Children children, there is no need to get emotional or fight about this. Like all technology, the ability to break codes can be used for both good and bad.
The real worry is - when NSA can do it, then there will be other criminals who can as well. You may not like your government, but they are pretty sweet compared to Mexican drug cartels or the Mafia; and even they are notable for their humane touch compared to some of the major gangs in SE Asia.
I didn't know there had been a previous "privacy battleground".
Personally, I don't feel there is an issue. Sure, it is slightly uncomfortable to know that there are unsavoury character out there collecting information about who you are and what you do with the intent to use it against you - advertisers spring to mind - but that is the way it has always been, and we have always found ways to live with it, one way or another.
I am sure I will be modded way down for expression this as my view, ironically (free speech, eh?), but I really think it is a non-issue. We give out private information without a second thought all the time, when we use credit cards, mobiles and God knows what else; it is part of opening your front door and showing yourself outside in the public space, where other people are likely to observe your presence, whether by means of technology or simply by looking at you. Privacy is not about a right to pass through life completely unobserved, but about things like the sanctity of the home: you have a right to a place that is your own, where nobody else has a right to enter without your persmission.
A more relevant and pressing issue is about what is done with the data afterwards, and to me the most worrying part is not what the government or its agencies will do, but what private companies are up to. To me there is nothing more odious than being targeted by manipulative advertisers trying to extract money from you and enticing you to get hooked on products that are harmful to you. At least in our part of the world, governments are tightly regulated in most of what they do, whereas big businesses are not. And with some trans-national corporations being bigger than many governments, that is a real cause for concern.
...a cloud operating system that is specially meant for government purposes.
Cloud OS = vaporware, right? And an OS geared towards government would have to be slow, heavy, overly bureaucratic, doing things that you are not supposed to know about and sending information about your activities to somebody that you are told about - that's Windows, basically, isn't it?
The author struggled to make clear his point and left the impression he was creating a strawman argument
Strange - I found his arguments (in the first article, didn't read the second) quite straight forward, and I feel that adding equations would only have obfuscated matters. Most people don't understand equations and inequalities or their specific significance, and that goes for a lot of well-educated people too. The significance of Heisenberg's inequality is that you can use it in quantitative calculations when you test your theory, but it does not in itself add much to your intuitive understanding of the principle.
The problem with the article IMO, is that the subject really does require a reasonably strong background in experimental physics. You need to know something about how experiments in particle physics are conducted, how the results are calculated, etc, before his arguments fall into place.
Very true. And besides, they want to add spinach genes to oranges, which makes a lot of sense; that way they will become STRONG, as we all know. what could possibly be bad about this?
It is sad, in a way, although not surprising to me.
Sad, because it was once so promising; GNOME was once my absolute favourite desktop, but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them. And then they started removing useful features, upsetting their core community - those who were on Linux because it is OPEN, extremely configurable, very inclusive etc - and the GNOME developers became more and more unapproachable and sectarian. I suppose, in a way they chose to follow their own closed set of ideals and lost their way.
Now I use KDE - it is not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I only need good enough, and KDE is good enough for my purposes.
First it may be illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers. Then there's the fact that no filter is perfect, and finally kids are smart enough to find their way around them.
Of these three points only the first one is of any substance, potentially. The rest is just a re-hash of the old 'we don't want it because it isn't perfect' - ie. just empty rhetorics. Nothing is perfect, we already knew that; the real question is, does it make things better - and how much? And what do we understand by better?
As far as I can see, this scheme essentially means that there will be some filter and you teach people how to turn it off if they want to. That makes a lot of sense to me - many (probably most) people don't want to get into contact with what they see as filth, and they don't want to have to learn something they find difficult. And this scheme doesn't affect the freedom of those who want it - they just have to make a bit more of an effort. What's not to like about it?
I like broccoli, but I also like the fact that most vegetables, fruits and other things are seasonal. One of the results of supermarkets always having everything - strawberries, apples, everything - is that you can only get the varieties that either keep indefinitely, can be force-grown or can be shipped in from the other side of the globe, which means you can only get apples that are like wood, strawberries like potatoes etc.
The other effect is of course that it all becomes commonplace and therefore less attractive. It makes a huge difference when you haven't tasted oranges since last Christmas, and they start arriving just around November or there abouts. Even things like green beans and cabbages taste great when you haven't seen them for months.
