People seem to always mistake weather (ie what happens every day, or even over weeks or months) for climate, which is more like an average.
Think of a desert - here, the Sonoran Desert (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_temperature_in_Arizona) - the average temperature over a year is 22.5 Centigrade, if one simply takes the day and night temperatures for each month, add them up and divide by 24; 22.5C is really quite pleasant. So why is it so damned hot there in July? Who's lying?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK Mensa is a club for people whose only common interest is their ability to score highly in IQ tests? I remember being very impressed when I was a teenager, but I think the consensus has moved on a bit from the idea that intelligence, not to mention broader abillity, can be described well with just one number. And of course, one so often comes across people who have scored something mile high and still seem surpisingly limited in their abilities in life.
Taking intelligence tests is something that can be learned - it's not even that hard, once you learn the tricks. I have several times scored over 150; so am I genius? Well, you tell me:-) It's a bit like bodybuilding - it looks very impressive, but all those hard pumped muscles are just for show, they don't actually have much practical value.
... that astrophysicists have brushed under the carpet
To me, this article reeks of conspiracy theory; a valid, scientific critique or proposal has no need for using this kind of language.
Another thing is that the speed of light and its constancy in all inertial frames of reference is a fundamental tenet in all modern physics. It underpins the whole of relativity theory and it is crucial in the explanation of the equivalence between mass and energy; it even explains the colour of gold. In short: one has to be careful fiddling with it, because one will then have to find alternative explanations for A LOT OF OBSERVABLE FACTS.
I have no idea what the 'valley' represents, nor the 'hill' so this explanation tells me nothing.
What I read into this metaphor is that the Higgs field is a 'scalar field' that varies only with the distance - so one can draw a graph with distance as the X-axis and 'Higgs' as the Y-axis. This graph has a local minimum, that looks like a 'valley', and one can imagine that it would be possible to 'push reality out of the valley' to the other side of one of the nearby, local maxima. No, I'm not it makes a lot of sense either.
Also, I'm not happy with the tendency in physics to 'run to the fields' and start talking about fields and vector bosons; adding yet another field to the flock doesn't bring our understanding to a deeper level, it only allows us to perform calculations within our existing understanding, and I feel we are running against the edge here.
This is a good example of the scientific method in action, really: we have theory and a prediction (namely, that the university doesn't exist); seeing that the prediction fails, we have to conclude that there is a flaw in the theory.
True, but who is going to start a war with China over this? Those can match China in power are not too keen, all things considered. Might may not be right, but it definitely is might.
In UK, 1 litre of petrol (gasoline) costs about 1.2 GBP. 1 US gallon = 3.7 litres, so that works out as 7.57 USD per gallon. The OP doesn't actually say what you guys pay, but I get the impression that it is less by a wide margin. The US is also, I believe, the largest economy on the planet, and you spend more energy, per capita, than any other nation in the world. Perhaps you should tighten up a bit on the way you waste energy - I assume it must wasted, because it doesn't look like all that extra energy results in higher, actual production.
I'm sorry I haven't got loads of sympathy, but it does look like a luxury problem to me. Find a way to change the situation - fix the inequalities in your society, so the poorest don't have to struggle in hopeless poverty in order to feed the indulgencies of the rich.
... the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center...
As a European, I find it is constant struggle to keep in mind just how extreme American politics are; to me "left" means "socialism", which isn't generally seen as a swear word either, just a description of one side of the political spectrum. And "right" means - well, not exactly "capitalism", probably more like "libertarianism", if you will. Marx, for example, was not really against capitalism as such, only against the particularly nasty, unbridled form of capitalism that was prevalent at the time.
So, from what I can see here on/. it looks like the consensus is that political parties really are just like some sort of business. What the party stands for is more like its 'core business', and you can change it, if it is more profitable - if "the market requires it". At them moment it is fashionable to be against immigrants, so lets try to market that brand...
It's quite sad, really. When I grew up, we thought it was all about having principles, things you really believed in as true, which you had to fight for and try to convince others about. It seems what used to be moral leadership is now more about "strategic branding".
