We've talked with the people at Dreamworks, and here's a quick list of the improvements that they hope to bring to the latest installation in the Ghost in the Shell franchise:
10. Cute kid to follow everyone around and ask a lot of questions 9. Helpless female with nasal voice that screams a lot and has to be rescued over and over 8. Less edgy animation so that American audience doesn't find it quite so jarring 7. Speaking of jarring, do you think we could borrow Jar-jar from Lucas? 6. Deep philosophical conundrums replaced with pop psychology and Jedi aphorisms. 5. More clothing to avoid the R rating 4. More senseless violence to fill in the parts we had to take out. 3. A properly evil villain so people know who to hate. 2. Good old-fashioned technobabble. 1. A talking Donkey (Nice call, Rob!)
After reading through the article, I really have to say that this is probably a case of the support VP not holding his ground against a mean and aggressive development VP. The CIO is also quite a bit to blame for not mediating the dispute very well, but that's support you can't rely on especially if the other VP and the CIO play golf together.
When you see yourself heading into this kind of position, the very first thing you have to do is go into Cover Your Ass mode. If you see something going into distribution that your people aren't trained for, spell out the liabilities to your CIO. If the development team just plain doesn't have time to actually tell you how things are going to work, then mention it to the CIO, see previous statements. You can't tell me that this was completely unforseen.
Don't be pushy. You don't have to actually get the CIO to change things. Executives are notorious for failing to accept that their cost-cutting measures might have consequences. But when things go bad and everyone is running around trying to decide who to blame, calling attention to the CYA emails is the best way to say "Don't even think about trying to blame this on me if you don't want me to whip out a can of I told you so."
People make mistakes. In a highly aggressive environment, people try to blame their mistakes on others. This has nothing to do with IT bullying, it has more to do with geeks trying to play nice with sharks and insisting that they shouldn't have gotten bitten.
...just stupid user interfaces. This is the #1 rule when designing a user interface. If people are doing the wrong thing more often then not, it isn't because they're stupid, it's because you didn't create the user interface correctly.
Taking responsibility for one's inability to convey information is a common problem, and this is a prime example of it. If men mis-understand what women are trying to convey 68% of the time, then who is at fault? You think that men aren't trying their darndest to eek every bit of comprehension they can get out of women's coy smiles? Well, maybe some really aren't, but most of us are desperate for a clue.
Here's an interesting study that I'd like to see: Figure out how much overlap there is between what women do when they're just friendly vs. what women do when they're really interested. There's a huge gray area there, and it varies heavily between one person and the next. You can't see something clearly if it's presenting you with a blurry image.
One of the serious problems with saying whether or not something is a disease or an addiction is actually defining the words "disease" and "addiction".
Anything that causes discomfort or mild misfunction can be called a disease. I've had doctors argue that broken bones are a diseased state. Addictions are even tougher because they're mostly defined as anything that you continue doing despite negative consequences. Thus, gaming IS an addiction because people will continue doing them at the expense of furthering their career. This is true about a hideously large number of things, but people only bother to point it out about the things that they personally don't approve of.
Let's actually look at what causes "addiction". We all have drives that continue to push us around despite no longer being useful. Our hunger can make us eat until we're obese. Our hoarding instincts (store things away in case we need them) turn us into pack rats and compulsive shoppers. Our drive to find the most efficient way to stimulate our minds (sometimes called "laziness") reduces us to hypnotized couch-potatoes. Our inner need for security (or maybe just our insecurities) drive us to eliminate the security of others and ourselves. Anything that makes us produce endorphins can drive even the most resolute of us to distraction. These are our addictions.
With gaming, there is a definite endorphin component. Any gamer knows that they get an endorphin rush and a sense of accomplishment from playing. We use this to supplement and sometimes completely replace a lack of that in our real life. When gaming is the only way to get that rush, the addiction can get completely out of control. For most of us, though, it just isn't a problem.