I have thought a lot about this subject over the years, and I think it goes a bit deeper than that, although I agree with what you say - that it is to some extent a question of learning how to pace your effort and keeping it up.
I think a large part of it is simply that the ones that study science at university are very intelligent - so intelligent that they have breezed through school and high-school without having to make an effort. I mean, I turned up to my high-school exams without ever having opened the books or handed in my home work - and I passed with good enough grades to get into university, where I failed everything for the first three years. It would have helped me immensely, if there had been a lot more focus on making me work steadily in school, but as it was, I simply didn't understand the necessity of it.
The other thing is that because there are so many startling and impressive results in science, that is what teaching often seems to be about before university; but at university you are meant to learn about the methods, and the results really ought to be secondary to this. In my opinion this is not pointed out strongly enough in most university education, which means that a lot of students end up with an education that they don't quite know how to use - they can apply the main theorems and results, but they can't go on and produce new theoretical work. I think this is the real, fundamental problem in modern science education.
What, nothing at all? I'm off to the States if security involves attractive blondes in a state of significant undressedness. Did she give you a full anal as well?
You don't see the logical disconnect in that sentence? You're saying we have to give up freedoms to be free.
Not really. What I say is that freedom is not an absolute - it is a subjective thing. I feel that I have all the freedom I want and need to go about my life and be happy; but I also live under a lot of restrictions. The thing is, I agree with those restrictions on my freedom, so I don't mind, it part of the price you pay for being a member of society. As far as I can observe, most people feel the same way.
What I am getting at is, I don't think we disagree all that much; you say, yourself, that "there are shades of gray, even with censorship" - but that was not apparent in your first comment, where you seemed to be completely against the very thought. The reason I don't agree with that viewpoint is that I think history shows us that when trolls and fanatics are given a free rein, they end up dominating the public discourse. Hence the Nazism in Germany in the 1930'es or the Muslim terrorism now - these things occur because decent people do not have the courage to stand up for decency as individuals (because they will be targeted by the bullies), and because society does not dare to seize the power to do the right thing, in the name of "freedom of speech".
Is that right, do you think? To my mind it is important that we as a society at least dare to consider this subject with an open mind.
I can't agree with a single thing he said in the article
Hmm, are one of those "You're either for me or against me" types? Things are not so black and white, you know, and you might benefit from trying to see things from the other side, even if you don't agree. Freedom and democracy are not absolutes - what is freedom to me may feel like a straitjacket to you.
As far as I can see, what he is saying is that democracy and freedom only work if more or less everybody are willing to play by the rules; that is why it can never work, when the West tries to impose democracy on nations that are not prepared for it. Hell, even in Europe it took a couple of generations before people really took to it, because it takes that long to educate the population in democracy.
I think there is some merit to what he says - we have to defend our values, like freedom and democracy against those that want to take them away. And yes, that also means restricting their freedom of speech.
Yet another 'war'. And once again the evil ghost of Communism is raised from its grave. Some people just can't let go of the past, it seems.
I'm not denying that China spies on more or less everybody else; I just don't think their spying is any different from what the US, Israel, UK,... do, and the motivation is in all cases the same: they want to get ahead in the game. It is a very naughty thing to do, but the again, keeping secrets is not a squeeky clean thing either, when you think of it. It's part of life, at the end of the day, and I think this book is just one more, rather sad attempt at spinning money on people's fear of the unknown.
If you were to really make a 100% perfect copy of a yourself, which one would be you? Each copy would, certainly initially, feel and think exactly the same, and would object to being destroyed. This, I think is a strong argument against the idea that one can truly "transfer" a person in this way.
Strictly speaking, what he said was "Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear..."; the word "should" is quite revealing, as it changes the meaning to "This is how it ought to be...". This use of words suggests that he knows this isnt quite the case.
Not quite, I think; I would say complementary rather than antithetical. They cover different, completely disjoint sets of experience - science covers the things we can measure and test, roughly speaking, religion is about the things we can't (yet). The conflict arises not so much from science being anti-religion, but from the fact that as we learn more about reality, we are able to measure more and more things, thus pushing back the domain of religion.
Also, I think one has to distinguish between belief in one or more gods, and religion. Religion, to mind, is more like a framework that people construct around their lives, which can serve to protect against an overwhelming reality (and science can seem rather overwhelming), whereas belief in (or at least openness to the idea of) supernatural beings is not in itself anti-scientific.