Let take a long shot and me guess: You feel it is improper of me to make a joke that could be construed as offensive to gays? However, the joke is not really about Freddie Mercury being gay, but about the goofy'ish misunderstanding of the original post - referring to him as 'odd' was merely a lightweight way of not addressing the issue.
I'm all in favour of non-discrimination, but not discriminating necessarily also means not molly-cuddling anybody, just because they might be the target of discrimination, because that too is a form of discrimination.
So, the idea that contrary leptons can be symmetric is absurd.
Not at all. Because, while your considerations are valid in a sense, you fail to take into account the fact that a 'particle' is an abstract entity - a theoretical construct that attempts to sum up a set of measurable characteristics in the data. Whenever we construct a theory, we are looking for things that are looking symmetrical and harmonic in some sense, so the elements in our theory will almost unavoidably be objects with this sort of universal properties.
Of course, being a only model means that any theory must fail at some point, when our observations become sophisticated enough, and that is probably what all true scientists are hoping for. The frustrating problem we have had for a long time is that we have observations that are not covered by our theory, but none of the predictions we have been able to produce with the help of our models turn out to be false. IOW, we know that our understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed, but we can't see how or where. Things like the apparent problem with lepton universality may show us a way forward, so it is in fact very good news.
I think this is what we all hope - that the existing theories may finally be proven wrong. To a scientist, it is always the unsolved problems that are interesting; the journey and the fun is over when you reach your goal.
I'm not sure about Supersymmetry, though - it's only intuition, but my feeling is that it should have been a minimal form of Supersymmetry, if any. Occam's Razor and all that - I believe Einstein once used the expression 'As simple as possible, but no simpler than that'. I think the next big step forward will always be something that seems like a beautiful and simple explanation to what looked like a big mess. Both GM and QM were that in the beginning, and I'm sure whatever replaces (ie. refines) them, will be something that makes us all go 'Ah, of course'. Give or take a few, crinkly equations;-)
Seriously, what's so fucking great about using a relatives DNA?
It's art, in the same sense as it is art when David Blaine tries to impress people by sitting in a Faraday cage for while, or when somebody can sell a rotting pig's carcass for millions of dollars.
I can't see it myself - but maybe I'm just not sensitive enough. To me art is something that induces you to think or feel more deeply about something important by demonstrating something 'deep', and as far as I can see, what a lot of modern art demonstrates is simply the gullibility of certain people with more money than sense. Or taste.
Yeah this is controversial and will piss off all the hippies, but I think it's awesome how humans are affecting the ecosystem of earth.
There isn't anything strange or awesome about a species affecting the ecosystem of Earth - the oxygen content of our atmosphere is largely due to cyanobacteria and the like. Apparently there is little on this planet that isn't affected to a significant extent by life - even things like land erosion and plate techtonics.
This may be an interesting parallell to what happened during the Carboniferous era, when apparently plant matter didn't rot away until the fungi evolved the ability to break down lignin. As a matter of fact, there are a few fungi that are able to attack some kinds of plastic too.
Indeed - this is not about what you as a customer want, or what a road user needs, it's only about trying to turn your car into yet another platform for selling crap that is tied to one vendor, like the iPhone.
If they really wanted to give people what they want and need, then cars would be made from interchangeable, generic and compatible parts, so you could build a car up pretty much like a PC. And the in-car computer systems would be open source. That way, if you are against all things modern and digital, you could have a fully mechanic car, but still choose a modern and efficient engine (it is, in fact possible to make efficient engines with no computer control; just not very easy) - and if you are a bleeding-edge hyper-nerd, you would be able to have something fully computerized. And it would a lot cheaper, because there would be far more competition in the market.
But with the number and diversity of connected endpoints expected to skyrocket in the next decade, radical measures are fast becoming necessary to ensure that today's "smart" devices and embedded systems don't haunt us for years down the line
May I offer a slightly less optimistic outlook? I can very easily imagine a future where this is not going to be problem at all. It's not just global warming, although in my view it is quite likely to be a major problem, but we are pushing ahead of us a growing stack of unsolved problems: population growth, loss of bio-diversity, resource limits (not just energy, but just about every raw material, as well as clean drinking water etc), resistent diseases, and the list goes on for quite a while yet.
