C.M. Shifflet makes the point in her books, pertaining to Ki Society Aikido, that there are noticeable physical effects that are observable from something as simple as changing what you are thinking about from something positive to something negative.
Now, maybe somewhere down the line we'll have the science to explain that. Maybe somewhere down the line we'll have the science to explain that there is no such thing as free will and that a human of configuration X, given inputs Y and Z, will make a decision whose outcomes can be described by a probability function very exactly.
It is quite possible that down the road we'll discover that what we know about the human condition, while not wrong, is incomplete. Perhaps the Force does not exist as a telekinetic power. But perhaps there is something to be said for the mind having an ability to affect the physical world.
I forget the particular luminary who said this (I'm sure someone in the erudite/. audience will recall and correct my quotation):
If a great man of science tells you a thing is possible, he is almost certainly right. If he tells you something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.
There is a certain wisdom in this. Over the course of time, we have discovered many things. And then later yet, we have discovered others that totally revamped our understanding of our original discoveries. Perhaps this is something of that variety.
Then again, it could just all be a made up hokey religion which just won't hold up against a blaster...
Oh, and Kurasawa himself often returned the favor. "Ran" was a samurai remake of "King Lear."
And Shakespeare has been accused of lifting many things from prior works himself... so we can't even blame the English....:)
This all goes back to the point that a great story is timeless and the main elements can be lifted and reset into another setting and time without a lot of dilution of the value - because the story is about people and they remain, in most fundamental ways, the same over time.
Not really, unless they've recently returned from a couple of years in London and it rubbed off on them. Kiwi's are more likely to use "eh" at the end of sentences, like Canadians.
Next thing you know, you'll be telling me Kiwis have taken a fancy to Tim Horton's Donuts, Maple Syrup, Beaver Tails (the pastry delicacy, for those who think I'm talking about an actual appendage from an actual beaver which I'm not), and Ice Hockey....
I mean, then you'd be like Canada (vast and interesting geography, fun-loving and relatively peaceful folk, brew some good beer, neighbours that sometimes make you wince but whom you depend on for defence, etc.) except with a nicer climate.
Careful, you might find your immigration figures from what would then be called "Northern Canada" go waaaay up.... (*grin*)
There's no real use to the US wilfully cutting Pakistan's link. I can only see India gaining from such an action -- and even then, only if they were about to launch an all-out attack against Pakistan, and I've seen no signs of that happening.
Hmmm. I'm not a lodge brother in the Order of the Tinfoil Beanie, but you'd think this would have some relatively severe econcomic impacts. Even short term outages could have effects on business and on international customers and on things like banking and such. Any data loss could have consequences too. And the longer it takes to fix, the more it costs.
Of course, I think this probably has either a benign (accidental) origin or a stupid one. Usually, when left with a choice between conspiracy and stupidity, the safe bet is on stupidity somewhere along the line.
It is easy to have lofty principles such as helping the developing world until such time as it actually starts to cost us something.
Outsourcing is a sign. It is a sign that we're not doing the right things in the (more fully) developed world. If a programmer in India can do my job for half the wage and still look good (relative to his cost of living), then I'd better either learn Gujurati, Hindi, or one of the many other tongues and move to compete with him, or else I'd better be thinking of doing something else.
Does it shock anyone that at the same time as the US and the EU are bleeding skilled jobs to new centers of skill (India is developing quite a few of technical skill centers!) elsewhere in the world, that we're busy arguing about cutting back to a 35 hour work week (bits of the EU) or about making Intelligent Design the latest 'education' in our schools?
This is the 21st century. If you trained as a computer geek, realize computers are commoditizing and start looking at an exit strategy. Software is busy doing this now too. No one anymore says "I want to manufacture machine screws by hand!". We know this process is automated and you can now have them for a very low price. Similarly, software will go that route over time.
So, if you want to remain a highly educated worker at the cutting edge of the newest field, realize that computer software isn't going to be it. It was in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2120, I don't imagine it will be. So what are you doing to start sorting out 'the next area of innovation' and to prepare yourself to work in that field? Or are you buying a $400K+ house, driving a $40K+ car, and spending all your money on toys?
If you aren't saving up for your next stage of education and you aren't thinking about what it is and investing in continuing education steadily (and that may well mean 'into another area of study'), then you are essentially the woolen worker put out of work when the mills closed, or the hatpin maker who found out the machine could do a better and faster and cheaper job.... and you weren't looking ahead to see it coming.
So, you've got a warning. The trend is clear. Stop cringing and whinging and get out there and do! Plan, act, educate yourself, and move on to 'the next new thing'. If you have the brains to make sense out of assembly code, if you can write multi-threaded client server apps, if you can make a database sing... then surely you can use that brainpower in some other endeavour to equal effect, given some investment in training.
Ultimately, we're still stuck in the old model of 'go to school, get an education, carry on with life after education'. We should realize the new model is 'get a part of an education, work for a while, see the changes coming, re-educate, get a new job, work for a while, rinse, repeat.' That's living on globalized internet time. It might not be all that palatable if you feel like saying 'my brain is full' or 'but I've spent my time in school' but it is what the new world's rate of change will require. Be agile or be roadkill....
...if by war you mean a deadly serious conflict. Sure, it sounds melodramatic, but if people's jobs and livelihoods are on the line, and it affects therefore their communities, their families, etc, then in some sense, it is *very* serious. It isn't just an irrelevant little spat about ego or statistical market share - it is a real-world issue that determines who eats and who doesn't.
From the definition that follows, it might satisfy the first definition if you consider various computer programs an 'arm'. Of course, that might depend on if you were the US DOD or not...
It definitely meets the third definition.
war n.
1. A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.
2. The period of such conflict.
3. The techniques and procedures of war; military science.
3. A condition of active antagonism or contention: a war of words; a price war.
4. A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious: the war against acid rain.
I'll apologize for my laziness in not using preview (which in no significant way affects content in this instance other than having some unworkable HTML in it) when people stop posting as anonymous cowards and take the time to log in and own up to their posts. Of the two, I know which I consider more odious.... and it ain't a few bad tags amidst the text....
And sometimes they are also the place you express the frustration you feel at the particularly dismal piece of architecture someone handed you, that was a poor architecture in the first place and has subsequently been further bastardized into something whose design logic no longer exists in any coherent form, and in which any time you touch the code, there is a decent chance of side effects.