I can understand why religion can so easily fill a scientifically minded person with disgust, because it is so often the worst and most obnoxiously stupid representatives for religion that are the loudest and make the most absurd demands on our time and efforts. However, there is a large majority that are really quite sensible and open-minded.
At the moment it seems to me that many companies are moving things into the cloud, and often the traditional IT department is outsourced at the same time - or perhaps a little bit later. So, in 5 years a lot of IT departments will look rather empty.
The reason behind this is that the idea about putting things in the cloud looks compelling, since it promises things like savings and convenience. And the outsourcing will happen, because once your stuff is in the cloud, it will be administered remotely anyway, using tools like Chef or Puppet, so they might as well save on expensive on-shore staff.
This strategy may well backfire, though. When you outsource, you may be giving away your core assets - your data - to an unknown entity, in the hope that a contract will be all that is required to make it work. To me it looks a bit like winging it on a prayer.
I am not trying to spread unreasonable FUD here, but there are some real issues that should be thought through by those in charge. Regrettably, even quite clever people somehow tend to distrust the persons they know well, while being perfectly willing to trust a complete stranger.
Babies need protein, lots of it. They need meat. Feeding a baby only soy protein or bean protein is child abuse. Humans are designed to eat and digest meat. A breast feeding mother needs to increase her protein intake. Even mountain and lowland gorillas, whose diet is entirely vegetarian, consume more protein than we do.
Not exactly - babies need a balanced diet containing quite a lot more fat than an adult diet, and it is in fact possible to overfeed them with protein.
I can't imagine where you get your ideas from. Humans are certainly not designed to eat meat - we are omnivores, and although we can eat meat, we also need plant material. People in the West, whether they are mothers or not, are already eating far too much meat, especially red meat, which is known to be a major factor in diseases like bowel cancer.
I think you are rambling all over the place - first you condemn the idea that we should eat vegetables, because "babies need more protein" and vegans eat soy beans that according to you are full of , er, protein. And then gorillas, who are entirely vegetarian (not factually true, either) consume more protein then humans? I have met people like you before - mostly on closed psychiatric wards.
How about they make a safe "Hammer" or "club" since these kill more people than all rifles every year? Oh right, because rifles are big loud scary objects!
Nope. The difference is that with a gun it is easy even for an average madman to massacre a load of children in a high school, whereas the same amount of mayhem would require an amazing level of agility and stamina if you use a hammer.
I think the fact that those in favour of gun ownership resort to this kind of argumentation is an admittance that they don't have real arguments. They know that the overwhelming majority of Americans (I've heard 90%) are in favour of stricter gun control, and deep down in their miserable souls they know that they are prostitutes to the gun lobby. I don't understand why - it is not like you guys even get paid for your "opinions".
freedom of speech, even speech we dont like is legal
Laws and rights are the result of what the people that make up society think is right. They are not God-given; they are note even 'natural' except in the sense that humans are natural and it is natural for us to live together and form cultures.
And that is where it becomes tricky; Americans tend to think that their way is the only right way - the rest of the world often has different views. But in this day and age, society is no longer just what happens in your own backyard - you share it with people in other countries, and the resulting culture with the accessory laws and rights, is no longer just American. And guess what: people in most countries demand that companies take wider responsibility for their role in society.
Personally, I have felt for a long time that this trend towards ever more intrusive gadgets has gone far enough. Sure, a smartphone can be useful sometimes, but when even having an ordinary dumb phone can feel too much like a straitjacket, does that not tell us that we've crossed the line somewhere? And the glasses are just literally in your face.
I have often wodnered why exactly it is that big projects, paid for by the public, always seem to fail so spectacularly. Over the years I have made some wild guesses, and some of them may be plausible:
- They are too ambitious. It is a well known phenomenon that complexity very easily becomes hyper sensitive to small variations of the premises, even if the components are very simple (like Mandelbrot). It would probably be a lot easier if they started by making a simpler tool - instead of trying to calculate everybody's entitlements everywhere in accordance with whatever the current rules, perhaps one could start by making a tool that solves one or two of the most burdensome problems social workers face, and design it so that it can be easily extended later, when it has proven its worth.
- They keep changing the specifications. This is partly because legislation that governs the input to the system changes unpredictably.
- Those in charge may be highly qualified, but with the wrong qualifications.
- They didn't spend enough time understanding the problem they wanted to solve well enough.
- They lack the will to really see it through.