Each of these problems could be solved, possibly even quite easily, if we applied ourselves to the task, but we don't. And at some point, the combined 'mass' of the all these unsolved problems will be too big for us to solve; the really scary thing is that we don't even know whether we have passed that point yet.
It is something I have wondered about myself. I know quite a few people who have left their career in IT behind in order to work as builders or decorators, of all things, and I begin to see why: It is a reasonably high-skilled profession, but not really difficult. You just have to be able to use tools, understand complex systems and be able to learn and follow rules. Having worked in IT means that you probably have a systematic engineering approach to solving problems, so you are already half-ways there. And it pays very well, if you are good - how about £3000 for constructing a driveway? This takes about a week and that was 3 thousand GBP, probably cash. Or perhaps £10,000 to build a conservatory? These are prices I have actually enquired about, and you can probably look them up online if you want to check.
I would tend to disagree - and you hint at the definition yourself: "...it was immediately clear that it wasn't great writing. It was just 1800's porn." I think one of the things that make up porn is the fact that it is void of anything worthwhile, unless you appreciate its one selling point. In fact, you can extend the definition of porn to a lot of other products that use media to deliver this kind of monotonous, narrowly focused form without content. Like computer games that are all gore and no story, or tv channels that are nothing more than outlets for selling cheap crap. And quite possibly certain items of modern art, altough I admit the failing in this case may be due to my lack of sensitivity.
I like the bit where it says ""It looks like you're writing a letter..."
That comment brought a smile to my face, at least.
I wouldn't have commented on it, were it not because it has been marked 'Troll' - this seems to happen whenever somebody makes even the slightest, negative comment about certain things, like in this case Microsoft, or in other cases Apple. That makes me wonder if there is a person or group of persons on/. who is on a mission to censor everything they don't like? Whatever it is, I think it is a petty and unworthy thing to do; speak out openly if you are opposed to what somebody has to say, or else just ignore it.
... Computer Science â" which is undeniably the most important 21st Century skill...
I sort of stumbled over this one - it stands out as blatant nonsense, IMO, at least when picked out of its context. There is no doubt that information processing is important, but all the important, fundamental research has been done, really, and we are just polishing up and filling gaps now. I would say that most of what computer science has brought us, now belongs to the basic skill set along with things like literacy, numeracy and the ability to eat and drink through the right orifices. All very important, but there are unsolved problems that are far more important now, in my view. I'll just mention three, that I can think of:
- Us and the environment: not just climate change and the sadness of losing cute animal species. Once, only about 30 or 40 years ago, it was generally believed that we could survive even if we wiped out all other species than humans and the few we directly exploit; we now know that everything is intimately connected, and that even what might seem like a minor extinction may have the potential to topple the whole load. In my estimation, understanding this well enough should be a top priority - our survival as an advanced civilisation might depend on it. On the plus side, it isn't actually all that difficult to sort out.
- Theoretical physics: We are now standing in a similar place as about 100 years ago, when everybody was trying to get to grips with the strange observations that lead to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We know that our current understanding is incomplete, because we can't explain all our observations, but haven't yet had that moment of brilliant insight that makes everything obvious (for a certain value of "obvious" - GR and QM aren't all that simple). We are probably on the verge of it - and who knows what may be waiting just around the corner? FTL travel? Unlimited, clean energy?
- Biology: We are gaining huge, new insights almost every day into aspects of life and medicine, that I could hardly dream of when I was young. We almost know what life itself is. We are close to beating cancer. We may be able to overcome death itself. We have technology that can see what goes on inside the brain as we think. We are beginning to understand mental illness. The potential benefits are obvious.
There are also obvious dangers in knowing so much - but we have taken the step already, simply by taking an interest and asking the questions. Knowledge is power, and we are always going to have to learn how to use our powers responsibly. That, perhaps, is always going to be the most important challenge.