I try not to be profane. If I really want to imply some sort of upset or exclamation, I'll got the old cartoon route of using @#$%^%&!!!!! as a replacement.
But I find people sometimes shy away from identifying poorly architected code, odd inputs our outputs, or places where the approach taken was a kludge that needed to be thrown in but wasn't very good for fear of having an unflattering comment in place. Frankly, I'd rather know about these situations. I'm a big boy... if someone writes that a particular routine is a steaming pile of crap, that won't offend me, as long as the description is technically accurate (the routine actually is) and there is sufficient other data with the comment to tell me WHY this is so.
A co-worker of mine put in this one recently.... <ecode> ' Quick kludge because of time. Should not rely on global structure </ecode>
Sure, it reveals that we've put a hack in when we should have done it a different way. But at least whoever the next poor bugger that comes along can be 'in the know' and not thinking that we mystically thought this was the 'right' way to solve the problem.
I also like to put in comment tags I can quickly locate in a search (<i>ANAKIN, WORF, BLAKE, GARTH OF IZAR, etc</i>). Sometimes they get left in. Do they cause any grief? Not really. A friend of mine uses the tag <i>WALLY</i> for all of his temporary patches and now this has infested the code bases at at least 4 companies (and other developers use it). You know if you see a <i>WALLY<i> that there is something to pay attention to and usually the note indicates it is a patch, a kludge, or a less than optimal solution.
Other sorts of comments that might not look so good might include:
<ecode> ' [initials_deleted] - [date] ' THIS IS A FIX - we're holding off on implementing it, despite the fact is is the ' correct fix, in order to get the [version] release out the door. Default is [value]. This ' means we are writing the wrong thing into the DB. Yet, at the same time, if we fix ' it now, it means more work to fix and more risk. So, we want to fix it, we want to ' see this change in place, but not right now. So I'm leaving it here, but commented. '[line of code commented out] </ecode>
I guess I've written a few comments late at night that I usually excise when the code goes into the repository for the builds. I remember some that crept through. A follow on developer asked me about a comment where I had written "I have no #$%! idea what this value is meant to be so it is utterly arbitrary...." (relating to line discipline for systems we didn't have specs on). Similarly, I've seen comments like "If you get here, we're TU" (Tits Up).
I have seen supposedly benign test data that was never designed for primetime leak out to customer sites. I've seen error messages that said "You should never see this error message. If you do, you're in a very bad state." pop up at client sites. This kind of stuff happens, so beware that any test data you enter should at the very least not be offensive - funny is okay, but humour can be in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure the [deleted] police agency would have been happy if the easter egg we joked with at the office (an avi of a pig squealing) had actually made it into the final release so that every time someone hit request-to-talk, that noise played on the laptop. Some officers we showed it to broke up laughing, but I'm sure others would have been hugely pissed off. So whenever you do something you don't think will get out, keep in mind, it on
The comment about food concentration isn't wrong (you still gain the benefit of food concentration) so much as it is incomplete. You are right - eating a carefully managed vegetarian diet can supply adequate amounts of protein and it may be more energy efficient.
And humans (as I understand) aren't terribly nutritious from the point of view of a good diet (not to mention the awkward social ramifications of cannibalism).
OTOH, your conclusion about excessive meat consumption I find much more dubious. I think that has a lot more to do with every sauce, condiment, or the like being loaded with both sugars and fats. Look at the amount of soda, cookies, potato chips, etc. consumed - that probably has more to do with obesity than meat consumption.
FWIW, as a Canuck, whenever I travel to the US, I'm overwhelmed by portion sizes. A 'large' meal up here is the regular size south of the border. If I make the mistake of ordering a larger meal down south, I can't finish it. So I think vast portion sizes (which one then becomes accustomed to) have a lot to do with that issue too.
And of course, sedimentary lifestyles don't help either....
So although meat consumption may not be energy efficient, ruminants may produce lots of greenhouse gases, etc. and so forth, meat is probably not the bane of our existence foodwise (as far as obesity goes). I think it falls far behind the other causes I've cited.
And besides, I just plain enjoy a good flame grilled hamburger with a nice chunk of sharp cheddar, some grilled onions, some ketchup, dijon mustard, dill relish or a dill pickle, a nice crisp lettuce leaf, and a juicy tomato slab. That's just about Nirvana, to my thinking.(shrug)
Many, many things "are expected on the market by [insert future time here]. This is not the same as saying that these puppies will be on the shelf in Fry's on August 12, 2005 at a cost of one gonad three pence.
That almost caused a keyboard kill. I wish I had some mod points for you today. I think, mind you, I'd wait until the price came down dramatically... otherwise getting a raid array could be.... an emasculating experience.
It would be nice to see flash tech advance to the capability where I could slap a 40Gb key into my camcorder and just record video and audio in high resolution de-jittered quality until the cows come home. It'll come one of these days. It's a pretty good time to be alive, in terms of computer power you can buy for a reasonable budget.
Tastier? I think that would be hard to substantiate objectively.
I'd say with vast array of available animal protein out there (Bison, Ostrich, Gator, Cow, Pig, a huge variety of Fish (Cod, Halibut, Trout, Herring, Sardine, Mackerel, Talapia, Swordfish, Marlin, Tuna, Salmon, etc), other Aquatic life (Shrimp, Scallops, Lobster, Crab, Oysters, Octopus, etc), and various birds (Turkey, Chicken, Duck, Goose, Pheasant, Quail, etc)), there is little doubt that with proper preparation, you can have a vast variety of flavours. Yes, you can also have a vast variety of vegetable flavours (if they are prepared right), but if you think Vegetarian is tastier, it is either a personal preference or a very limited exposure to the range of animal-related meal items. Being an omnivore and fairly well travelled food-wise, I've sampled great vegetarian and carnivore dishes and couldn't imagine trying to say which was 'tastier'.
As for healthy, vegetarian diets have some shortcomings. I've actually had one friend who was a Vegan ordered by her doctor to start eating meat again despite her best efforts to procure all the required nutrients and vital vitamins elsewhere. If I recall, one of the B complex vitamins was fairly hard to come by sufficiently without eating meat, despite various supplementations during any given year.