Perhaps the solution for complex projects is to be found in the world of biology; an eco-system is a very complex entity, but it works because there is room for failure; individual components can fail without endangering the whole, and this in fact helps to evolve the whole over time.
... giving everyone in the country a flying car. While this would no doubt be enjoyable, without proper training and regulation it would also be tremendously dangerous (also assume training and regulating is not practical in this case)
- or giving everybody the right to own firearms. I would say, if your argument is valid when it comes to flying cars or drugs, then it is valid for gun-ownership as well. The funny thing, though, is that a lot of the people who are wildly in favour of gun-ownership are also rabidly against ligitimising drugs. I'm not sayign that one or the other is "right", only that you have to be for or against both, unless you are a hypocrite.
... the broad generalizations and assumptions you just made...
I was talking about my experience - rather than making sweeping generalisations. Here's an example: Not long ago I wrote a long report about some technical matters, 100 something pages. I used OpenOffice, and I always turn off spell check etc, because most of the words are not in the dictionary anyway. I handed it to a manager, who felt that he needed to put me down for whatever reason - so he ran a spell check and found 1 genuine spelling mistake. Just 1 - but this was apparently a major issue, and one of the brilliantly enlightening comment he made were "Surely you learned how to use a spell-checker when you wrote your thesis at uni?" - Except that when I did that, the IBM PC had only just come to market, and everybody wrote their theses by hand, using ink and paper. He would have realised if he had bothered with thinking, I'm sure.
I can of course shrug that sort of nonsense off, but it has done little to build confidence in the abilities of managers. I mean, one incident means he had a bad day, but this level of idiocy on an almost daily basis, what does that mean? It isn't just ignorance about technical matters - ignorance I can understand and tolerate, it's the scale of it combined with the bloated and mostly misplaced self-assurance, the "I'm richer than you, so I am evidently better and more intelligent".
I think, in many ways what you are doing by holding on to 'the old ways' is the right thing. A lot of these 'next big thing' gadgets are only fads, and anyway, what do you think lies under it all? The next big thing won't happen unless there is a lot of good old-fashioned computer skills happening somewhere, just out of sight. Hold on to what you are doing well, and keep yourself up to date with some of the new stuff, but don't let it take over - it is not worth it.
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Children children, there is no need to get emotional or fight about this. Like all technology, the ability to break codes can be used for both good and bad.
The real worry is - when NSA can do it, then there will be other criminals who can as well. You may not like your government, but they are pretty sweet compared to Mexican drug cartels or the Mafia; and even they are notable for their humane touch compared to some of the major gangs in SE Asia.
... the next privacy battleground...
I didn't know there had been a previous "privacy battleground".
Personally, I don't feel there is an issue. Sure, it is slightly uncomfortable to know that there are unsavoury character out there collecting information about who you are and what you do with the intent to use it against you - advertisers spring to mind - but that is the way it has always been, and we have always found ways to live with it, one way or another.
I am sure I will be modded way down for expression this as my view, ironically (free speech, eh?), but I really think it is a non-issue. We give out private information without a second thought all the time, when we use credit cards, mobiles and God knows what else; it is part of opening your front door and showing yourself outside in the public space, where other people are likely to observe your presence, whether by means of technology or simply by looking at you. Privacy is not about a right to pass through life completely unobserved, but about things like the sanctity of the home: you have a right to a place that is your own, where nobody else has a right to enter without your persmission.
A more relevant and pressing issue is about what is done with the data afterwards, and to me the most worrying part is not what the government or its agencies will do, but what private companies are up to. To me there is nothing more odious than being targeted by manipulative advertisers trying to extract money from you and enticing you to get hooked on products that are harmful to you. At least in our part of the world, governments are tightly regulated in most of what they do, whereas big businesses are not. And with some trans-national corporations being bigger than many governments, that is a real cause for concern.
...a cloud operating system that is specially meant for government purposes.
Cloud OS = vaporware, right? And an OS geared towards government would have to be slow, heavy, overly bureaucratic, doing things that you are not supposed to know about and sending information about your activities to somebody that you are told about - that's Windows, basically, isn't it?
The author struggled to make clear his point and left the impression he was creating a strawman argument
Strange - I found his arguments (in the first article, didn't read the second) quite straight forward, and I feel that adding equations would only have obfuscated matters. Most people don't understand equations and inequalities or their specific significance, and that goes for a lot of well-educated people too. The significance of Heisenberg's inequality is that you can use it in quantitative calculations when you test your theory, but it does not in itself add much to your intuitive understanding of the principle.