You don't understand, a lot of the people who are pro-executions don't want a painless peaceful death; not even when the statistics show that about 1 in 20 people are innocent.
Of course, "correlation is not causation", but it is interesting to note that the US is not just the only highly industrialized nation whose population are so passionate about causing painful death, but they are also notorious for religious fundamentalism. Compare this to China, a nation that isn't generally seen as a forerunner for human rights, where they execute large numbers of people, simply, quickly and efficiently.
I'm not a fan of death penalty, but if you decide that you have to execute a person, at least have the self-respect and dignity to not piss around with agonizing torture, not to mention the obscene, mental torture of being on death-row for decades. To me, at least, this love for revenge and torture goes hand-in-hand with religious fundamentalism; it is something akin to human sacrifice. All that is missing is the stepped pyramid and the rippipng out of the still beating heart. For the glory of God, evidently; or a god.
Listen, Republican. President Dick Cheney's himbo proxy was bad. Barak "No Change" Obama is bad too. Fucking deal with it.
You are angry with politicians, and probably with a lot of the crap those in power dole out, and I can understand that - most ordinary people agree with you; but being agressive and shouty is probably a very poor way to channel that anger. It would be a lot more productive if we could use our anger to address the real problems at the root: things like injustice, fundamentalism, poverty and inequality. We may never be able to make things perfect, but we can easily do better, that's for sure.
It doesn't matter who is in power, really, as long as they are moderately competent, because most of what is going on is determined by current circumstances and short-term solutions, not by the ideals and intentions of the guy at the top. If we want things to be different, we have to find a way to fundamentally change society, by changing the culture and mindset of people. It almost seemed to happen in the 60es, but then, of course, those young revolutionaries grew up and got careers. Even so, we still managed to move forward a little; racism and other discrimination is now seen as fundamentally unacceptable, and let me tell you, that is a MAJOR change from what I grew up with.
... i smoke pot, i make 6 figures have a family and kids. I have many friends who smoke pot, they include directors...
Ah, yes, this is something I have been meaning to talk to you about. You see, one of the terrible, terrible consequences of smoking The Evil Weed is that you get these vivid delusions... If you didn't do that, you would realize that you actually lying on a filthy rag in a basement somewhere, while rats eat away your shrunken genitals.
Yes, it is coming up the the European elections over here, and this 'story' should be seen on that background: as a self-serving piece of propaganda from one of the wing-nuts.
...bitterness on the EU side at U.S. influence online.
Meh? I suspect most of us are not so much bitter at all as simply plain, old tired of American self-importance. The fact is that American influence is on the decline and has been for many years; any bitterness is probably on the American side. The Chinese are taking over as the great influencers of cultural and intetllectual expression, but these things always shift; it is only a few decades ago that it was Italy, UK, France or Germany.
Europeans who have been told that the Internet is basically ungovernable â" and if it does have guiding principles then they come from the land of the free...
Ask a real American if USA is the 'Land of the Free' any more, if ever it was. The internet is not ungovernable; there are many ways govern, and not all rely on legislation, democracy or use of weapons. The rulers of the internet are not national governments, but big corporations like Google, Facebook etc, who have a near monopoly on the most popular methods to access information. If you control the sources of information, you control people's minds. In Europe we have a very sound scepticism towards the wisdom of letting unelected corporations have that much power.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Which Creator are we talking about here? I ask out of interest; and of course also because I have never seen any evidence of such a being. My point here is NOT that humans don't have rights or that these aren't reasonable and fundamental, but I think it is time to abandon the pious lingo and try to find the valid reasons that undoubtedly are there, somewhere. After all, if the only reason why these rights are unalienable is that they are God-given and somehow enforced by Him, then they can be thrown out when your religious affiliations change, as they so easily do. The fact is that the god most, if not all, people claim to follow, is a concept created to suit their own preferences and petty prejudices, and personally wouldn't want my freedom and rights to depend on the whims of the prevailing, religious wind.
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to always mistake weather (ie what happens every day, or even over weeks or months) for climate, which is more like an average.