Keep in mind as well that herbivores rule few food chains. Why? Because when worst comes to worst, an omnivore can eat plants *and* animals. A vegetarian that is rigidly so can only eat one out of two. The ominvores natural advantage is he can actually eat the vegetarians. Generally, the omnivore also recieves the benefit of concentration of food value up the food chain that predators do - the lower creatures in the chain (often herbivores) do a lot of the work concentrating food value and the predator reaps the reward.
Or put another way, when you look at a salad, you don't see food, you see what food eats.
We can all only make our own choices, but my ancestors worked for many millions of years to get to the top of the food chain, and that involved eating meat. I'm not about to dishonour that huge amount of effort and sacrifice:)
To each his own, just keep in mind that when the end comes, one camp will be walking rations for the other....:)
False assumption is a logical fallacy. So is the fallacy that basically translates as 'doesn't necessarily follow' (though I forget the proper name).
Your third paragraph is probably close to the way I see the situation. I try not to reject things out of hand, generally, unless they are assertions about what I think or believe, which are even then not really rejected out of hand but out of sure knowledge that I am the only one who can really know that particular perspective. In other cases, I do try to consider the case on merits.
I will however attempt to correct a few points: - I came across overly harsh against those who try go 'get something' out of a movie. I just find for myself, real life provides more than enough of the deeper things and thus no need for them in movies. So when I see people damning the output of hollywood for this reason, I find that my interests (light fair, I suppose you might call it) are being marginalized. In a fair world, I should say there is room for both options, and I think I may have conceded this myself earlier. My expression was perhaps a tad overwrought. - I simply say that your argument may have seemed to be a Straw Man based on holding up a percieved view (for which I must obviously take some responsibility for giving, though perhaps the reader has a part to play in that as well) and then assailing it. The problem with this is that the view being assailed wasn't really what I was trying to support nor what I believed exactly, so that by definition would make it a Straw Man. - I concede the point that a better definition of a copy control culture is required in such a discussion.
One last thought: A lot of a person's outlook on life comes down to how they choose (and it tends to be a choice, concious or not) about what lens they use in looking at their world. If we have predisposition in a matter, we tend to interpret new data in that vein. This often reinforces the earlier opinions, whereas a different lens might yeild a differing interpretation and support a wholly other view.
I won't (by far) say that we have the whole idea of Intellectual Property down pat. But I think it would be an exaggeration (by my standards) to say that we have a huge problem (overall) in this area. Yes, there are things that need revisited (Patents even before Copyrights and Copyrights to the extent that they no longer serve the same master they once did....), but I think there is a lot of evidence that we are *not* a Copy Control culture (working from my own internal idea of what that implies). So, I do, I think, fall somewhere in the middle ground, though perhaps more towards not-a-big-problem than towards oh-my-lord-it-is-the-apocalypse.
It does make for something I believe should be openly discussed and the underlying concepts analyzed and understood. The lack of this sort of discussion surely is what has allowed Copyright Law to mutate so over the years and for Patents to become a tool of stagnation instead of innovation.
It's not just 10,000 words... that's the SUMMARY!
I feel the strange urge to quote Inigo Montoya here....
"I do not theenk that thees word means wha' you theenk eet meens."
Or at least, 10,000 words should surely summarize something at least 100x as long.
Sure, in the grand scheme, a few people doesn't matter much. I'm sure 1-10 people get killed on any given day by far more bizarre things than a little fallout - dwarf tossing, cow tipping, bull-baiting, terminal internet addiction, etc.
Yet at the same time, the automobile accidents are something we try to reduce and we don't just shrug and say 'Hey, those 114 deaths don't matter! Let's tack on another 10!'
Oddly, I think that 1-10 more deaths in what most folk would percieve as an unnecessary event would be particularly unwelcome.
And doubly so when there may well be other alternatives to avoid this fate. Don't know about you, but I'm not real interested in being one of the poor saps who has the bad luck to die from fallout. Plus then again the chance that something worse goes wrong and a lot more folks die... or that (lord forbid) the data is wrong and it affects more folks.
This seems like the kind of downside that not only can be avoided but should be avoided. We should go to space for a variety of reasons, but this whole phobia about us being wiped out is a panic of the last ten to twenty years. We've inhabited this burg for a few thousands or tens of thousands years (and the other species that precede us for far longer) and that's a blip on the cosmic timescale. We should get out to space, but we should do it in a sustainable, sensible, and environmentally sound fashion.
Artifakt the Opined spake thus:
Your ancestors, who had an average age at death of about 30 by the time you go back three geneerations, probably would debate whether your stress level is any higher than theirs. If you've got some who faced little stressors like World War 2, the black plague, or Atilla the Hun, they certainly would. Why do you believe otherwise?
Oddly, my Grandfather fought in the trenches in WW1, my mother lived through the Blitz and rationing in WW2. And I've been told by they and others that my life is more *continously* stressful. I was fortunate enough never to get shot at when I served in the infantry, never to have my best friends blown to bits around me like my Grandfather. But at the same time, in the period where he was not at war, life was pretty straightforward. It wasn't stress free, but it wasn't the ongoing pressure cooker of working with telecoms, dot-coms, dot-bombs, public safety applications where people's lives are on the line, on a day to day basis. Now, my other grandfather, who was a coal mining engineer and sometimes had to work double and triple shifts in the mine for a pittance probably approached the number of work hours I put in. I'm undoubtedly better compensated. But in terms of stress, I still think I have him beat. And it isn't all work stress either - for a number of other reasons, I happen to believe this. You can gainsay it, but you really don't have much data to make such a problematic judgement with.
Could it be because the media have been telling you stress is up, up, up? Could it be you feel flattered, deep inside, by the thought that you are a special breed of person who can cope with all that extra, special stress?
First, what makes you think I can cope?
Second, objective measures of stress don't require me to be listening to the media unless you are about to tell me that all stress is in ones imagination.
Part of selling more newer stuff that's
still protected by copyright is giving you a false sense of what the past is like, so you won't think older books, films, and such are relevant to your faster paced, newer than new style life.
