vote for people who want the job - which by rights ought to disqualify them."
Sortition is the answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
It's close. Real close. Once the problem of eliminating the capacitive reluctance inside the hydrocoptic marzelvanes is solved (simply an engineering
fix) control of the milford trunions will in the range of 90%. Any day now.
brilliant.
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes. ~ W. Gibson
Nonesense on every count. Scientists have largely supported trusting institutions that support science, and institutions that make conclusions that are based on scientific skepticism.
Nobody IS saying that "replace coal now or millions will die" is a scientific conclusion. It is a policy conclusion based on a scientific conclusion. What they do say is that carbon increases heat absorption, we're increasing carbon output, and the temperature and weather is measurably changing. But policy is never a conclusion of the scientific method. Policy is the logical conclusion that rational people make in the face of scientific evidence and in light of facts revealed by the scientific method. The very idea that there should be evidence to support a policy conclusion, as opposed to the fact conclusions upon which the policy conclusion is based, indicates that you basically have no understanding of either science or policy.
I don't know, likewise, any scientist who has ever used any evidence derived from the scientific method to conclude that in a scientific sense that "god doesn't exist." What scientists typically and rightly say is that we don't need god to explain the evidence, that god is not a testable hypothesis, and that god is basically irrelevant to our theories and ideas. Only in the fevered imaginings of fundamentalists are scientists drawing the conclusion from scientific evidence and methods that god doesn't exist. They just don't do that, because by and large they know that this would be absurd.
Hard to imagine that the conversion of gasoline energy to electricity could occur more efficiently through the tires than through the cars electrical system...
I've been product managing and architecting for a years and now I'm out of work at age 52 with no obvious prospects for re-employment. I decided the developers were always having more fun than the managers. So I took my first course in c++ last month at a local community college (2nd quarter CS.... objects, linked lists, pointers, etc.). It was hard, but not impossible.
I have the same questions. Objectively, the idea of becoming a developer in your 50s is ridiculous, absurd, silly. But here's another thing that's even more ridiculous. - Getting up in the morning and having to do things that you don't give a damn about. So with my unemployment checks and savings I'm back to school to see how far I can go in the art of coding.
Will this enable me to support my family? I have serious doubts about it. On the other hand, it's not like there are other options falling out of the trees. It will take a least a year or two before I can even walk in the door and say "Hey I'm an old guy with some new skills... (and a lot of experience around software development)... what terms are you willing to hire me on?" If I do this thing, I'll do it the honest way, not pretending to be a 20 year old developer, and not asking for the salary of the experienced 50 year old project manager that I am.
Will it work? Will anyone bite? Hell if I know. But I do like playing with code, so I'm taking baby steps down that road and we'll see where it leads.
If you use Chrome, it hardly matters whether you type a url, a search term, or a URLish search term. I don't even think about it anymore. Just mash my fingers down on the keyboard and either I get where I meant to go on the first try, or the one more click on the search results and I'm there. Anyone got a problem with that?
This has always been my "vegetarian" ethic. I don't eat animals that I'm not willing to kill. I couldn't kill a cow, so I don't eat cows. I think I could kill a chicken or a fish, and so I eat them. The fact that Zuckerberg has the money and time to put my theoretical schema to the test doesn't bother me. I applaud him.
The problem with meat isn't the killing, it's the lying. He's addressing the lying... and the hiding and the pretending. Good on him. Kol ha'kavod.
Check this supersonic fantasy machine: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2010/12/16/the-sno-melter-1960.html
Whatcha wanna do here is send small self replicating molecules.... accelerate them at the speed of light toward habitable planets in some kind of accelerator gun... let them land on the distant planet and start evolving... wait a billion years or so and voila... they start sending radio signals announcing their arrival.
It will be "us", but perfectly adapted to wherever "we" land.
In fact, that may be how we got here. We may be the aliens finally reporting back to the mother planet right now.
Forgot sense of humor?