Think of a desert - here, the Sonoran Desert (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_temperature_in_Arizona) - the average temperature over a year is 22.5 Centigrade, if one simply takes the day and night temperatures for each month, add them up and divide by 24; 22.5C is really quite pleasant. So why is it so damned hot there in July? Who's lying?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK Mensa is a club for people whose only common interest is their ability to score highly in IQ tests? I remember being very impressed when I was a teenager, but I think the consensus has moved on a bit from the idea that intelligence, not to mention broader abillity, can be described well with just one number. And of course, one so often comes across people who have scored something mile high and still seem surpisingly limited in their abilities in life.
Taking intelligence tests is something that can be learned - it's not even that hard, once you learn the tricks. I have several times scored over 150; so am I genius? Well, you tell me :-) It's a bit like bodybuilding - it looks very impressive, but all those hard pumped muscles are just for show, they don't actually have much practical value.
... that astrophysicists have brushed under the carpet
To me, this article reeks of conspiracy theory; a valid, scientific critique or proposal has no need for using this kind of language.
Another thing is that the speed of light and its constancy in all inertial frames of reference is a fundamental tenet in all modern physics. It underpins the whole of relativity theory and it is crucial in the explanation of the equivalence between mass and energy; it even explains the colour of gold. In short: one has to be careful fiddling with it, because one will then have to find alternative explanations for A LOT OF OBSERVABLE FACTS.
I have no idea what the 'valley' represents, nor the 'hill' so this explanation tells me nothing.
What I read into this metaphor is that the Higgs field is a 'scalar field' that varies only with the distance - so one can draw a graph with distance as the X-axis and 'Higgs' as the Y-axis. This graph has a local minimum, that looks like a 'valley', and one can imagine that it would be possible to 'push reality out of the valley' to the other side of one of the nearby, local maxima. No, I'm not it makes a lot of sense either.
Also, I'm not happy with the tendency in physics to 'run to the fields' and start talking about fields and vector bosons; adding yet another field to the flock doesn't bring our understanding to a deeper level, it only allows us to perform calculations within our existing understanding, and I feel we are running against the edge here.
This is a good example of the scientific method in action, really: we have theory and a prediction (namely, that the university doesn't exist); seeing that the prediction fails, we have to conclude that there is a flaw in the theory.
... all wars are dumb.
True, but who is going to start a war with China over this? Those can match China in power are not too keen, all things considered. Might may not be right, but it definitely is might.
A few quick calculations, for comparison:
In UK, 1 litre of petrol (gasoline) costs about 1.2 GBP. 1 US gallon = 3.7 litres, so that works out as 7.57 USD per gallon. The OP doesn't actually say what you guys pay, but I get the impression that it is less by a wide margin. The US is also, I believe, the largest economy on the planet, and you spend more energy, per capita, than any other nation in the world. Perhaps you should tighten up a bit on the way you waste energy - I assume it must wasted, because it doesn't look like all that extra energy results in higher, actual production.
I'm sorry I haven't got loads of sympathy, but it does look like a luxury problem to me. Find a way to change the situation - fix the inequalities in your society, so the poorest don't have to struggle in hopeless poverty in order to feed the indulgencies of the rich.
... the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center ...
As a European, I find it is constant struggle to keep in mind just how extreme American politics are; to me "left" means "socialism", which isn't generally seen as a swear word either, just a description of one side of the political spectrum. And "right" means - well, not exactly "capitalism", probably more like "libertarianism", if you will. Marx, for example, was not really against capitalism as such, only against the particularly nasty, unbridled form of capitalism that was prevalent at the time.
So, from what I can see here on /. it looks like the consensus is that political parties really are just like some sort of business. What the party stands for is more like its 'core business', and you can change it, if it is more profitable - if "the market requires it". At them moment it is fashionable to be against immigrants, so lets try to market that brand...
It's quite sad, really. When I grew up, we thought it was all about having principles, things you really believed in as true, which you had to fight for and try to convince others about. It seems what used to be moral leadership is now more about "strategic branding".
odd?
hmm..