That's an interesting claim. It may even be true. Or maybe it is the fact that the world does change a bit, and some of the older stuff isn't as relevant. Now, I'm not going to gainsay Tacitus or Sun Tzu or Von Clauswitz or Sophocles. Some classic works have value that transcend the period. But a lot of merely 'old' literature (if you could call it that) isn't really that useful or applicable and some (not all, by any means) of the newly minted material is.
This may even help difuse your own better instincts. Even if you end up picking, not just Star Wars over Sophie's Choice, but Jerry Springer uncensored over both, you can fall back on the excuse that it's because your special life came with special stress levels,
Not the case of a special life. Or at least, no more special than any other. Higher stress levels than most, but that's the way life sometimes deals a varied hand to different people.
and not ever have to ask yourself "What if I'm just being mentally lazy?",
What if I am? Quite seriously, I'm not sure that industry is the most desirable of virtues, unless you're a corporate drone. Similarly, there is nothing inherently wrong with being lazy *from time to time*.
To my mind, you have to pick your battles. You have to choose when to expend your energies in this life. You have to choose where to emotionally and intellectually invest yourself. So on the occasions you do not, that seems to me both natural and not inherently problematic.
or even "What if I'm not really enjoying Spiderman 14 the way I did the first three or four?" I'm not saying you should be constantly asking yourself why you chose X over Shakespeare, but this stress arguement keeps you from ever asking why you chose a sequel over something new.
I can see where you might think that, but it is not th
Still, you're right: an antelope needs 18 hours to eat because grass has a very low energy density. Antelopes have a higher energy density than grass, so if you eat antelopes rather than grass you spend less time eating. I suspect lions sleep a lot because the television on the Serengeti plains isn't too good (although the pygmy channel has some good shorts).
I wish I had some mod points to mod that up. That's hilarious! Nice!
The point about concentration of food value up the food chain is also well taken.
My take on omnivory: My ancestors worked for many millions of years (sorry Intelligent Design fans) to get to the top of the food chain. I'm not about to dishonour those sacrifices by turning back into a grass eater. That and the fact that if things get really bad, Vegans can eat grass. I can, OTOH, eat Vegans. And we've already acknowledged the benefits of concentration of food value up the food chain. And I'm sure a Vegan would classify as Atkins-diet material. As one of my friends once put it while dining with a Vegan, pointing over at her plate with a smile, "That's not food. That's what food eats."
PS - For the humour-impaired, that has a big smiley before and after it. Vegans are okay folks and making your own choices is the great thing about Freedom.
Other than the strictly physical differences, let us look at the other differences between a tabloid and a textbook: Review effort. Tabloid 'news' is dished up with little research, little independent verification, and by people who are not as learned nor as expensive as university professors. Contrast this with a textbook, which is often peer reviewed by a number of different professors, sometimes specialists in their particular sub-area, and you can well see why a textbook might actually cost significantly more money. It isn't just a matter of 'collecting old data'. It is a matter of being able to reformat it and present it intelligibly, making sure you haven't made any mistakes (no mean feat in a math text), and covering the materials required for the curriculum you are shooting to address.
As to sports salaries, I hardly think that is a copy control culture issue. We routinely go and pay $30-200 per ticket for tickets to major sporting events. All the athletes are asserting is that they are the core of any such venture and should get the lion's share of the revenues (rather than the owners or other merchandising concerns). Oddly, we don't pay teachers as much because no one pays $30-200 to send their child to school for half a day and generally the school teacher can't merchandise herself nor can the school merchandize itself as athletes and pro teams can. Notice, nowhere in this discussion have I dragged in copy control culture. This is simply our choice of how to expend our limited resources. If we wouldn't pay $200 a seat per game for some sports, the market crashing would quickly fix the 'outrageous' salaries for sporting heroes. If we'd cap our contributions at $5-10 per game per seat, sports would no longer be a lifetime ticket for only a few years 'work'. But that is apparently not what we, the public, want.
As to Hollywood movies: Frankly, people who go to the theatre to get touched, to get educated, to get illuminated about life... need to get out more. My life is full enough of tragedy, pathos, stress, deep emotional context, meaning, and oddly enough, facts and education. So, what is there not enough of? Fun! Excitement! Feel good situations! So if I go to see a movie, which is entertainment, I'm just as happy to see Arnie blowing stuff up or Adam Sandler making an ass of himself or some sci-fi special FX as an imaginary Yoda gets his fuzzy green muppet butt kicked by the Emperor.... all of that is fun, stress relieving, and doesn't have the gaul to be preachy, to try to 'teach me something' or 'touch me'. My normal life where I interact with normal humans is touching and heart-rending enough, usually, that I don't need more of that when I go out for a break. And that's what a movie is, to me anyway. So I understand Hollywood. And here again, the copy control culture doesn't really seem to play into the set of tastes we see evidenced.
So, although I agree we are a copy control culture and I think *AAs are doing bad things with lawyer/legislative backing, your arguments don't exactly bring out these problems in a cause and effect fashion. I think most of us put 'hype' as you call it (arguable) over 'substance' (again your word, again arguable) because we have enough 'substance' from other sources. Life nowadays has a stress level that I don't think people from prior times would really have experienced incessantly (as a result of pace), so I think we just want a break more often. Sports and movies are more a sign of that than any underlying ideology of copy control.
Oddly, though it may be an incorrect interpretation, given the context you often here 'hack' used in, one might think that it has to do with the hatchet job said writer does on the underlying story.
I dunno, taken from the perspective of a software developer who averages about 6 hours a night right now due to workload, I'm thinking that the whole 'sleep for 20 hours' sounds like a great idea.
That obviously means the lions can get done what they need to get done in 4 hours, whereas the herbivores might take a better chunk of their 18.
I'm thinking I know which one I'd rather be. Plus it isn't all that often that a lion gets an arse whuppin' from herbivores. The reverse is obviously not the case.
And maybe someone can explain to me why this refered to carnivores and herbivores, since the former dinosaur had a mixed diet making it an omniovore?
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With respects, Sensei Adcock:
/. audience will recall and correct my quotation):
C.M. Shifflet makes the point in her books, pertaining to Ki Society Aikido, that there are noticeable physical effects that are observable from something as simple as changing what you are thinking about from something positive to something negative.
Now, maybe somewhere down the line we'll have the science to explain that. Maybe somewhere down the line we'll have the science to explain that there is no such thing as free will and that a human of configuration X, given inputs Y and Z, will make a decision whose outcomes can be described by a probability function very exactly.
