your saying this anchient wizdom can't be wrong? Incorrect? Dangerous?
Of course it can...but so can the "wisdom" of modern medicine. Hormone replacement therapy, anyone? Arthroscopic knee surgery?
For any given therapy - conventional or "alternative" - there's always a chance that future information will deem it ineffective. But you've got to make a treatment decision based on the information available now.
Apply proper scientific study to it. Should be simple enough to do.
How simple was it to get proper scientific study of tobacco?
There are proper studies being done, some of which are conducted by herb suppliers. Of course, the skeptically-correct can be just as biased as the true-believers, and will dismiss all studies that don't support their biases as "flawed".
Well, any intelligent civilization ought to try to expand. There isn't any good reason not to.
Oh? I think you're making several assumptions:
Intelligence implies an interest in space travel. But this may be a primate bias - perhaps our interest in flight, and in space, is due to our distant ancestors being tree-dwellers. Would a race of intelligent gopher-like burrowers care about flight and about space travel?
Interest in space travel continues as the "virtual" world grows. Perhaps humanity will abandon its interest in space as our ability to create digital worlds of our own grows.
Interstellar travel is a feasable feat of engineering. We have only wild speculation about how we might do it.
Interstellar travel is sociologically practical for intelligent species. Maybe if a "generation ship" set our for Alpha Centuri, the children of the original travellers would not share their parents desire to separate from the human race, and would decide to turn the thing around.
A species advanced enough for interstellar travel would not have some sort of ecological conscience.
The inhabitants of a self-sufficient mobile space colony, after many generations in space, would be interested in living on the surface of a planet.
So Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA was a "non-repeatable" result? Fascinating.
those results will never get published in any scientific journal!
Nature is a well-respected peer-reviewed scientific journal. So your assertation is simply not true.
As for the rest of your post, I can't find any defintion of "skyes" other than a chain of islands off of Scotland, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
Almost sounds like you're talking about clouds - but of course, the whole fscking point of this research is how contrails affect cloud formation which then affects local climate.
those results will never get published in any scientific journal...
You didn't even have to RTFA - the write-up itself says, "but now their work has been published in Nature." You know, the well-known scientific journal?
Let me let you in on something...in investigations of the natural world - you know, that thing outside the lab? - you often don't get to have a formal control group. Cosmologists, for example, don't have a "control" universe to check against. Neither do meterologists have a "control" Earth to check against.
And if you had RTFA, you might see that what they were looking at was not the average temperature, but the temperature swing between day and night.
Saddest thing of all is that your post was modded up.
We've had that in Maryland for a while now - "MVA Express" offices that handle the simple stuff. And automated kiosks to handle renewing your vechicle registration. And now you can even renew over the web. While there are still painful operations that can only be done at the full-service, wait-in-line-all-day full services offices, they've done an excellent job of making it less painful overall.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That's why they call it "in public".
You're making the assumption that both "privacy" and "being in public" are boolean values.
If I'm standing on a streetcorner at 3a.m. talking to someone, and no one is around, I have an expectation of privcy. Not as much as if we were in my home, but more so that on the same corner at noon.
When I'm driving my car about town, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy that included that my movements are not being tracked, that the passenger compartment is not bugged, and so on. I don't have a reasonable expectation that a cop might not come up behind me and run my plates, jsut for jollies since he doesn't like the look of my bumper stickers, or that someone who knows me might not spot me.
Re:This is what's good/bad about the West
on
The Last Place
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· Score: 1
I'd like to suggest that one of the great hallmarks of the West is exactly that -- dissatisfaction with who you are, where you are, and what you have.
I'd suggest that it's not so much a great hallmark, as a great fundamental error of our society.
This produces drive...to "get ahead", drive to "keep up with the onses"
I'd rather have a drive to gain wisdom...to create beauty...to experience joy.
Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat. I have no desire to keep up with the Joneses - they're not even going where I want to go.
That a side effect of this institutionalized dissatisfaction is a household full of unneeded, worthless goods is a small price to pay
It's not a side effect. It's the main action. It's the effect desired by our government and industry - keep buying! Keep consuming more and more to keep the economy growing!
But more and more people are declining to play.
Re:No escape from the CULTURE
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 1
An individual's decision to turn the TV off does not change that- it's a "head in the sand" response.
It doesn't directly change what happens to the culture, no. But it changes what happens to you, so it's not in any way a "head in the sand" response. And by changing yourelf, you have made a very small change in the culture...one that might even propagate. ("Hey, you see Survivor last night?" "Nope. I was reading Walden." "What's that about?" "Let me tell you. You want to borrow my copy?")