In the IT industry, when employees are more scarce, then employers have to pay more for them. When employees are less scarce, then employers have to pay less for them. This is the rule of supply and demand, like Remedial Economics 070 or something.
Therefore, when employers say that there is a shortage, then they are saying "employees are more scarce than I want them to be", which means "I have to pay more for the quality of employees that I want". As a rule, unless there are unemployed experts out there just waiting to be snatched up at a pittance (as was the case during the dotcom bust), employers will always feel that they have to pay too much for the quality of employee that they want.
There are three things that you can do to improve the situation:
Pay people more. In the short term, this results in the "Spell Java, earn 120k" situation of the dotcom boom. In the long term it evens out.
Supplement educational programs. This takes a good 4-6 years to pay off, but it's very reliable, and gives industry the opportunity to force University professors to stop teaching people how to program in Cobol
Hire people from outside the US at a lower rate. This is a quick fix that works in the short term, but in the long term results in more people that want too much money. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If the employers are making public complaints about this, guess which of the three they want to do.
This is true for most other industries, too. If you increase the amount that nurses and teachers are paid, just watch how quickly the shortage turns into a glut.
The funny thing about this statement is that you're really describing why human level intelligence isn't that far off. We don't have to come up with something that is infallible in order to have human level intelligence, we just have to come up with something that is no more fallible than your typical human. That's pretty darn fallible, in my experience. The advantage of creating an artificial intelligence is that, when we get to that point, we can improve on it by examining and closing the gap on the fallibilities, which we can't really do with another human.
The secret to software engineering is the concept of "do it once, do it right, do it well". If you can do it at all, then you usually have the first step to getting it right regularly. Then you can examine the way you do it and make it more efficient, more reliable, and less expensive. That's the way it ALWAYS works. The only obstacle to super-intelligent AI's is, and has always been, the "do it once" part of that equation. Where things are standing, we're closing in on that with increasing rapidity by increasing the number of things that robots can do at all.
Another common flaw in people's refuting of the singularity theory is the idea that computers can't do things the same way humans can. Well, duh. The human brain is massively parallel, and standard computing platforms are still working on being multi-processing. This has two flaws. The first is that it suggests that computers will NEVER be able to do it the way humans do it, and the second is that computers don't HAVE to do it the same way humans do it. It doesn't matter how they do it as long as they can actually do it.
To be honest, I agree with you that H2 is a non-starter as far as being an energy technology goes. The only reason it's even vaguely popular is because the current industries see it as a quick fix to a difficult problem.
Contrary to what a lot of people are saying, the problem H2 solves isn't the oil crisis. The oil crisis actually has two components. The first is the obvious one of losing an energy source, and that's what everybody is scrambling to figure out. How do we power our lifestyle without the leverage of eons of geological petroleum formation to take advantage of?
The other component is more subtle. Gasoline has a huge energy density, and that energy density is what makes automobiles possible. What are our options for creating a cost-effective and safe energy density that's comparable to the one gas gives us? Every technology that we're looking at starts with an electrical feed, but what do we do with it after that? Convert electrical to hydrogen? Clean, but inefficient, with the dangers we've discussed. Pack it into a battery? Efficient, but not much density, and the environmental effects of creating and recycling the batteries might be more trouble than it's worth. High efficiency capacitors? Better than batteries environmentally, but with even lower density and the danger of catastrophic discharge. Spin up a flywheel? Excellent density, but the technology is REALLY expensive, and catastrophic failure on one of those acts like a 200lb. hand grenade.
So, no H2 isn't a perfect solution, and it has problems. So does everything else. We'll just have to work out the details as we go along. But please don't cloud the issue with poorly researched sensational claims about the dangers of one technology or another. It's plenty clouded as it is.
Your information about H2 technologies is amazingly flawed. They're not made out of metal, they're made out of graphite composite. They can just about drop those things out of passing airliners without cracking them, and they don't have to be "several inches thick".
Pipe water using our existing system? most cities are already at or beyond capacity of their systems today, let alone adding this load.