The problem with the article IMO, is that the subject really does require a reasonably strong background in experimental physics. You need to know something about how experiments in particle physics are conducted, how the results are calculated, etc, before his arguments fall into place.
Very true. And besides, they want to add spinach genes to oranges, which makes a lot of sense; that way they will become STRONG, as we all know. what could possibly be bad about this?
It is sad, in a way, although not surprising to me.
Sad, because it was once so promising; GNOME was once my absolute favourite desktop, but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them. And then they started removing useful features, upsetting their core community - those who were on Linux because it is OPEN, extremely configurable, very inclusive etc - and the GNOME developers became more and more unapproachable and sectarian. I suppose, in a way they chose to follow their own closed set of ideals and lost their way.
Now I use KDE - it is not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I only need good enough, and KDE is good enough for my purposes.
First it may be illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers. Then there's the fact that no filter is perfect, and finally kids are smart enough to find their way around them.
Of these three points only the first one is of any substance, potentially. The rest is just a re-hash of the old 'we don't want it because it isn't perfect' - ie. just empty rhetorics. Nothing is perfect, we already knew that; the real question is, does it make things better - and how much? And what do we understand by better?
As far as I can see, this scheme essentially means that there will be some filter and you teach people how to turn it off if they want to. That makes a lot of sense to me - many (probably most) people don't want to get into contact with what they see as filth, and they don't want to have to learn something they find difficult. And this scheme doesn't affect the freedom of those who want it - they just have to make a bit more of an effort. What's not to like about it?
I like broccoli, but I also like the fact that most vegetables, fruits and other things are seasonal. One of the results of supermarkets always having everything - strawberries, apples, everything - is that you can only get the varieties that either keep indefinitely, can be force-grown or can be shipped in from the other side of the globe, which means you can only get apples that are like wood, strawberries like potatoes etc.
The other effect is of course that it all becomes commonplace and therefore less attractive. It makes a huge difference when you haven't tasted oranges since last Christmas, and they start arriving just around November or there abouts. Even things like green beans and cabbages taste great when you haven't seen them for months.
I have thought a lot about this subject over the years, and I think it goes a bit deeper than that, although I agree with what you say - that it is to some extent a question of learning how to pace your effort and keeping it up.
I think a large part of it is simply that the ones that study science at university are very intelligent - so intelligent that they have breezed through school and high-school without having to make an effort. I mean, I turned up to my high-school exams without ever having opened the books or handed in my home work - and I passed with good enough grades to get into university, where I failed everything for the first three years. It would have helped me immensely, if there had been a lot more focus on making me work steadily in school, but as it was, I simply didn't understand the necessity of it.
The other thing is that because there are so many startling and impressive results in science, that is what teaching often seems to be about before university; but at university you are meant to learn about the methods, and the results really ought to be secondary to this. In my opinion this is not pointed out strongly enough in most university education, which means that a lot of students end up with an education that they don't quite know how to use - they can apply the main theorems and results, but they can't go on and produce new theoretical work. I think this is the real, fundamental problem in modern science education.
She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything
What, nothing at all? I'm off to the States if security involves attractive blondes in a state of significant undressedness. Did she give you a full anal as well?
You don't see the logical disconnect in that sentence? You're saying we have to give up freedoms to be free.
Not really. What I say is that freedom is not an absolute - it is a subjective thing. I feel that I have all the freedom I want and need to go about my life and be happy; but I also live under a lot of restrictions. The thing is, I agree with those restrictions on my freedom, so I don't mind, it part of the price you pay for being a member of society. As far as I can observe, most people feel the same way.
What I am getting at is, I don't think we disagree all that much; you say, yourself, that "there are shades of gray, even with censorship" - but that was not apparent in your first comment, where you seemed to be completely against the very thought. The reason I don't agree with that viewpoint is that I think history shows us that when trolls and fanatics are given a free rein, they end up dominating the public discourse. Hence the Nazism in Germany in the 1930'es or the Muslim terrorism now - these things occur because decent people do not have the courage to stand up for decency as individuals (because they will be targeted by the bullies), and because society does not dare to seize the power to do the right thing, in the name of "freedom of speech".
Is that right, do you think? To my mind it is important that we as a society at least dare to consider this subject with an open mind.