Yes, I watch TV, but just like any other drug I set parameters to make sure my use stays healthy.
Besides, this sort of thing is determined largely by economics - the smaller cups must not have been selling as well.
Economics, yes, demand, no. Starbucks saw that they could make more profit on large sizes. They control enough of the market to make competion a moot point. It's the typical distortion of the free market seen when one supplier (or one buyer) becomes too influential.
but I think there is enough competition so that if people really wanted a small cup, they'd get it
Uh, no. I really would like to be able to buy a small, old-school, 8 ounce soda. I can't.
If you're searching on a common name, Google's not much help. If the name is unusual - say, Tom Swiss, and if you know enough to disambiguate the few matches (I'm the hacker vegan karate guy, not the ju-jitsu guy, not the Drake professor; and just one of the poets on the net with that name.)
For example: most plumbers, miners, and fisherman are good at what they do, but I bet they'd rather be doing something else.
Dunno about miners or fishermen, but plumbing is pretty good work. Difficult sometimes, but pays pretty good. And it's important work, too - your plumber is more responsible for your increased life expectancy over your uppity-great grandpa than your doctor is. You might wait a few days to see your doctor, but man, if your toilet's broke you want a plumber there now.
Don't forget, Albert Einstein once said that if he had it all to do over again, he'd probably have been a plumber...
Your plumber would probably be pretty pissed off to be replaced by a machine.
I'll become a tree-hugging vegan PETA extremist before I worry about a MACHINE'S feelings and social standing
Tree-hugging vegan PETA member that I am, I don't care about the hardware, but the software.
When creatures with brains made of doped semiconductors, or nano-scale transistors, or whatever, become complicated enough that their behavior approaches that of sentient beings made out of meat, they will deserve ethical consideration.
I'm happy to address any issues you might have with her philosophy, but in order to do that, you're going to have to read it.
Ah, but you see, it's not her philosophy I have a problem with, necessarily. It's the sophmoric philosophy of her rabid worshipers. Whether that corresponds with her own philosophy, I don't yet know; and having to work through the prejudice engendered by encounters with said rabid worshipers is not an investment of energy I've gotten around to yet, or one that seems worthy of high priority.
In other words: rabid followers of a philosophy - any philosophy - are strong disincentives towards further study of that philosophy.
Just want to emphasise that the book is nothing like the travesty of a film that claims to be based on it. I don't know that it's dystopian - it's post-apocolyptic, but ultimately it's hopeful.
Hell, all teh fanatics that want you to NOT read it is reason enough to read it.
I've never yet heard any "fanatic" tell people not to read it. However, the attitudes of fanatical Rand worshippers have, so far, managed to discourage me from picking it up. Yes, a bunch of fanatics that want you TO read something is reason enough to stay away...
...Even free software. Our industry is maturing...
The "maturity" of the "industry" has nothing to do with freedom. The GPL and BSD-oid licences will remain, regardless of "click-thru".
This might be a problem for adherents of "open source" philosophy, since they are concerned with acceptance by the "industry". To adherents of "free software" philosophy, it's a non-issue.
Replanting after defortesting doesn't get you back a forest.
While trees are renewable, forests are not, at least on anywhere near the same time scale. But yes, perhaps something like this could let trees be taken without destroying the forest. Perhaps. Maybe.
Actually, if used wisely (which as always is a big if), something like this could be quite good for helping to stop deforestation. No roads need to be cut into the forest, and no clearcutting; instead a couple of guys with these could pick out a tree here, a tree there, and still leave the forest basically intact. It's like plucking a few hairs from your head here and there, vesus shaving one spot.
Oh, and the question is not "tree" supply. It's forests. A forest is more than just a bunch of trees, ya know.
Of course it can...but so can the "wisdom" of modern medicine. Hormone replacement therapy, anyone? Arthroscopic knee surgery?
For any given therapy - conventional or "alternative" - there's always a chance that future information will deem it ineffective. But you've got to make a treatment decision based on the information available now.
How simple was it to get proper scientific study of tobacco?
There are proper studies being done, some of which are conducted by herb suppliers. Of course, the skeptically-correct can be just as biased as the true-believers, and will dismiss all studies that don't support their biases as "flawed".
That depends on how polluted, and how thirsty you are.
Nature is a well-respected peer-reviewed scientific journal. So your assertation is simply not true.
As for the rest of your post, I can't find any defintion of "skyes" other than a chain of islands off of Scotland, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
Almost sounds like you're talking about clouds - but of course, the whole fscking point of this research is how contrails affect cloud formation which then affects local climate.
You didn't even have to RTFA - the write-up itself says, "but now their work has been published in Nature." You know, the well-known scientific journal ?