It is quite possible that down the road we'll discover that what we know about the human condition, while not wrong, is incomplete. Perhaps the Force does not exist as a telekinetic power. But perhaps there is something to be said for the mind having an ability to affect the physical world.
I forget the particular luminary who said this (I'm sure someone in the erudite
If a great man of science tells you a thing is possible, he is almost certainly right. If he tells you something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.
There is a certain wisdom in this. Over the course of time, we have discovered many things. And then later yet, we have discovered others that totally revamped our understanding of our original discoveries. Perhaps this is something of that variety.
Then again, it could just all be a made up hokey religion which just won't hold up against a blaster...
Actually, I always thought his name was "Elron"
No, you're confusing him with Hugo Weaving.Unless, of course, they are Canadian. Then they're in obsolete, leaky, British cast-off boats. And perhaps, in big trouble....
Oh, and Kurasawa himself often returned the favor. "Ran" was a samurai remake of "King Lear."
And Shakespeare has been accused of lifting many things from prior works himself... so we can't even blame the English.... :)
This all goes back to the point that a great story is timeless and the main elements can be lifted and reset into another setting and time without a lot of dilution of the value - because the story is about people and they remain, in most fundamental ways, the same over time.
Do I really want to read a book by someone who works for a consulting firm named after the ignition of fruit?
And the other alternative is even more disturbing....
Not really, unless they've recently returned from a couple of years in London and it rubbed off on them. Kiwi's are more likely to use "eh" at the end of sentences, like Canadians.
Next thing you know, you'll be telling me Kiwis have taken a fancy to Tim Horton's Donuts, Maple Syrup, Beaver Tails (the pastry delicacy, for those who think I'm talking about an actual appendage from an actual beaver which I'm not), and Ice Hockey....
I mean, then you'd be like Canada (vast and interesting geography, fun-loving and relatively peaceful folk, brew some good beer, neighbours that sometimes make you wince but whom you depend on for defence, etc.) except with a nicer climate.
Careful, you might find your immigration figures from what would then be called "Northern Canada" go waaaay up.... (*grin*)
There's no real use to the US wilfully cutting Pakistan's link. I can only see India gaining from such an action -- and even then, only if they were about to launch an all-out attack against Pakistan, and I've seen no signs of that happening.
Hmmm. I'm not a lodge brother in the Order of the Tinfoil Beanie, but you'd think this would have some relatively severe econcomic impacts. Even short term outages could have effects on business and on international customers and on things like banking and such. Any data loss could have consequences too. And the longer it takes to fix, the more it costs.
Of course, I think this probably has either a benign (accidental) origin or a stupid one. Usually, when left with a choice between conspiracy and stupidity, the safe bet is on stupidity somewhere along the line.
Actually, submarines are properly refered to as "boats" -- at least they are by submariners, who are an entirely different breed than surface sailors.
Yes, they are that. Submariners are insane. (*VBG!*)
Said another way:
It is easy to have lofty principles such as helping the developing world until such time as it actually starts to cost us something.
Outsourcing is a sign. It is a sign that we're not doing the right things in the (more fully) developed world. If a programmer in India can do my job for half the wage and still look good (relative to his cost of living), then I'd better either learn Gujurati, Hindi, or one of the many other tongues and move to compete with him, or else I'd better be thinking of doing something else.
Does it shock anyone that at the same time as the US and the EU are bleeding skilled jobs to new centers of skill (India is developing quite a few of technical skill centers!) elsewhere in the world, that we're busy arguing about cutting back to a 35 hour work week (bits of the EU) or about making Intelligent Design the latest 'education' in our schools?
This is the 21st century. If you trained as a computer geek, realize computers are commoditizing and start looking at an exit strategy. Software is busy doing this now too. No one anymore says "I want to manufacture machine screws by hand!". We know this process is automated and you can now have them for a very low price. Similarly, software will go that route over time.
So, if you want to remain a highly educated worker at the cutting edge of the newest field, realize that computer software isn't going to be it. It was in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2120, I don't imagine it will be. So what are you doing to start sorting out 'the next area of innovation' and to prepare yourself to work in that field? Or are you buying a $400K+ house, driving a $40K+ car, and spending all your money on toys?
If you aren't saving up for your next stage of education and you aren't thinking about what it is and investing in continuing education steadily (and that may well mean 'into another area of study'), then you are essentially the woolen worker put out of work when the mills closed, or the hatpin maker who found out the machine could do a better and faster and cheaper job.... and you weren't looking ahead to see it coming.
So, you've got a warning. The trend is clear. Stop cringing and whinging and get out there and do! Plan, act, educate yourself, and move on to 'the next new thing'. If you have the brains to make sense out of assembly code, if you can write multi-threaded client server apps, if you can make a database sing... then surely you can use that brainpower in some other endeavour to equal effect, given some investment in training.
Ultimately, we're still stuck in the old model of 'go to school, get an education, carry on with life after education'. We should realize the new model is 'get a part of an education, work for a while, see the changes coming, re-educate, get a new job, work for a while, rinse, repeat.' That's living on globalized internet time. It might not be all that palatable if you feel like saying 'my brain is full' or 'but I've spent my time in school' but it is what the new world's rate of change will require. Be agile or be roadkill....
...if by war you mean a deadly serious conflict. Sure, it sounds melodramatic, but if people's jobs and livelihoods are on the line, and it affects therefore their communities, their families, etc, then in some sense, it is *very* serious. It isn't just an irrelevant little spat about ego or statistical market share - it is a real-world issue that determines who eats and who doesn't.
From the definition that follows, it might satisfy the first definition if you consider various computer programs an 'arm'. Of course, that might depend on if you were the US DOD or not...
It definitely meets the third definition.
war n.
1. A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.
2. The period of such conflict.
3. The techniques and procedures of war; military science.
3. A condition of active antagonism or contention: a war of words; a price war.
4. A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious: the war against acid rain.
I'll apologize for my laziness in not using preview (which in no significant way affects content in this instance other than having some unworkable HTML in it) when people stop posting as anonymous cowards and take the time to log in and own up to their posts. Of the two, I know which I consider more odious.... and it ain't a few bad tags amidst the text....