I can't agree with a single thing he said in the article
Hmm, are one of those "You're either for me or against me" types? Things are not so black and white, you know, and you might benefit from trying to see things from the other side, even if you don't agree. Freedom and democracy are not absolutes - what is freedom to me may feel like a straitjacket to you.
As far as I can see, what he is saying is that democracy and freedom only work if more or less everybody are willing to play by the rules; that is why it can never work, when the West tries to impose democracy on nations that are not prepared for it. Hell, even in Europe it took a couple of generations before people really took to it, because it takes that long to educate the population in democracy.
I think there is some merit to what he says - we have to defend our values, like freedom and democracy against those that want to take them away. And yes, that also means restricting their freedom of speech.
Yet another 'war'. And once again the evil ghost of Communism is raised from its grave. Some people just can't let go of the past, it seems.
I'm not denying that China spies on more or less everybody else; I just don't think their spying is any different from what the US, Israel, UK, ... do, and the motivation is in all cases the same: they want to get ahead in the game. It is a very naughty thing to do, but the again, keeping secrets is not a squeeky clean thing either, when you think of it. It's part of life, at the end of the day, and I think this book is just one more, rather sad attempt at spinning money on people's fear of the unknown.
If you were to really make a 100% perfect copy of a yourself, which one would be you? Each copy would, certainly initially, feel and think exactly the same, and would object to being destroyed. This, I think is a strong argument against the idea that one can truly "transfer" a person in this way.
Strictly speaking, what he said was "Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear ..."; the word "should" is quite revealing, as it changes the meaning to "This is how it ought to be ...". This use of words suggests that he knows this isnt quite the case.
Religion and science are antithetical in nature
Not quite, I think; I would say complementary rather than antithetical. They cover different, completely disjoint sets of experience - science covers the things we can measure and test, roughly speaking, religion is about the things we can't (yet). The conflict arises not so much from science being anti-religion, but from the fact that as we learn more about reality, we are able to measure more and more things, thus pushing back the domain of religion.
Also, I think one has to distinguish between belief in one or more gods, and religion. Religion, to mind, is more like a framework that people construct around their lives, which can serve to protect against an overwhelming reality (and science can seem rather overwhelming), whereas belief in (or at least openness to the idea of) supernatural beings is not in itself anti-scientific.
I can understand why religion can so easily fill a scientifically minded person with disgust, because it is so often the worst and most obnoxiously stupid representatives for religion that are the loudest and make the most absurd demands on our time and efforts. However, there is a large majority that are really quite sensible and open-minded.
At the moment it seems to me that many companies are moving things into the cloud, and often the traditional IT department is outsourced at the same time - or perhaps a little bit later. So, in 5 years a lot of IT departments will look rather empty.
The reason behind this is that the idea about putting things in the cloud looks compelling, since it promises things like savings and convenience. And the outsourcing will happen, because once your stuff is in the cloud, it will be administered remotely anyway, using tools like Chef or Puppet, so they might as well save on expensive on-shore staff.
This strategy may well backfire, though. When you outsource, you may be giving away your core assets - your data - to an unknown entity, in the hope that a contract will be all that is required to make it work. To me it looks a bit like winging it on a prayer.
I am not trying to spread unreasonable FUD here, but there are some real issues that should be thought through by those in charge. Regrettably, even quite clever people somehow tend to distrust the persons they know well, while being perfectly willing to trust a complete stranger.
Babies need protein, lots of it. They need meat. Feeding a baby only soy protein or bean protein is child abuse. Humans are designed to eat and digest meat. A breast feeding mother needs to increase her protein intake. Even mountain and lowland gorillas, whose diet is entirely vegetarian, consume more protein than we do.
Not exactly - babies need a balanced diet containing quite a lot more fat than an adult diet, and it is in fact possible to overfeed them with protein.
I can't imagine where you get your ideas from. Humans are certainly not designed to eat meat - we are omnivores, and although we can eat meat, we also need plant material. People in the West, whether they are mothers or not, are already eating far too much meat, especially red meat, which is known to be a major factor in diseases like bowel cancer.
I think you are rambling all over the place - first you condemn the idea that we should eat vegetables, because "babies need more protein" and vegans eat soy beans that according to you are full of , er, protein. And then gorillas, who are entirely vegetarian (not factually true, either) consume more protein then humans? I have met people like you before - mostly on closed psychiatric wards.
How about they make a safe "Hammer" or "club" since these kill more people than all rifles every year? Oh right, because rifles are big loud scary objects!
