Kudos, you wrote the most useful, relevant, important post in this whole thread.
Related to that, everyone, and I mean everyone - liberal & conservative alike (including libertarians;)...should read Myths of Free Trade and learn something real about our relationship with China and the rest of the world.
I would like it if we could both 1) work to stave off human-unfriendly climate change here on Earth and 2) work to figure out how to colonize other planets properly.
I also have a feeling that (2) will turn out to be much more difficult than (1), so perhaps we should prioritize our energies a bit towards (1) so we can safely stay here the length of time it will take to accomplish (2).
You got to know what you want before you can go looking for it in a list.
The usual thing that happens with me on Windows or Mac OS X: I'm browsing around and find some developer's site with a new game, or I hear about some cool new program that does X, or I'm looking for a program to fill need Y - I download them and run them.
The apt-get+GUI solution: I'm browsing around and find some developer's site with a new game (but there's no version for Ubunto/myDistro, only source, or no Linux version at all), or I hear about some cool new program that does X (but it's not in the repository, and going to the dev's site results in the same problems previously mentioned), or I'm looking for a program to fill need Y (but I have no clue what to look for in the repository).
I find dragging-and-dropping more convenient for me.
Cost, as another poster mentioned. Not just the cost of building/launching/deliverying said satellites - but at the rate technology is improving, the satellites would be outdated incredibly soon, prompting scientists to want to send new satellites to answer new questions.
It's more cost effective to send cheaper (less permanent design needs) single-shot probes to answer specific questions and gather specific data. Then when new questions arise from the data collected, and you would have to design & send a new permanent satellite, you can just design & build another cheaper short-term probe.
I'm not sure there'd be any benefit to long-term satellite data anyway. What would we be looking for, alien outposts?
One does not for example hear people talk about a "Dell life-style" or a "Gateway life-style").
Well, I don't hear people talk about an "Apple life-style" either, but then, maybe I just don't hang out with the right people.
It's always seemed to me that the push for Apple to be associated with some particular life-style is actually coming from people who don't like Apple, and are always talking about "clueless hipsters" and "artsy types" and trying to disparage both the perceived demographic and, indirectly, Apple.
Sadly, economics isn't a science and has to deal with human irrational behavior in every area.
I suspect at least two, possibly more, important people would have to leave Microsoft before their pride would let them make this particular business decision...
Money is money. Money can be used to amplify speech. Money can be used to save time. Money can be used to control, extort, pay off, bribe, reward, incentivize, and many other things that involve power relationships.
Governance & politics, however, should be shielded from this as much as possible. Governance & politics are supposed to be about ideas, and which ones are best for managing society. (And if you don't think society should be managed, that's fine, that's another idea, and money shouldn't have an impact in whether or not it gets implemented.)
Therefore, SCOTUS needs to acknowledge that money is not speech, and money should not be involved in politics.
In addition, can we stop pretending the news needs to be "balanced"? Not every issue or event has "sides" and when they do they often don't have equal merit.
The library doesn't update itself automatically...
Not sure what you mean here - sure it does. You're interacting with your files via iTunes, right? I mean, if you're going out into your file system and moving stuff around, and then wondering why iTunes doesn't notice, you're just wasting your time complaining about it. The whole point is to use iTunes to interact with your music files and just let it worry about organizing that section of your file system. If you really must go futz with the files & folders themselves, then maybe iTunes just isn't for you in the first place.
Man, I'm not saying the Democrats are paragons of perfection, but geez, talk about drinking the konservative koolaid! Your post should be modded +1 Funny
How about limiting corporate control of the law making process? How about dropping our spending under two trillion dollar a year. HOW ABOUT PAYING DOWN THE 7 TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT. How about opening up the federal healthcare group to all US citizens or permanent residents.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
Unfortunately, I think you'd have a hard time finding a majority of citizens (let alone voting citizens) who are aware of what these statements mean, let alone are aware of the problems they address. Republicans don't win by addressing problems like these, they win by saying "Ooh, look, boogeyman! We'll keep you safe from the communists/terrorists/abortionists/atheists/scary- people-who-aren't-like-you!"
Well, you could create an interesting game of "guided" evolution, where they player gets to make continuous modifications to the environment(s) and see how the organisms evolve to adapt to them. Make your own Earth! Play with geological history!
But then you're just moving the design from biology to geology & astrophysics (solar radiation, etc. could be mutable, too)...
I agree with your sentiment, halfway. What pisses me off about your type of argument, however, is that it commits the reverse error of assuming that everything that a person experiences in life is something they can make a choice about. Not everything in your life is under your direct control.