And sometimes they are also the place you express the frustration you feel at the particularly dismal piece of architecture someone handed you, that was a poor architecture in the first place and has subsequently been further bastardized into something whose design logic no longer exists in any coherent form, and in which any time you touch the code, there is a decent chance of side effects.
I try not to be profane. If I really want to imply some sort of upset or exclamation, I'll got the old cartoon route of using @#$%^%&!!!!! as a replacement.
But I find people sometimes shy away from identifying poorly architected code, odd inputs our outputs, or places where the approach taken was a kludge that needed to be thrown in but wasn't very good for fear of having an unflattering comment in place. Frankly, I'd rather know about these situations. I'm a big boy... if someone writes that a particular routine is a steaming pile of crap, that won't offend me, as long as the description is technically accurate (the routine actually is) and there is sufficient other data with the comment to tell me WHY this is so.
A co-worker of mine put in this one recently....
<ecode>
' Quick kludge because of time. Should not rely on global structure
</ecode>
Sure, it reveals that we've put a hack in when we should have done it a different way. But at least whoever the next poor bugger that comes along can be 'in the know' and not thinking that we mystically thought this was the 'right' way to solve the problem.
I also like to put in comment tags I can quickly locate in a search (<i>ANAKIN, WORF, BLAKE, GARTH OF IZAR, etc</i>). Sometimes they get left in. Do they cause any grief? Not really. A friend of mine uses the tag <i>WALLY</i> for all of his temporary patches and now this has infested the code bases at at least 4 companies (and other developers use it). You know if you see a <i>WALLY<i> that there is something to pay attention to and usually the note indicates it is a patch, a kludge, or a less than optimal solution.
Other sorts of comments that might not look so good might include:
<ecode>
' [initials_deleted] - [date]
' THIS IS A FIX - we're holding off on implementing it, despite the fact is is the
' correct fix, in order to get the [version] release out the door. Default is [value]. This
' means we are writing the wrong thing into the DB. Yet, at the same time, if we fix
' it now, it means more work to fix and more risk. So, we want to fix it, we want to
' see this change in place, but not right now. So I'm leaving it here, but commented.
'[line of code commented out]
</ecode>
I guess I've written a few comments late at night that I usually excise when the code goes into the repository for the builds. I remember some that crept through. A follow on developer asked me about a comment where I had written "I have no #$%! idea what this value is meant to be so it is utterly arbitrary...." (relating to line discipline for systems we didn't have specs on).
Similarly, I've seen comments like "If you get here, we're TU" (Tits Up).
I have seen supposedly benign test data that was never designed for primetime leak out to customer sites. I've seen error messages that said "You should never see this error message. If you do, you're in a very bad state." pop up at client sites. This kind of stuff happens, so beware that any test data you enter should at the very least not be offensive - funny is okay, but humour can be in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure the [deleted] police agency would have been happy if the easter egg we joked with at the office (an avi of a pig squealing) had actually made it into the final release so that every time someone hit request-to-talk, that noise played on the laptop. Some officers we showed it to broke up laughing, but I'm sure others would have been hugely pissed off. So whenever you do something you don't think will get out, keep in mind, it on
The comment about food concentration isn't wrong (you still gain the benefit of food concentration) so much as it is incomplete. You are right - eating a carefully managed vegetarian diet can supply adequate amounts of protein and it may be more energy efficient.
And humans (as I understand) aren't terribly nutritious from the point of view of a good diet (not to mention the awkward social ramifications of cannibalism).
OTOH, your conclusion about excessive meat consumption I find much more dubious. I think that has a lot more to do with every sauce, condiment, or the like being loaded with both sugars and fats. Look at the amount of soda, cookies, potato chips, etc. consumed - that probably has more to do with obesity than meat consumption.
FWIW, as a Canuck, whenever I travel to the US, I'm overwhelmed by portion sizes. A 'large' meal up here is the regular size south of the border. If I make the mistake of ordering a larger meal down south, I can't finish it. So I think vast portion sizes (which one then becomes accustomed to) have a lot to do with that issue too.
And of course, sedimentary lifestyles don't help either....
So although meat consumption may not be energy efficient, ruminants may produce lots of greenhouse gases, etc. and so forth, meat is probably not the bane of our existence foodwise (as far as obesity goes). I think it falls far behind the other causes I've cited.
And besides, I just plain enjoy a good flame grilled hamburger with a nice chunk of sharp cheddar, some grilled onions, some ketchup, dijon mustard, dill relish or a dill pickle, a nice crisp lettuce leaf, and a juicy tomato slab. That's just about Nirvana, to my thinking.(shrug)
Many, many things "are expected on the market by [insert future time here]. This is not the same as saying that these puppies will be on the shelf in Fry's on August 12, 2005 at a cost of one gonad three pence.
That almost caused a keyboard kill. I wish I had some mod points for you today. I think, mind you, I'd wait until the price came down dramatically... otherwise getting a raid array could be.... an emasculating experience.
It would be nice to see flash tech advance to the capability where I could slap a 40Gb key into my camcorder and just record video and audio in high resolution de-jittered quality until the cows come home. It'll come one of these days. It's a pretty good time to be alive, in terms of computer power you can buy for a reasonable budget.
Tastier? I think that would be hard to substantiate objectively.
:)
:)
I'd say with vast array of available animal protein out there (Bison, Ostrich, Gator, Cow, Pig, a huge variety of Fish (Cod, Halibut, Trout, Herring, Sardine, Mackerel, Talapia, Swordfish, Marlin, Tuna, Salmon, etc), other Aquatic life (Shrimp, Scallops, Lobster, Crab, Oysters, Octopus, etc), and various birds (Turkey, Chicken, Duck, Goose, Pheasant, Quail, etc)), there is little doubt that with proper preparation, you can have a vast variety of flavours. Yes, you can also have a vast variety of vegetable flavours (if they are prepared right), but if you think Vegetarian is tastier, it is either a personal preference or a very limited exposure to the range of animal-related meal items. Being an omnivore and fairly well travelled food-wise, I've sampled great vegetarian and carnivore dishes and couldn't imagine trying to say which was 'tastier'.