Let take a long shot and me guess: You feel it is improper of me to make a joke that could be construed as offensive to gays? However, the joke is not really about Freddie Mercury being gay, but about the goofy'ish misunderstanding of the original post - referring to him as 'odd' was merely a lightweight way of not addressing the issue.
I'm all in favour of non-discrimination, but not discriminating necessarily also means not molly-cuddling anybody, just because they might be the target of discrimination, because that too is a form of discrimination.
So, the idea that contrary leptons can be symmetric is absurd.
Not at all. Because, while your considerations are valid in a sense, you fail to take into account the fact that a 'particle' is an abstract entity - a theoretical construct that attempts to sum up a set of measurable characteristics in the data. Whenever we construct a theory, we are looking for things that are looking symmetrical and harmonic in some sense, so the elements in our theory will almost unavoidably be objects with this sort of universal properties.
Of course, being a only model means that any theory must fail at some point, when our observations become sophisticated enough, and that is probably what all true scientists are hoping for. The frustrating problem we have had for a long time is that we have observations that are not covered by our theory, but none of the predictions we have been able to produce with the help of our models turn out to be false. IOW, we know that our understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed, but we can't see how or where. Things like the apparent problem with lepton universality may show us a way forward, so it is in fact very good news.
I think this is what we all hope - that the existing theories may finally be proven wrong. To a scientist, it is always the unsolved problems that are interesting; the journey and the fun is over when you reach your goal.
I'm not sure about Supersymmetry, though - it's only intuition, but my feeling is that it should have been a minimal form of Supersymmetry, if any. Occam's Razor and all that - I believe Einstein once used the expression 'As simple as possible, but no simpler than that'. I think the next big step forward will always be something that seems like a beautiful and simple explanation to what looked like a big mess. Both GM and QM were that in the beginning, and I'm sure whatever replaces (ie. refines) them, will be something that makes us all go 'Ah, of course'. Give or take a few, crinkly equations ;-)
Seriously, what's so fucking great about using a relatives DNA?
It's art, in the same sense as it is art when David Blaine tries to impress people by sitting in a Faraday cage for while, or when somebody can sell a rotting pig's carcass for millions of dollars.
I can't see it myself - but maybe I'm just not sensitive enough. To me art is something that induces you to think or feel more deeply about something important by demonstrating something 'deep', and as far as I can see, what a lot of modern art demonstrates is simply the gullibility of certain people with more money than sense. Or taste.
Yeah this is controversial and will piss off all the hippies, but I think it's awesome how humans are affecting the ecosystem of earth.
There isn't anything strange or awesome about a species affecting the ecosystem of Earth - the oxygen content of our atmosphere is largely due to cyanobacteria and the like. Apparently there is little on this planet that isn't affected to a significant extent by life - even things like land erosion and plate techtonics.
This may be an interesting parallell to what happened during the Carboniferous era, when apparently plant matter didn't rot away until the fungi evolved the ability to break down lignin. As a matter of fact, there are a few fungi that are able to attack some kinds of plastic too.
Oh give it a rest, will you? Queen were actually quite good, although their lead singer was a rather odd character.
Indeed - this is not about what you as a customer want, or what a road user needs, it's only about trying to turn your car into yet another platform for selling crap that is tied to one vendor, like the iPhone.
If they really wanted to give people what they want and need, then cars would be made from interchangeable, generic and compatible parts, so you could build a car up pretty much like a PC. And the in-car computer systems would be open source. That way, if you are against all things modern and digital, you could have a fully mechanic car, but still choose a modern and efficient engine (it is, in fact possible to make efficient engines with no computer control; just not very easy) - and if you are a bleeding-edge hyper-nerd, you would be able to have something fully computerized. And it would a lot cheaper, because there would be far more competition in the market.
But with the number and diversity of connected endpoints expected to skyrocket in the next decade, radical measures are fast becoming necessary to ensure that today's "smart" devices and embedded systems don't haunt us for years down the line
May I offer a slightly less optimistic outlook? I can very easily imagine a future where this is not going to be problem at all. It's not just global warming, although in my view it is quite likely to be a major problem, but we are pushing ahead of us a growing stack of unsolved problems: population growth, loss of bio-diversity, resource limits (not just energy, but just about every raw material, as well as clean drinking water etc), resistent diseases, and the list goes on for quite a while yet.