Nope. The difference is that with a gun it is easy even for an average madman to massacre a load of children in a high school, whereas the same amount of mayhem would require an amazing level of agility and stamina if you use a hammer.
I think the fact that those in favour of gun ownership resort to this kind of argumentation is an admittance that they don't have real arguments. They know that the overwhelming majority of Americans (I've heard 90%) are in favour of stricter gun control, and deep down in their miserable souls they know that they are prostitutes to the gun lobby. I don't understand why - it is not like you guys even get paid for your "opinions".
freedom of speech, even speech we dont like is legal
Laws and rights are the result of what the people that make up society think is right. They are not God-given; they are note even 'natural' except in the sense that humans are natural and it is natural for us to live together and form cultures.
And that is where it becomes tricky; Americans tend to think that their way is the only right way - the rest of the world often has different views. But in this day and age, society is no longer just what happens in your own backyard - you share it with people in other countries, and the resulting culture with the accessory laws and rights, is no longer just American. And guess what: people in most countries demand that companies take wider responsibility for their role in society.
Personally, I have felt for a long time that this trend towards ever more intrusive gadgets has gone far enough. Sure, a smartphone can be useful sometimes, but when even having an ordinary dumb phone can feel too much like a straitjacket, does that not tell us that we've crossed the line somewhere? And the glasses are just literally in your face.
I have often wodnered why exactly it is that big projects, paid for by the public, always seem to fail so spectacularly. Over the years I have made some wild guesses, and some of them may be plausible:
- They are too ambitious. It is a well known phenomenon that complexity very easily becomes hyper sensitive to small variations of the premises, even if the components are very simple (like Mandelbrot). It would probably be a lot easier if they started by making a simpler tool - instead of trying to calculate everybody's entitlements everywhere in accordance with whatever the current rules, perhaps one could start by making a tool that solves one or two of the most burdensome problems social workers face, and design it so that it can be easily extended later, when it has proven its worth.
- They keep changing the specifications. This is partly because legislation that governs the input to the system changes unpredictably.
- Those in charge may be highly qualified, but with the wrong qualifications.
- They didn't spend enough time understanding the problem they wanted to solve well enough.
- They lack the will to really see it through.
Perhaps the solution for complex projects is to be found in the world of biology; an eco-system is a very complex entity, but it works because there is room for failure; individual components can fail without endangering the whole, and this in fact helps to evolve the whole over time.
... giving everyone in the country a flying car. While this would no doubt be enjoyable, without proper training and regulation it would also be tremendously dangerous (also assume training and regulating is not practical in this case)
- or giving everybody the right to own firearms. I would say, if your argument is valid when it comes to flying cars or drugs, then it is valid for gun-ownership as well. The funny thing, though, is that a lot of the people who are wildly in favour of gun-ownership are also rabidly against ligitimising drugs. I'm not sayign that one or the other is "right", only that you have to be for or against both, unless you are a hypocrite.
... the broad generalizations and assumptions you just made ...
I was talking about my experience - rather than making sweeping generalisations. Here's an example: Not long ago I wrote a long report about some technical matters, 100 something pages. I used OpenOffice, and I always turn off spell check etc, because most of the words are not in the dictionary anyway. I handed it to a manager, who felt that he needed to put me down for whatever reason - so he ran a spell check and found 1 genuine spelling mistake. Just 1 - but this was apparently a major issue, and one of the brilliantly enlightening comment he made were "Surely you learned how to use a spell-checker when you wrote your thesis at uni?" - Except that when I did that, the IBM PC had only just come to market, and everybody wrote their theses by hand, using ink and paper. He would have realised if he had bothered with thinking, I'm sure.
I can of course shrug that sort of nonsense off, but it has done little to build confidence in the abilities of managers. I mean, one incident means he had a bad day, but this level of idiocy on an almost daily basis, what does that mean? It isn't just ignorance about technical matters - ignorance I can understand and tolerate, it's the scale of it combined with the bloated and mostly misplaced self-assurance, the "I'm richer than you, so I am evidently better and more intelligent".
I think, in many ways what you are doing by holding on to 'the old ways' is the right thing. A lot of these 'next big thing' gadgets are only fads, and anyway, what do you think lies under it all? The next big thing won't happen unless there is a lot of good old-fashioned computer skills happening somewhere, just out of sight. Hold on to what you are doing well, and keep yourself up to date with some of the new stuff, but don't let it take over - it is not worth it.