You're obviously not grasping the scales involved here. The US uses somewhere on the order of 150 billion gallons of gasoline each year. We use three times that much water every DAY. I think that the system can handle it. Purification isn't nearly the problem you suggest it is. Existing filtration systems would be more than adequate to supply water to your typical hydrolysis system.
not only is parking a leaky tank in a garage a bad idea, so is any underground parking lot, dense parking area with low wind, or other places
This is amazingly poorly thought out. It's based on gasses that are about the same density as air. Hydrogen is much less dense than air (think twice as boyant as Helium), and doesn't require anything resembling a wind to disperse upwards. This stuff seeps through solid metal, you think a parking garage ceiling is going to stop it?
The entire logic of your argument is based on bad science and the idea that things will never improve. I don't buy it.
Every time a perfectly good open source product is produced, it ruins the ability of the competitors to charge people for it. This is like anti-monopoly laws ruining people's ability to wring every ounce of your money out of you by preventing you from getting things somewhere else.
Let's take word processors as an example. Open Office is heinously cutting into Microsoft's profits. Simultaneously, it's increasing the profitability of the companies that use it by an equivalent amount, because they get to keep that cash instead of giving it to Microsoft. It isn't destroying profits, it's just moving them around. They also save money on tracking all of their licenses in the bargain.
For other systems, they still had some altitude control, and therefore could specify generally where the debris would hit. They have no communication with this satellite. It's a bus-sized LEO meteor with a hydrazine explosive punch when it hits, and it could land almost anywhere in the flight path. Toxicity doesn't really matter as much as the damage it could do if it lands in an inhabited area. This kind of lack of control is pretty well guaranteed to tick off the control-freak types who run the country.
Besides, we want to test our ability to shoot evil badguy satellites out of the sky. Who knows when we'd get another excuse to try that?
Those few rare Americans who don't always vote for the home team, ur, party will generally vote for the candidate that they dislike the least. That's why I vote for Cthulu - I'm tired of voting for the LESSER of two evils.
What if 100 people ran around shouting "Anthrax" thus causing a panic?
Oh, damn, hadn't thought of that. Quick, put a ban on white powders! Or at least make a person fill out a form to buy them, for Christ's sake! Irresponsible use of white powders is a crime!
For a drug to treat cancer it must be at toxic to at least cancer cells. And if a drug is used to treat cancer it is by definition chemotherapy.
Not true. It doesn't have to be toxic, it just has to prevent the cancer from spreading for long enough for other treatments to do the killing.
THC, for instance, has been demonstrated to prevent cancer cells from creating new blood vessels to feed themselves. Metastasizing isn't even growth, it's migration, where a cancer colony sends out cells to other parts of the body.
I can give a valid example of overzealous deletion. I organize the group that builds the page on Alcoholism. There are about a half dozen notable, reputable organizations that provide counseling and services to alcoholics and their families. Most of them had established pages in Wikipedia, until someone went through and deleted the articles for #2, 3, and 4, leaving AA and a couple that probably were just overlooked by the admins. The reason give was "non-notability", although two of the three have national memberships in the thousands. Deletion reviews for those two were summarily dismissed by a different admin as "blatant copyright violations", even though the content specifically met Wikipedia's copyright guidelines (similar to existing material, but written by the same author). The admin responsible deleted my attempts to discuss it on his user page without a response. I'm very disappointed.
The other one was about a kid who befriends a neighbor working in 4-D stuff. The kid (because he's young and has an open mind or something) learns to move about in that dimension as well, and communicate with creatures living in other dimensions. Don't remember the title of that one, though.
I think I remember this one. The neighbor is creating speakers that will project sound into the fourth dimension, and attracts the attention of creatures that live considerably "dup" of us. The kid figures out how to actually see in the fourth dimension, and describes the creatures approaching. One of the creatures accidentally knocks a wall out of alignment with our three dimensions with its "elbow" before peeling the kid out of our normal three dimensions. It was an interesting short story, but I don't remember the title either.