Proper social policy needs to meet these two aspects of reality in the middle, balancing choice with a safety net for the things we can't make choices over. National healthcare has been demonstrated to work beautifully, we just need to implement it. It doesn't mean you're suddenly going to be paying to keep drug addicts and bacon-eaters alive. Education and prevention would have to be a major component.
A great many people would benefit immediately from the simple preventative measure of access to annual checkups. If you can't get that, and many can't, the first time a professional sees your problems is when they're full-blown problems and you go to the emergency room. That's a huge cost which has to be absorbed somewhere (either by themselves (in which case they get even poorer and become a bigger drag on the economy), or by government or insurance, in which case you pay for it (taxes, premiums)). The cost would be less to us all if these people could see a regular doctor.
For some, hatred for him and removing him is enough, if you thought the status quo before him was just fine - then you're likely to think all he's done is screw everything up, and you're not looking for NEW new ideas, you're looking to re-load your last game save, from 1999...
I don't think that my tax dollars should be going to my neighbor's teenage son so that he can surf for pr0n.
I don't think that my tax dollars should be subsidizing spreading this newfangled telephone service out to the desert so some housewife in B*mf*ck Nevada can gab all day to her neighbors.
Wait, you say the benefits to the nation as a whole might outweigh the misuses?
Nope, it's closer to Intelligent Design than evolution. Here's why. Evolution has a number of aspects:
1) Randomness. When new alleles appear, they are the result of random recombination/error/mutation. However, it appears that in Spore, the player has control over new traits, choosing them as they go. Changes are not a result of natural recombination or random error/mutation.
2) Environmental pressure. A population changes over time when the frequency of alleles changes, often because the environment selects for or against certain traits. In the Spore game, it seems that the player can pick whatever traits he wants, tailoring the organism to its environment. Sure, the player may find that, for example, the short legs he chose makes the creature move too slowly so it's always getting eaten, so he has to reload his earlier game and choose different legs. That's almost natural selection, but not quite.
3) everything else... Everything that follows from gene pool dynamics and random changes (genetic drift, migration, the bottleneck effect)... These things don't seem to be represented in the game at all.
It's entirely an analogy to Intelligent Design.
Not that it makes it a bad game - I'm sure going to enjoy it if it delivers most of what it promises. But it has very little to do with evolution.
I just wish he'd invented a way to beat Bush in 2000.
*sigh*
Re:There needs to be a "Fun" score in every review
on
Black Review
·
· Score: 1
Because such a review is useless in a world where everyone's idea of "fun" is different.
A more involved review attempts to describe the experience and the reviewer's reaction to it. Good reviews try to do so in a way that let's the reader figure out if they would agree.
I thought this review was pretty good because it outlined what the game was about, some things the reviewer thought were good, some he thought were bad, and even better, he explained why he thought so, so I could decide to some extent whether I would agree with him or not, and thereby decide whether I care to go get the game or not.
If he'd just said "it's fun" - A) it seems to me like that wouldn't necessarily be accurate for him, and B) even if it was fun for him, just saying "I give it a thumbs up" is useless to everyone.
Here's what's holding me back from ebooks: Regular books are better. On all counts, regular books are simply better.
The only thing I've ever wished a regular book would have in common with computers or electronic communicat is text search. So if someone can make a device that is basically exactly like current books, but allows you to do quick text searches, I'd jump all over that.
The only (current tech) solution is probably to publish all books with a built-in chip (or disk or CD-ROM even) that contains the text of the book. (This can be all DRM'd up in a special interface or whatever if they want, as long as it runs on my Mac or Windows or Linux machine (or PDA or iPod or whatever I need).)
The point would be to be able to search the text and find where in the book __BLANK__ occurs. Give me a page number so I can flip to it in the book, and not have to read it on the screen, because, again: Books are just better.
Freedoms do not mean free room, borad, health care, eduction, and (insert good cause here) coerced at every one elses expense by the popular mob. Anyone can do grand feats when done with other peoples money.
Better that than free room, board, health care, education and (insert anything else here) coerced at the popular mob's expence by a select few individuals, who inevitably pass this accumlated capital to their own offspring and friends. Only Andrew Carnegie can do grand feats under this system...
They do, however, create an intense bulwark against others implementing their ideas. Cost of startup, all that stuff. Luckily for IT, throwing some code up on a webserver is a bit less costly. Sustaining the bandwidth/server needs if it succeeds wildly is another story...
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos, you wrote the most useful, relevant, important post in this whole thread.
;) ...should read Myths of Free Trade and learn something real about our relationship with China and the rest of the world.