Each of these problems could be solved, possibly even quite easily, if we applied ourselves to the task, but we don't. And at some point, the combined 'mass' of the all these unsolved problems will be too big for us to solve; the really scary thing is that we don't even know whether we have passed that point yet.
It is something I have wondered about myself. I know quite a few people who have left their career in IT behind in order to work as builders or decorators, of all things, and I begin to see why: It is a reasonably high-skilled profession, but not really difficult. You just have to be able to use tools, understand complex systems and be able to learn and follow rules. Having worked in IT means that you probably have a systematic engineering approach to solving problems, so you are already half-ways there. And it pays very well, if you are good - how about £3000 for constructing a driveway? This takes about a week and that was 3 thousand GBP, probably cash. Or perhaps £10,000 to build a conservatory? These are prices I have actually enquired about, and you can probably look them up online if you want to check.
Porn is not really an easily defined term.
I would tend to disagree - and you hint at the definition yourself: "...it was immediately clear that it wasn't great writing. It was just 1800's porn." I think one of the things that make up porn is the fact that it is void of anything worthwhile, unless you appreciate its one selling point. In fact, you can extend the definition of porn to a lot of other products that use media to deliver this kind of monotonous, narrowly focused form without content. Like computer games that are all gore and no story, or tv channels that are nothing more than outlets for selling cheap crap. And quite possibly certain items of modern art, altough I admit the failing in this case may be due to my lack of sensitivity.
I like the bit where it says ""It looks like you're writing a letter..."
That comment brought a smile to my face, at least.
I wouldn't have commented on it, were it not because it has been marked 'Troll' - this seems to happen whenever somebody makes even the slightest, negative comment about certain things, like in this case Microsoft, or in other cases Apple. That makes me wonder if there is a person or group of persons on /. who is on a mission to censor everything they don't like? Whatever it is, I think it is a petty and unworthy thing to do; speak out openly if you are opposed to what somebody has to say, or else just ignore it.
... Computer Science â" which is undeniably the most important 21st Century skill...
I sort of stumbled over this one - it stands out as blatant nonsense, IMO, at least when picked out of its context. There is no doubt that information processing is important, but all the important, fundamental research has been done, really, and we are just polishing up and filling gaps now. I would say that most of what computer science has brought us, now belongs to the basic skill set along with things like literacy, numeracy and the ability to eat and drink through the right orifices. All very important, but there are unsolved problems that are far more important now, in my view. I'll just mention three, that I can think of:
- Us and the environment: not just climate change and the sadness of losing cute animal species. Once, only about 30 or 40 years ago, it was generally believed that we could survive even if we wiped out all other species than humans and the few we directly exploit; we now know that everything is intimately connected, and that even what might seem like a minor extinction may have the potential to topple the whole load. In my estimation, understanding this well enough should be a top priority - our survival as an advanced civilisation might depend on it. On the plus side, it isn't actually all that difficult to sort out.
- Theoretical physics: We are now standing in a similar place as about 100 years ago, when everybody was trying to get to grips with the strange observations that lead to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We know that our current understanding is incomplete, because we can't explain all our observations, but haven't yet had that moment of brilliant insight that makes everything obvious (for a certain value of "obvious" - GR and QM aren't all that simple). We are probably on the verge of it - and who knows what may be waiting just around the corner? FTL travel? Unlimited, clean energy?
- Biology: We are gaining huge, new insights almost every day into aspects of life and medicine, that I could hardly dream of when I was young. We almost know what life itself is. We are close to beating cancer. We may be able to overcome death itself. We have technology that can see what goes on inside the brain as we think. We are beginning to understand mental illness. The potential benefits are obvious.
There are also obvious dangers in knowing so much - but we have taken the step already, simply by taking an interest and asking the questions. Knowledge is power, and we are always going to have to learn how to use our powers responsibly. That, perhaps, is always going to be the most important challenge.