I think that's exactly the point, Kaffiene. These languages are dying because they don't belong to anyone any more. You could find people who are descendants of the original speakers and teach it to them, but they'd just be playing dress-up. They live in a different world and have a language that better suits their needs, otherwise they'd still be speaking the old one. The languages have outgrown their value, and the speakers have moved on.
Thinking that culture has value just because it's culture is like people who think that old furniture is valuable just because it's old. That's not enough. It has to be well built, durable, and show a kind of flair that you don't see in current furniture in order to be valuable. Culture is the same way. Those that are well built and show interesting flair will persevere, but most of them will perish like the barely crafted knockoff furniture that is definitely not antique.
When I look at statements like this, I feel like I'm looking at an Onion article.
"Dwayne Snickworth of Boyse, Idaho goes to his death taking a lifetime of experience with him"
Certainly the analysis of a language would hold many fine insights into the world we live in, but the vast majority of those insights are redundant or trivial, and I doubt any of them are untranslatable. The primary thing we lose when a language dies is the history that went into the creation of that language, left on its structure like a million bird-tracks in the sand. Histories are cheap, though, and we'll get over it. I have more important things to concern myself about.
Federalists passed something called the "Alien and Sedition Act" in 1798 which allowed prosecution of anyone who said bad things about the current government. This particular governmental power was hastily repealed in 1802 when it became likely that Thomas Jefferson (a staunch opponent of the act and those who passed it) would win the next presidency.
Politics is like football. We've been at it so long that we forget that fitness was the original purpose of the game, and just care about winning.
Alas, this is the case. The fact that they composed the coupon, and that it contains an ordering of content that it has an ordering and/or layout of content that is original to that coupon is enough to make it coverable by copyright.
Does anyone know what happened with the British copyright case where one guy was claiming that three minutes of silence was sampled from his album of thirty minutes of silence?
Many people's concept of aliens involve creatures just a little bit more advanced than we are flying in on chunks of hardware and occasionally crashing. If there are aliens out there, then their technology would be sufficiently advanced that we wouldn't even recognize it as technology, any more than someone 200 years in our past would be able to puzzle out the purpose of a microchip.
One of the most fascinating (and mathematically sound) predictions about the future of technology involves the exponential advancement of our capabilities (think Moore's Law). Once computers hit the level of human processing capability, the exponential rate has the potential to increase exponentially as those who are designing the next breed of thinking machines get exponentially smarter. This could very well result in processing power that would provide every human on the planet with more thinking capacity than all of mankind currently has, and it could result in it well before 2100.
There are many avenues that mankind could reach once that hits. It's not impossible that any mechanism capable of producing intelligence that powerful is incapable of being un-ambitious enough to self destruct. As our intelligence increases, so does the destructive power of the individual. Right now a couple of ambitious individuals can kill a few hundred with ease. What happens when we become smart enough to design viruses that can kill people and not just computers? If we limit the technology to a select few, how do we prevent those select few from succumbing to in-fighting, with the unselected as both prizes and pawns?
Another avenue involves transcendence. Having the capability to understand everything down to its tiniest particle, a universe without surprises may very regularly result in any race that achieves intelligence transcending beyond the physical world.
There are many, many ideas of what might happen when our intelligence is boosted well past our own, but none of them involve us seeking out new civilizations to share our new found godhood with. Call it two hundred years between when we understand the concept of other star systems and when we no longer find other star systems interesting. The probability of two such civilizations peaking out at the same time is phenomenally small.
Isn't it a little naive to think that such an alien species might be spewing out massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation, just in case someone's listening? I mean, yea, we speak to our plants every now and then but we don't expect them to hear and understand, much less reply.
There is a complete failure to do deeper analysis here. The dotcom bubble occurred because of the creation of a technology that could produce an immense competitive edge. That technology was the web-based storefront, which allowed companies to save immense amounts of money by not having to pay for a physical outlet for their products. What was then costing companies thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year was becoming something that anyone with $35 and a little skill with HTML could set up in a week. There was a huge rush to be the first to grab a niche in this new environment, and poor understanding of the dynamics of that environment.