We value sticking together... we value it in our mutual decision (hers, mine, my spouse's) to be next door neighbors with our mother/mother in law... we value it in our hopes to remain near our children when they are adults... and we raise our children under the guidance of the always apt maxim "be nice to your children, they may be picking your nursing home... or deciding whether you can live next door or in their house."
"ignorant", "stupid", "lie" -- seriously, is there an eye rolling icon big enough for this kind of nonsense?
I was kidding about the firm warning... it's a joke we make, but a joke with a serious point. If our kids move out of state, we plan to follow (some day) and of course we do everything we can to make sure they'll want us, or choose to remain local.
It seems like Google Earth qualifies as a much larger "picture".... continuously linked pixels creating a visual representation of reality resembling that which you would see if you looked with your eyes.
Define "picture" or "photograph" as you will... many map databases integrate images to create images that are vastly larger and more interactive.
>(1) Yes, families do have the option to look after older members to a certain degree, and it's sad that parents in some societies are encouraged to separate themselves from their children and vice versa;
(2) But not everyone has children. Recall also that children are a huge unearnt burden to the state, while older people have already paid their national insurance / social security / whatever contributions and are just getting the care they paid for. We are all better off because we do not breed out of concern about our frailties; >
My preteen children year old are on firm warning... they can move out of state, but we parents are coming after them and moving into their attics/basements/spare rooms. There is no escape. And we live what we talk, taking care of our mother/mother-in-law next door.
Are we better off if people do not breed for the purposes of old age insurance? I doubt it. We are better off if people do not breed excessively out of fear that disease will utterly deprive them of offspring for old age, but it is probably more sustainable to "entrain" children in the care of parents out of a sense of duty, than it is to free them to maximize their income and then tax that income to pay "someone else" to provide elder care.
We might ask "would it not be more efficient for a lawyer or engineer to earn $200 K and pay someone else $50 K to watch an elder?" but that is probably a rare case. The cost of quality care is the cost of middle class income anyway, roughly, so why should this family service be exogenized into the market as opposed to remaining endogenous to the family?
Well there is ONE very good reason and that is that women are the vastly predominant providers of elder care services. Marketizing those services enables women to have public careers as opposed to be locked into the family care giver role... mother to children, nurse to elders... for their entire life. Families are only "free" if you ignore the lost opportunities they tend to cause for women.
Single safe = single point of failure. Distribute the information as noncoding dna in the genomes of cockroaches. That'll last.
Sorry, but sometimes the stupid just burns: "They are merely two different brands of corporatism that use different approaches to achieve the same goal of statism."
No, corporatism is its own goal, and the very opposite of statism. In a corporatist reality, our reality, the corporations control the state. It expresses their interests. Any reasonable definition of statism must put corporations in service of a powerful central state, and no sane observer could imagine that we have that or are moving in that direction.
There is only one political party... the left third of the Democratic party... and the rest is just one big corporate funded subsidiary of powerful interests.... 100% of the Republicans and 2/3 of the Democrats, doing corporate bidding.
As for Obama... well he believes in the art of the possible... does what the corporate party requires of him... and lacks the will to attack the paymasters of Congress. When people worry about "statism" I just laugh. They have no idea. We should be so lucky as to have a strong central government, able to see a need and levy a tax to fund an efficient government office to solve the problem. It can be done, but we way too far gone for it to happen.
Really? Do they use a keypad?
I wonder if you could run a skype ap over wifi? Just saw this: http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/iphone/ I assume it would work on speaker. Bluetooth headset option?
Ah yes... the old triple double cross with a backflip onto the reverse side of a mobius strip. It gets them every time.
... but I do know that
1) genotypes are a direct function of enviro-types
2) the envirotype of 2010 and and of 1900 to the present (antibiotics, changed cultural mores etc.) is pretty different from anything that proceeded it, so of course the genotype will adjust.... if that envirotype hangs around long enough.
On the other hand, while the Western envirotype has shifted, has the planetary envirotype shifted? Isn't the normative human environment still China, India, Africa and Brazil? Must be, because that's where the people live. So whatever evolution is happening for the species as a whole, it is surely happening because of environmental changes facing people living in places other than Europe and the U.S.