Related to that, everyone, and I mean everyone - liberal & conservative alike (including libertarians
I would like it if we could both 1) work to stave off human-unfriendly climate change here on Earth and 2) work to figure out how to colonize other planets properly.
I also have a feeling that (2) will turn out to be much more difficult than (1), so perhaps we should prioritize our energies a bit towards (1) so we can safely stay here the length of time it will take to accomplish (2).
You got to know what you want before you can go looking for it in a list.
The usual thing that happens with me on Windows or Mac OS X: I'm browsing around and find some developer's site with a new game, or I hear about some cool new program that does X, or I'm looking for a program to fill need Y - I download them and run them.
The apt-get+GUI solution: I'm browsing around and find some developer's site with a new game (but there's no version for Ubunto/myDistro, only source, or no Linux version at all), or I hear about some cool new program that does X (but it's not in the repository, and going to the dev's site results in the same problems previously mentioned), or I'm looking for a program to fill need Y (but I have no clue what to look for in the repository).
I find dragging-and-dropping more convenient for me.
Cost, as another poster mentioned. Not just the cost of building/launching/deliverying said satellites - but at the rate technology is improving, the satellites would be outdated incredibly soon, prompting scientists to want to send new satellites to answer new questions.
It's more cost effective to send cheaper (less permanent design needs) single-shot probes to answer specific questions and gather specific data. Then when new questions arise from the data collected, and you would have to design & send a new permanent satellite, you can just design & build another cheaper short-term probe.
I'm not sure there'd be any benefit to long-term satellite data anyway. What would we be looking for, alien outposts?
No, no, no, mods. It wasn't trollish, it was repetitively redundant!
I was trying to read the TFA on my mobile cell phone while automatically getting cash from an ATM machine but the text of the TFA was too small small.
Hmm, sounds neat, but on the other hand, I kinda like my iPod, you know?
One does not for example hear people talk about a "Dell life-style" or a "Gateway life-style").
Well, I don't hear people talk about an "Apple life-style" either, but then, maybe I just don't hang out with the right people.
It's always seemed to me that the push for Apple to be associated with some particular life-style is actually coming from people who don't like Apple, and are always talking about "clueless hipsters" and "artsy types" and trying to disparage both the perceived demographic and, indirectly, Apple.
Sadly, economics isn't a science and has to deal with human irrational behavior in every area.
I suspect at least two, possibly more, important people would have to leave Microsoft before their pride would let them make this particular business decision...
Money is not speech.
Money is not time.
Money is money. Money can be used to amplify speech. Money can be used to save time. Money can be used to control, extort, pay off, bribe, reward, incentivize, and many other things that involve power relationships.
Governance & politics, however, should be shielded from this as much as possible. Governance & politics are supposed to be about ideas, and which ones are best for managing society. (And if you don't think society should be managed, that's fine, that's another idea, and money shouldn't have an impact in whether or not it gets implemented.)
Therefore, SCOTUS needs to acknowledge that money is not speech, and money should not be involved in politics.
the gatekeepers, the middlemen--the ones that own the means of distribution, starting with railroads.
Am I confused, or do we not still have these in the form of ISPs, the telecom companies, etc?
Oh yeah, Brit Hume's just a paragon of journalism.
In addition, can we stop pretending the news needs to be "balanced"? Not every issue or event has "sides" and when they do they often don't have equal merit.
The library doesn't update itself automatically...
Not sure what you mean here - sure it does. You're interacting with your files via iTunes, right? I mean, if you're going out into your file system and moving stuff around, and then wondering why iTunes doesn't notice, you're just wasting your time complaining about it. The whole point is to use iTunes to interact with your music files and just let it worry about organizing that section of your file system. If you really must go futz with the files & folders themselves, then maybe iTunes just isn't for you in the first place.
Man, I'm not saying the Democrats are paragons of perfection, but geez, talk about drinking the konservative koolaid! Your post should be modded +1 Funny
How about limiting corporate control of the law making process? How about dropping our spending under two trillion dollar a year. HOW ABOUT PAYING DOWN THE 7 TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT. How about opening up the federal healthcare group to all US citizens or permanent residents.
- people-who-aren't-like-you!"
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
Unfortunately, I think you'd have a hard time finding a majority of citizens (let alone voting citizens) who are aware of what these statements mean, let alone are aware of the problems they address. Republicans don't win by addressing problems like these, they win by saying "Ooh, look, boogeyman! We'll keep you safe from the communists/terrorists/abortionists/atheists/scary
Well, you could create an interesting game of "guided" evolution, where they player gets to make continuous modifications to the environment(s) and see how the organisms evolve to adapt to them. Make your own Earth! Play with geological history!