There is no such obvious competitive edge with Web 2.0. There wasn't anything near that kind of edge with CD-Roms. There certainly is not a flood of poorly informed investors willing to pour cash into anything that sounds vaguely marketable. Web 2.0 may be slightly over-invested, and the investors may suddenly realize that their new golden boy isn't as golden as they thought it was. Buzz words come and buzz words go, but nothing has had the all-pervasive influence of the birthing of the internet. We do not have insanely inflated stock values, and neither is there a huge glut of tech jobs.
I'm sorry, Mr. Dvorak, but I think that in this case you're leaping before you look.
I'm glad they posted this one in the humor department. I'd actually like to see a study that measures the mean time to divorce based on intelligence.
My personal suspicion is that, above a certain intelligence threshold, the world in general has a lot to offer people before the hormones kick in. We spend a lot of time and effort seeking out and examining all of the cool stuff and build up momentum that makes a mess of us when the hormones kick in. Below that threshold, people spend their younger years trying to figure out the aesthetics without bothering to wonder what's under the hood. It's just convenient for them that aesthetics tend to be what get people laid, especially early in life.
Slashdot Mirror
We've talked with the people at Dreamworks, and here's a quick list of the improvements that they hope to bring to the latest installation in the Ghost in the Shell franchise:
10. Cute kid to follow everyone around and ask a lot of questions
9. Helpless female with nasal voice that screams a lot and has to be rescued over and over
8. Less edgy animation so that American audience doesn't find it quite so jarring
7. Speaking of jarring, do you think we could borrow Jar-jar from Lucas?
6. Deep philosophical conundrums replaced with pop psychology and Jedi aphorisms.
5. More clothing to avoid the R rating
4. More senseless violence to fill in the parts we had to take out.
3. A properly evil villain so people know who to hate.
2. Good old-fashioned technobabble.
1. A talking Donkey (Nice call, Rob!)
After reading through the article, I really have to say that this is probably a case of the support VP not holding his ground against a mean and aggressive development VP. The CIO is also quite a bit to blame for not mediating the dispute very well, but that's support you can't rely on especially if the other VP and the CIO play golf together.
When you see yourself heading into this kind of position, the very first thing you have to do is go into Cover Your Ass mode. If you see something going into distribution that your people aren't trained for, spell out the liabilities to your CIO. If the development team just plain doesn't have time to actually tell you how things are going to work, then mention it to the CIO, see previous statements. You can't tell me that this was completely unforseen.
Don't be pushy. You don't have to actually get the CIO to change things. Executives are notorious for failing to accept that their cost-cutting measures might have consequences. But when things go bad and everyone is running around trying to decide who to blame, calling attention to the CYA emails is the best way to say "Don't even think about trying to blame this on me if you don't want me to whip out a can of I told you so."
People make mistakes. In a highly aggressive environment, people try to blame their mistakes on others. This has nothing to do with IT bullying, it has more to do with geeks trying to play nice with sharks and insisting that they shouldn't have gotten bitten.
...just stupid user interfaces. This is the #1 rule when designing a user interface. If people are doing the wrong thing more often then not, it isn't because they're stupid, it's because you didn't create the user interface correctly.
Taking responsibility for one's inability to convey information is a common problem, and this is a prime example of it. If men mis-understand what women are trying to convey 68% of the time, then who is at fault? You think that men aren't trying their darndest to eek every bit of comprehension they can get out of women's coy smiles? Well, maybe some really aren't, but most of us are desperate for a clue.
Here's an interesting study that I'd like to see: Figure out how much overlap there is between what women do when they're just friendly vs. what women do when they're really interested. There's a huge gray area there, and it varies heavily between one person and the next. You can't see something clearly if it's presenting you with a blurry image.
One of the serious problems with saying whether or not something is a disease or an addiction is actually defining the words "disease" and "addiction".