Seems to me that for human evolution to occur in a meaningful sense you'd need a big change in some fundamental environmental factors, and they would have to effect most of the planet, particularly the places where most of the people live.
Given climate change and global warming, I'm not even sure we'll be around long enough to measure such effects. 2500 indeed! Good luck getting to 2200, planet earth.
Then of course you can get into different scenarios. What if Asia and Africa are wiped out by global warming, and Framingham Europeans are really a population bottleneck? Well then you could have evolutionary changes to adopt to Framingham environtypes... but only if they persisted over generations.
In retrospect, the antibiotic technology based stage of human evolution may prove to be quite temporary... a few generations. Do you really believe that antibiotics are forever? I suggest you have forgotten the evolutionary potential of bacteria.
The world of 20th and 21st century America and Europe is probably a deviation from the basic human condition of the past (certainly) and African villages and Mad Max warriors and Ghengis Kahn is more like the real future (I predict) and so the forms that evolve to live in the modern world are probably dead ends any way.
I know that you tech optimists find that improbable. You think antibiotics and high energy society are forever. I think African villages and are closer to forever, and that if there is a long run that's more what it looks like. The human forms that can survive in that world will continue to be the face of humanity.
My two cents.
Intel X25-M G2 (80gb) is a transformative computing experience. Applications boot "instantly". Of course I don't keep data files on an 80gb ssd drive... that's all over on standard 1TB platter. Once I upgrade to Win7 with TRIM I'm hoping for performance to be maintained for a good long while.
What on earth? The patients' doctors are irrelevant here, legally and ethically. It is patient consent that matters.
Round this neighborhood of inner eastside PDX lots of folks are unschooling. The ones I know are middle and upper income, or at least highly educated and downwardly mobile. They bring a lot to the table for their kids.
Plenty of kids need to be rescued by public schools from their home environments, but many home environments are richer than the available public school or private school environment, particularly if you appreciate all the kinds of ladders that kids can use to grow.
The work of education is providing the ladders to climb on. Only the child can climb the ladders.
Did you ever stop to think.... how incredibly neurotically self obsessed you'd have to be to want to ""to live our lives with CONSTANT monitoring of our body's medical status?"
Did you ever stop to think what an incredibly low level of bodily awareness you would have to have to need constant monitoring, and to be unable to feel your body without the aid of a machine?
Go take a walk around the block and your body will tell you what you need to know.
If you RTFRTTA (read the f---ing response to the article) it seems fairly plausible, even from this fascist administration, and even if printed in the batshit crazy moonie owned out and out fascist nutcase meshugga looney tunes Washington Times.
"By: S&Tspokesman
Shocking, but False
Sometimes it just amazes me how these stories evolve. Let me start off by saying that the Department of Homeland Securityâ(TM)s Science & Technology Directorate nor TSA have been pursuing shock bracelets for airline passengers as alleged by the Washington Times Blog.
This allegation stemmed from a misleading video posted on the Lamberd Website which depicts an ID bracelet that would contain identifying information as well as the ability to stun the wearer. The company claims to connect use of such a device to DHS and TSA, but no discussions between these agencies has ever taken place.
This all originated from a meeting held two years ago with a private company representative (not Lamberd) who proposed bracelet technology in response to the TSA's desire to find less-than-lethal means to detain an apprehended suspect.
The bracelet was never intended to replace boarding passes, contain ID information or be worn by all passengers as asserted in the Lamberd video and discussed in the Washington Times Blog.
The hypothetical use of the bracelet would have been for transporting already apprehended prisoners and detainees at prisons and border patrol facilities, and DHS was looking to see if there were potential air travel applications for apprehended suspects.
This concept was never funded or supported by the DHS or TSA and hasnâ(TM)t even been discussed for two years. The letter circulating throughout the blogosphere from Paul Ruwaldt was not addressed to Lamberd and merely states the DHS was interested in learning more about the technology. Neither side followed up.
DHS/TSA does NOT support the asserted use and has not pursued the development of such technology."