But then you're just moving the design from biology to geology & astrophysics (solar radiation, etc. could be mutable, too)...
I agree with your sentiment, halfway. What pisses me off about your type of argument, however, is that it commits the reverse error of assuming that everything that a person experiences in life is something they can make a choice about. Not everything in your life is under your direct control.
Proper social policy needs to meet these two aspects of reality in the middle, balancing choice with a safety net for the things we can't make choices over. National healthcare has been demonstrated to work beautifully, we just need to implement it. It doesn't mean you're suddenly going to be paying to keep drug addicts and bacon-eaters alive. Education and prevention would have to be a major component.
A great many people would benefit immediately from the simple preventative measure of access to annual checkups. If you can't get that, and many can't, the first time a professional sees your problems is when they're full-blown problems and you go to the emergency room. That's a huge cost which has to be absorbed somewhere (either by themselves (in which case they get even poorer and become a bigger drag on the economy), or by government or insurance, in which case you pay for it (taxes, premiums)). The cost would be less to us all if these people could see a regular doctor.
For some, hatred for him and removing him is enough, if you thought the status quo before him was just fine - then you're likely to think all he's done is screw everything up, and you're not looking for NEW new ideas, you're looking to re-load your last game save, from 1999...
I don't think that my tax dollars should be going to my neighbor's teenage son so that he can surf for pr0n.
I don't think that my tax dollars should be subsidizing spreading this newfangled telephone service out to the desert so some housewife in B*mf*ck Nevada can gab all day to her neighbors.
Wait, you say the benefits to the nation as a whole might outweigh the misuses?
Nope, it's closer to Intelligent Design than evolution. Here's why. Evolution has a number of aspects:
1) Randomness. When new alleles appear, they are the result of random recombination/error/mutation. However, it appears that in Spore, the player has control over new traits, choosing them as they go. Changes are not a result of natural recombination or random error/mutation.
2) Environmental pressure. A population changes over time when the frequency of alleles changes, often because the environment selects for or against certain traits. In the Spore game, it seems that the player can pick whatever traits he wants, tailoring the organism to its environment. Sure, the player may find that, for example, the short legs he chose makes the creature move too slowly so it's always getting eaten, so he has to reload his earlier game and choose different legs. That's almost natural selection, but not quite.
3) everything else... Everything that follows from gene pool dynamics and random changes (genetic drift, migration, the bottleneck effect)... These things don't seem to be represented in the game at all.
It's entirely an analogy to Intelligent Design.
Not that it makes it a bad game - I'm sure going to enjoy it if it delivers most of what it promises. But it has very little to do with evolution.
I just wish he'd invented a way to beat Bush in 2000.
*sigh*
Because such a review is useless in a world where everyone's idea of "fun" is different.
A more involved review attempts to describe the experience and the reviewer's reaction to it. Good reviews try to do so in a way that let's the reader figure out if they would agree.
I thought this review was pretty good because it outlined what the game was about, some things the reviewer thought were good, some he thought were bad, and even better, he explained why he thought so, so I could decide to some extent whether I would agree with him or not, and thereby decide whether I care to go get the game or not.
If he'd just said "it's fun" - A) it seems to me like that wouldn't necessarily be accurate for him, and B) even if it was fun for him, just saying "I give it a thumbs up" is useless to everyone.
Here's what's holding me back from ebooks: Regular books are better. On all counts, regular books are simply better.
The only thing I've ever wished a regular book would have in common with computers or electronic communicat is text search. So if someone can make a device that is basically exactly like current books, but allows you to do quick text searches, I'd jump all over that.
The only (current tech) solution is probably to publish all books with a built-in chip (or disk or CD-ROM even) that contains the text of the book. (This can be all DRM'd up in a special interface or whatever if they want, as long as it runs on my Mac or Windows or Linux machine (or PDA or iPod or whatever I need).)
The point would be to be able to search the text and find where in the book __BLANK__ occurs. Give me a page number so I can flip to it in the book, and not have to read it on the screen, because, again: Books are just better.
Freedoms do not mean free room, borad, health care, eduction, and (insert good cause here) coerced at every one elses expense by the popular mob. Anyone can do grand feats when done with other peoples money.
Better that than free room, board, health care, education and (insert anything else here) coerced at the popular mob's expence by a select few individuals, who inevitably pass this accumlated capital to their own offspring and friends. Only Andrew Carnegie can do grand feats under this system...
They do, however, create an intense bulwark against others implementing their ideas. Cost of startup, all that stuff. Luckily for IT, throwing some code up on a webserver is a bit less costly. Sustaining the bandwidth/server needs if it succeeds wildly is another story...