Anything that causes discomfort or mild misfunction can be called a disease. I've had doctors argue that broken bones are a diseased state. Addictions are even tougher because they're mostly defined as anything that you continue doing despite negative consequences. Thus, gaming IS an addiction because people will continue doing them at the expense of furthering their career. This is true about a hideously large number of things, but people only bother to point it out about the things that they personally don't approve of.
Let's actually look at what causes "addiction". We all have drives that continue to push us around despite no longer being useful. Our hunger can make us eat until we're obese. Our hoarding instincts (store things away in case we need them) turn us into pack rats and compulsive shoppers. Our drive to find the most efficient way to stimulate our minds (sometimes called "laziness") reduces us to hypnotized couch-potatoes. Our inner need for security (or maybe just our insecurities) drive us to eliminate the security of others and ourselves. Anything that makes us produce endorphins can drive even the most resolute of us to distraction. These are our addictions.
With gaming, there is a definite endorphin component. Any gamer knows that they get an endorphin rush and a sense of accomplishment from playing. We use this to supplement and sometimes completely replace a lack of that in our real life. When gaming is the only way to get that rush, the addiction can get completely out of control. For most of us, though, it just isn't a problem.
Therefore, when employers say that there is a shortage, then they are saying "employees are more scarce than I want them to be", which means "I have to pay more for the quality of employees that I want". As a rule, unless there are unemployed experts out there just waiting to be snatched up at a pittance (as was the case during the dotcom bust), employers will always feel that they have to pay too much for the quality of employee that they want.
There are three things that you can do to improve the situation:
If the employers are making public complaints about this, guess which of the three they want to do.
This is true for most other industries, too. If you increase the amount that nurses and teachers are paid, just watch how quickly the shortage turns into a glut.
The funny thing about this statement is that you're really describing why human level intelligence isn't that far off. We don't have to come up with something that is infallible in order to have human level intelligence, we just have to come up with something that is no more fallible than your typical human. That's pretty darn fallible, in my experience. The advantage of creating an artificial intelligence is that, when we get to that point, we can improve on it by examining and closing the gap on the fallibilities, which we can't really do with another human.
The secret to software engineering is the concept of "do it once, do it right, do it well". If you can do it at all, then you usually have the first step to getting it right regularly. Then you can examine the way you do it and make it more efficient, more reliable, and less expensive. That's the way it ALWAYS works. The only obstacle to super-intelligent AI's is, and has always been, the "do it once" part of that equation. Where things are standing, we're closing in on that with increasing rapidity by increasing the number of things that robots can do at all.
Another common flaw in people's refuting of the singularity theory is the idea that computers can't do things the same way humans can. Well, duh. The human brain is massively parallel, and standard computing platforms are still working on being multi-processing. This has two flaws. The first is that it suggests that computers will NEVER be able to do it the way humans do it, and the second is that computers don't HAVE to do it the same way humans do it. It doesn't matter how they do it as long as they can actually do it.
To be honest, I agree with you that H2 is a non-starter as far as being an energy technology goes. The only reason it's even vaguely popular is because the current industries see it as a quick fix to a difficult problem.
Contrary to what a lot of people are saying, the problem H2 solves isn't the oil crisis. The oil crisis actually has two components. The first is the obvious one of losing an energy source, and that's what everybody is scrambling to figure out. How do we power our lifestyle without the leverage of eons of geological petroleum formation to take advantage of?
The other component is more subtle. Gasoline has a huge energy density, and that energy density is what makes automobiles possible. What are our options for creating a cost-effective and safe energy density that's comparable to the one gas gives us? Every technology that we're looking at starts with an electrical feed, but what do we do with it after that? Convert electrical to hydrogen? Clean, but inefficient, with the dangers we've discussed. Pack it into a battery? Efficient, but not much density, and the environmental effects of creating and recycling the batteries might be more trouble than it's worth. High efficiency capacitors? Better than batteries environmentally, but with even lower density and the danger of catastrophic discharge. Spin up a flywheel? Excellent density, but the technology is REALLY expensive, and catastrophic failure on one of those acts like a 200lb. hand grenade.