You don't understand, a lot of the people who are pro-executions don't want a painless peaceful death; not even when the statistics show that about 1 in 20 people are innocent.
Of course, "correlation is not causation", but it is interesting to note that the US is not just the only highly industrialized nation whose population are so passionate about causing painful death, but they are also notorious for religious fundamentalism. Compare this to China, a nation that isn't generally seen as a forerunner for human rights, where they execute large numbers of people, simply, quickly and efficiently.
I'm not a fan of death penalty, but if you decide that you have to execute a person, at least have the self-respect and dignity to not piss around with agonizing torture, not to mention the obscene, mental torture of being on death-row for decades. To me, at least, this love for revenge and torture goes hand-in-hand with religious fundamentalism; it is something akin to human sacrifice. All that is missing is the stepped pyramid and the rippipng out of the still beating heart. For the glory of God, evidently; or a god.
Listen, Republican. President Dick Cheney's himbo proxy was bad. Barak "No Change" Obama is bad too. Fucking deal with it.
You are angry with politicians, and probably with a lot of the crap those in power dole out, and I can understand that - most ordinary people agree with you; but being agressive and shouty is probably a very poor way to channel that anger. It would be a lot more productive if we could use our anger to address the real problems at the root: things like injustice, fundamentalism, poverty and inequality. We may never be able to make things perfect, but we can easily do better, that's for sure.
It doesn't matter who is in power, really, as long as they are moderately competent, because most of what is going on is determined by current circumstances and short-term solutions, not by the ideals and intentions of the guy at the top. If we want things to be different, we have to find a way to fundamentally change society, by changing the culture and mindset of people. It almost seemed to happen in the 60es, but then, of course, those young revolutionaries grew up and got careers. Even so, we still managed to move forward a little; racism and other discrimination is now seen as fundamentally unacceptable, and let me tell you, that is a MAJOR change from what I grew up with.
... i smoke pot, i make 6 figures have a family and kids. I have many friends who smoke pot, they include directors ...
Ah, yes, this is something I have been meaning to talk to you about. You see, one of the terrible, terrible consequences of smoking The Evil Weed is that you get these vivid delusions ... If you didn't do that, you would realize that you actually lying on a filthy rag in a basement somewhere, while rats eat away your shrunken genitals.
Yes, it is coming up the the European elections over here, and this 'story' should be seen on that background: as a self-serving piece of propaganda from one of the wing-nuts.
...bitterness on the EU side at U.S. influence online.
Meh? I suspect most of us are not so much bitter at all as simply plain, old tired of American self-importance. The fact is that American influence is on the decline and has been for many years; any bitterness is probably on the American side. The Chinese are taking over as the great influencers of cultural and intetllectual expression, but these things always shift; it is only a few decades ago that it was Italy, UK, France or Germany.
Europeans who have been told that the Internet is basically ungovernable â" and if it does have guiding principles then they come from the land of the free...
Ask a real American if USA is the 'Land of the Free' any more, if ever it was. The internet is not ungovernable; there are many ways govern, and not all rely on legislation, democracy or use of weapons. The rulers of the internet are not national governments, but big corporations like Google, Facebook etc, who have a near monopoly on the most popular methods to access information. If you control the sources of information, you control people's minds. In Europe we have a very sound scepticism towards the wisdom of letting unelected corporations have that much power.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Which Creator are we talking about here? I ask out of interest; and of course also because I have never seen any evidence of such a being. My point here is NOT that humans don't have rights or that these aren't reasonable and fundamental, but I think it is time to abandon the pious lingo and try to find the valid reasons that undoubtedly are there, somewhere. After all, if the only reason why these rights are unalienable is that they are God-given and somehow enforced by Him, then they can be thrown out when your religious affiliations change, as they so easily do. The fact is that the god most, if not all, people claim to follow, is a concept created to suit their own preferences and petty prejudices, and personally wouldn't want my freedom and rights to depend on the whims of the prevailing, religious wind.