As for healthy, vegetarian diets have some shortcomings. I've actually had one friend who was a Vegan ordered by her doctor to start eating meat again despite her best efforts to procure all the required nutrients and vital vitamins elsewhere. If I recall, one of the B complex vitamins was fairly hard to come by sufficiently without eating meat, despite various supplementations during any given year.
Keep in mind as well that herbivores rule few food chains. Why? Because when worst comes to worst, an omnivore can eat plants *and* animals. A vegetarian that is rigidly so can only eat one out of two. The ominvores natural advantage is he can actually eat the vegetarians. Generally, the omnivore also recieves the benefit of concentration of food value up the food chain that predators do - the lower creatures in the chain (often herbivores) do a lot of the work concentrating food value and the predator reaps the reward.
Or put another way, when you look at a salad, you don't see food, you see what food eats.
We can all only make our own choices, but my ancestors worked for many millions of years to get to the top of the food chain, and that involved eating meat. I'm not about to dishonour that huge amount of effort and sacrifice
To each his own, just keep in mind that when the end comes, one camp will be walking rations for the other....
False assumption is a logical fallacy. So is the fallacy that basically translates as 'doesn't necessarily follow' (though I forget the proper name).
Your third paragraph is probably close to the way I see the situation. I try not to reject things out of hand, generally, unless they are assertions about what I think or believe, which are even then not really rejected out of hand but out of sure knowledge that I am the only one who can really know that particular perspective. In other cases, I do try to consider the case on merits.
I will however attempt to correct a few points:
- I came across overly harsh against those who try go 'get something' out of a movie. I just find for myself, real life provides more than enough of the deeper things and thus no need for them in movies. So when I see people damning the output of hollywood for this reason, I find that my interests (light fair, I suppose you might call it) are being marginalized. In a fair world, I should say there is room for both options, and I think I may have conceded this myself earlier. My expression was perhaps a tad overwrought.
- I simply say that your argument may have seemed to be a Straw Man based on holding up a percieved view (for which I must obviously take some responsibility for giving, though perhaps the reader has a part to play in that as well) and then assailing it. The problem with this is that the view being assailed wasn't really what I was trying to support nor what I believed exactly, so that by definition would make it a Straw Man.
- I concede the point that a better definition of a copy control culture is required in such a discussion.
One last thought: A lot of a person's outlook on life comes down to how they choose (and it tends to be a choice, concious or not) about what lens they use in looking at their world. If we have predisposition in a matter, we tend to interpret new data in that vein. This often reinforces the earlier opinions, whereas a different lens might yeild a differing interpretation and support a wholly other view.
I won't (by far) say that we have the whole idea of Intellectual Property down pat. But I think it would be an exaggeration (by my standards) to say that we have a huge problem (overall) in this area. Yes, there are things that need revisited (Patents even before Copyrights and Copyrights to the extent that they no longer serve the same master they once did....), but I think there is a lot of evidence that we are *not* a Copy Control culture (working from my own internal idea of what that implies). So, I do, I think, fall somewhere in the middle ground, though perhaps more towards not-a-big-problem than towards oh-my-lord-it-is-the-apocalypse.
It does make for something I believe should be openly discussed and the underlying concepts analyzed and understood. The lack of this sort of discussion surely is what has allowed Copyright Law to mutate so over the years and for Patents to become a tool of stagnation instead of innovation.
My thanks for your thoughts.
It's not just 10,000 words... that's the SUMMARY! I feel the strange urge to quote Inigo Montoya here.... "I do not theenk that thees word means wha' you theenk eet meens." Or at least, 10,000 words should surely summarize something at least 100x as long.
Sure, in the grand scheme, a few people doesn't matter much. I'm sure 1-10 people get killed on any given day by far more bizarre things than a little fallout - dwarf tossing, cow tipping, bull-baiting, terminal internet addiction, etc.
Yet at the same time, the automobile accidents are something we try to reduce and we don't just shrug and say 'Hey, those 114 deaths don't matter! Let's tack on another 10!'
Oddly, I think that 1-10 more deaths in what most folk would percieve as an unnecessary event would be particularly unwelcome.
And doubly so when there may well be other alternatives to avoid this fate. Don't know about you, but I'm not real interested in being one of the poor saps who has the bad luck to die from fallout. Plus then again the chance that something worse goes wrong and a lot more folks die... or that (lord forbid) the data is wrong and it affects more folks.
This seems like the kind of downside that not only can be avoided but should be avoided. We should go to space for a variety of reasons, but this whole phobia about us being wiped out is a panic of the last ten to twenty years. We've inhabited this burg for a few thousands or tens of thousands years (and the other species that precede us for far longer) and that's a blip on the cosmic timescale. We should get out to space, but we should do it in a sustainable, sensible, and environmentally sound fashion.
Artifakt the Opined spake thus: Your ancestors, who had an average age at death of about 30 by the time you go back three geneerations, probably would debate whether your stress level is any higher than theirs. If you've got some who faced little stressors like World War 2, the black plague, or Atilla the Hun, they certainly would. Why do you believe otherwise?
Oddly, my Grandfather fought in the trenches in WW1, my mother lived through the Blitz and rationing in WW2. And I've been told by they and others that my life is more *continously* stressful. I was fortunate enough never to get shot at when I served in the infantry, never to have my best friends blown to bits around me like my Grandfather. But at the same time, in the period where he was not at war, life was pretty straightforward. It wasn't stress free, but it wasn't the ongoing pressure cooker of working with telecoms, dot-coms, dot-bombs, public safety applications where people's lives are on the line, on a day to day basis. Now, my other grandfather, who was a coal mining engineer and sometimes had to work double and triple shifts in the mine for a pittance probably approached the number of work hours I put in. I'm undoubtedly better compensated. But in terms of stress, I still think I have him beat. And it isn't all work stress either - for a number of other reasons, I happen to believe this. You can gainsay it, but you really don't have much data to make such a problematic judgement with.
Could it be because the media have been telling you stress is up, up, up? Could it be you feel flattered, deep inside, by the thought that you are a special breed of person who can cope with all that extra, special stress?
First, what makes you think I can cope?
Second, objective measures of stress don't require me to be listening to the media unless you are about to tell me that all stress is in ones imagination.
Part of selling more newer stuff that's still protected by copyright is giving you a false sense of what the past is like, so you won't think older books, films, and such are relevant to your faster paced, newer than new style life.