Let me let you in on something...in investigations of the natural world - you know, that thing outside the lab? - you often don't get to have a formal control group. Cosmologists, for example, don't have a "control" universe to check against. Neither do meterologists have a "control" Earth to check against.
And if you had RTFA, you might see that what they were looking at was not the average temperature, but the temperature swing between day and night.
Saddest thing of all is that your post was modded up.
You're making the assumption that both "privacy" and "being in public" are boolean values.
If I'm standing on a streetcorner at 3a.m. talking to someone, and no one is around, I have an expectation of privcy. Not as much as if we were in my home, but more so that on the same corner at noon.
When I'm driving my car about town, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy that included that my movements are not being tracked, that the passenger compartment is not bugged, and so on. I don't have a reasonable expectation that a cop might not come up behind me and run my plates, jsut for jollies since he doesn't like the look of my bumper stickers, or that someone who knows me might not spot me.
I'd suggest that it's not so much a great hallmark, as a great fundamental error of our society.
I'd rather have a drive to gain wisdom...to create beauty...to experience joy.
Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat. I have no desire to keep up with the Joneses - they're not even going where I want to go.
It's not a side effect. It's the main action. It's the effect desired by our government and industry - keep buying! Keep consuming more and more to keep the economy growing!
But more and more people are declining to play.
It doesn't directly change what happens to the culture, no. But it changes what happens to you, so it's not in any way a "head in the sand" response. And by changing yourelf, you have made a very small change in the culture...one that might even propagate. ("Hey, you see Survivor last night?" "Nope. I was reading Walden." "What's that about?" "Let me tell you. You want to borrow my copy?")
Yes, I watch TV, but just like any other drug I set parameters to make sure my use stays healthy.
No, my rights to fuck with the original production can neither be bought nor sold. They are inherent in free speech and fair use.
Now, if I fuck with the original and represent that it's still the original, that's fraud
Thank you. Your post proves my point.
If you're searching on a common name, Google's not much help. If the name is unusual - say, Tom Swiss, and if you know enough to disambiguate the few matches (I'm the hacker vegan karate guy, not the ju-jitsu guy, not the Drake professor; and just one of the poets on the net with that name.)
Dunno about miners or fishermen, but plumbing is pretty good work. Difficult sometimes, but pays pretty good. And it's important work, too - your plumber is more responsible for your increased life expectancy over your uppity-great grandpa than your doctor is. You might wait a few days to see your doctor, but man, if your toilet's broke you want a plumber there now.
Don't forget, Albert Einstein once said that if he had it all to do over again, he'd probably have been a plumber...
Your plumber would probably be pretty pissed off to be replaced by a machine.
Tree-hugging vegan PETA member that I am, I don't care about the hardware, but the software.
When creatures with brains made of doped semiconductors, or nano-scale transistors, or whatever, become complicated enough that their behavior approaches that of sentient beings made out of meat, they will deserve ethical consideration.
How is this determination made? Is it just looking for functions that make certain calls, or what?
Seems to me all the attacker has to do is figure out how to spoof the security cookie. What prevents this?
Ah, but you see, it's not her philosophy I have a problem with, necessarily. It's the sophmoric philosophy of her rabid worshipers. Whether that corresponds with her own philosophy, I don't yet know; and having to work through the prejudice engendered by encounters with said rabid worshipers is not an investment of energy I've gotten around to yet, or one that seems worthy of high priority.
In other words: rabid followers of a philosophy - any philosophy - are strong disincentives towards further study of that philosophy.
Just want to emphasise that the book is nothing like the travesty of a film that claims to be based on it. I don't know that it's dystopian - it's post-apocolyptic, but ultimately it's hopeful.
The "maturity" of the "industry" has nothing to do with freedom. The GPL and BSD-oid licences will remain, regardless of "click-thru".
This might be a problem for adherents of "open source" philosophy, since they are concerned with acceptance by the "industry". To adherents of "free software" philosophy, it's a non-issue.
Replanting after defortesting doesn't get you back a forest.
While trees are renewable, forests are not, at least on anywhere near the same time scale. But yes, perhaps something like this could let trees be taken without destroying the forest. Perhaps. Maybe.
Actually, if used wisely (which as always is a big if), something like this could be quite good for helping to stop deforestation. No roads need to be cut into the forest, and no clearcutting; instead a couple of guys with these could pick out a tree here, a tree there, and still leave the forest basically intact. It's like plucking a few hairs from your head here and there, vesus shaving one spot.
Oh, and the question is not "tree" supply. It's forests. A forest is more than just a bunch of trees, ya know.