That's an interesting claim. It may even be true. Or maybe it is the fact that the world does change a bit, and some of the older stuff isn't as relevant. Now, I'm not going to gainsay Tacitus or Sun Tzu or Von Clauswitz or Sophocles. Some classic works have value that transcend the period. But a lot of merely 'old' literature (if you could call it that) isn't really that useful or applicable and some (not all, by any means) of the newly minted material is.
This may even help difuse your own better instincts. Even if you end up picking, not just Star Wars over Sophie's Choice, but Jerry Springer uncensored over both, you can fall back on the excuse that it's because your special life came with special stress levels,
Not the case of a special life. Or at least, no more special than any other. Higher stress levels than most, but that's the way life sometimes deals a varied hand to different people.
and not ever have to ask yourself "What if I'm just being mentally lazy?",
What if I am? Quite seriously, I'm not sure that industry is the most desirable of virtues, unless you're a corporate drone. Similarly, there is nothing inherently wrong with being lazy *from time to time*.
To my mind, you have to pick your battles. You have to choose when to expend your energies in this life. You have to choose where to emotionally and intellectually invest yourself. So on the occasions you do not, that seems to me both natural and not inherently problematic.
or even "What if I'm not really enjoying Spiderman 14 the way I did the first three or four?" I'm not saying you should be constantly asking yourself why you chose X over Shakespeare, but this stress arguement keeps you from ever asking why you chose a sequel over something new.
I can see where you might think that, but it is not th
Still, you're right: an antelope needs 18 hours to eat because grass has a very low energy density. Antelopes have a higher energy density than grass, so if you eat antelopes rather than grass you spend less time eating. I suspect lions sleep a lot because the television on the Serengeti plains isn't too good (although the pygmy channel has some good shorts).
I wish I had some mod points to mod that up. That's hilarious! Nice!
The point about concentration of food value up the food chain is also well taken.
My take on omnivory: My ancestors worked for many millions of years (sorry Intelligent Design fans) to get to the top of the food chain. I'm not about to dishonour those sacrifices by turning back into a grass eater. That and the fact that if things get really bad, Vegans can eat grass. I can, OTOH, eat Vegans. And we've already acknowledged the benefits of concentration of food value up the food chain. And I'm sure a Vegan would classify as Atkins-diet material. As one of my friends once put it while dining with a Vegan, pointing over at her plate with a smile, "That's not food. That's what food eats."
PS - For the humour-impaired, that has a big smiley before and after it. Vegans are okay folks and making your own choices is the great thing about Freedom.
Other than the strictly physical differences, let us look at the other differences between a tabloid and a textbook: Review effort. Tabloid 'news' is dished up with little research, little independent verification, and by people who are not as learned nor as expensive as university professors. Contrast this with a textbook, which is often peer reviewed by a number of different professors, sometimes specialists in their particular sub-area, and you can well see why a textbook might actually cost significantly more money. It isn't just a matter of 'collecting old data'. It is a matter of being able to reformat it and present it intelligibly, making sure you haven't made any mistakes (no mean feat in a math text), and covering the materials required for the curriculum you are shooting to address.
As to sports salaries, I hardly think that is a copy control culture issue. We routinely go and pay $30-200 per ticket for tickets to major sporting events. All the athletes are asserting is that they are the core of any such venture and should get the lion's share of the revenues (rather than the owners or other merchandising concerns). Oddly, we don't pay teachers as much because no one pays $30-200 to send their child to school for half a day and generally the school teacher can't merchandise herself nor can the school merchandize itself as athletes and pro teams can. Notice, nowhere in this discussion have I dragged in copy control culture. This is simply our choice of how to expend our limited resources. If we wouldn't pay $200 a seat per game for some sports, the market crashing would quickly fix the 'outrageous' salaries for sporting heroes. If we'd cap our contributions at $5-10 per game per seat, sports would no longer be a lifetime ticket for only a few years 'work'. But that is apparently not what we, the public, want.
As to Hollywood movies: Frankly, people who go to the theatre to get touched, to get educated, to get illuminated about life... need to get out more. My life is full enough of tragedy, pathos, stress, deep emotional context, meaning, and oddly enough, facts and education. So, what is there not enough of? Fun! Excitement! Feel good situations! So if I go to see a movie, which is entertainment, I'm just as happy to see Arnie blowing stuff up or Adam Sandler making an ass of himself or some sci-fi special FX as an imaginary Yoda gets his fuzzy green muppet butt kicked by the Emperor.... all of that is fun, stress relieving, and doesn't have the gaul to be preachy, to try to 'teach me something' or 'touch me'. My normal life where I interact with normal humans is touching and heart-rending enough, usually, that I don't need more of that when I go out for a break. And that's what a movie is, to me anyway. So I understand Hollywood. And here again, the copy control culture doesn't really seem to play into the set of tastes we see evidenced.
So, although I agree we are a copy control culture and I think *AAs are doing bad things with lawyer/legislative backing, your arguments don't exactly bring out these problems in a cause and effect fashion. I think most of us put 'hype' as you call it (arguable) over 'substance' (again your word, again arguable) because we have enough 'substance' from other sources. Life nowadays has a stress level that I don't think people from prior times would really have experienced incessantly (as a result of pace), so I think we just want a break more often. Sports and movies are more a sign of that than any underlying ideology of copy control.
Oddly, though it may be an incorrect interpretation, given the context you often here 'hack' used in, one might think that it has to do with the hatchet job said writer does on the underlying story.
I dunno, taken from the perspective of a software developer who averages about 6 hours a night right now due to workload, I'm thinking that the whole 'sleep for 20 hours' sounds like a great idea.
That obviously means the lions can get done what they need to get done in 4 hours, whereas the herbivores might take a better chunk of their 18.
I'm thinking I know which one I'd rather be. Plus it isn't all that often that a lion gets an arse whuppin' from herbivores. The reverse is obviously not the case.
And maybe someone can explain to me why this refered to carnivores and herbivores, since the former dinosaur had a mixed diet making it an omniovore?
...I understood this entire subthread, including the GURPS explanation.
:)
Something tells me I need to look for the "Magical Amulet of Get-A-Life" next time I'm hacking my way through a problem with my Cleaver 2d6...
The sarcast in me wants to ask "So, what has changed?"...