So, no H2 isn't a perfect solution, and it has problems. So does everything else. We'll just have to work out the details as we go along. But please don't cloud the issue with poorly researched sensational claims about the dangers of one technology or another. It's plenty clouded as it is.
Gee, you'd think that after over a century of this that we'd figured out how to handle explosive gasses.
Your information about H2 technologies is amazingly flawed. They're not made out of metal, they're made out of graphite composite. They can just about drop those things out of passing airliners without cracking them, and they don't have to be "several inches thick".
Pipe water using our existing system? most cities are already at or beyond capacity of their systems today, let alone adding this load.
You're obviously not grasping the scales involved here. The US uses somewhere on the order of 150 billion gallons of gasoline each year. We use three times that much water every DAY. I think that the system can handle it. Purification isn't nearly the problem you suggest it is. Existing filtration systems would be more than adequate to supply water to your typical hydrolysis system.
not only is parking a leaky tank in a garage a bad idea, so is any underground parking lot, dense parking area with low wind, or other places
This is amazingly poorly thought out. It's based on gasses that are about the same density as air. Hydrogen is much less dense than air (think twice as boyant as Helium), and doesn't require anything resembling a wind to disperse upwards. This stuff seeps through solid metal, you think a parking garage ceiling is going to stop it?
The entire logic of your argument is based on bad science and the idea that things will never improve. I don't buy it.
Every time a perfectly good open source product is produced, it ruins the ability of the competitors to charge people for it. This is like anti-monopoly laws ruining people's ability to wring every ounce of your money out of you by preventing you from getting things somewhere else.
Let's take word processors as an example. Open Office is heinously cutting into Microsoft's profits. Simultaneously, it's increasing the profitability of the companies that use it by an equivalent amount, because they get to keep that cash instead of giving it to Microsoft. It isn't destroying profits, it's just moving them around. They also save money on tracking all of their licenses in the bargain.
For other systems, they still had some altitude control, and therefore could specify generally where the debris would hit. They have no communication with this satellite. It's a bus-sized LEO meteor with a hydrazine explosive punch when it hits, and it could land almost anywhere in the flight path. Toxicity doesn't really matter as much as the damage it could do if it lands in an inhabited area. This kind of lack of control is pretty well guaranteed to tick off the control-freak types who run the country.
Besides, we want to test our ability to shoot evil badguy satellites out of the sky. Who knows when we'd get another excuse to try that?
Those few rare Americans who don't always vote for the home team, ur, party will generally vote for the candidate that they dislike the least. That's why I vote for Cthulu - I'm tired of voting for the LESSER of two evils.
Yea, ok, old joke, but it just had to be said.
What if 100 people ran around shouting "Anthrax" thus causing a panic?
Oh, damn, hadn't thought of that. Quick, put a ban on white powders! Or at least make a person fill out a form to buy them, for Christ's sake! Irresponsible use of white powders is a crime!
For a drug to treat cancer it must be at toxic to at least cancer cells. And if a drug is used to treat cancer it is by definition chemotherapy.
Not true. It doesn't have to be toxic, it just has to prevent the cancer from spreading for long enough for other treatments to do the killing.
THC, for instance, has been demonstrated to prevent cancer cells from creating new blood vessels to feed themselves. Metastasizing isn't even growth, it's migration, where a cancer colony sends out cells to other parts of the body.
I can give a valid example of overzealous deletion. I organize the group that builds the page on Alcoholism. There are about a half dozen notable, reputable organizations that provide counseling and services to alcoholics and their families. Most of them had established pages in Wikipedia, until someone went through and deleted the articles for #2, 3, and 4, leaving AA and a couple that probably were just overlooked by the admins. The reason give was "non-notability", although two of the three have national memberships in the thousands. Deletion reviews for those two were summarily dismissed by a different admin as "blatant copyright violations", even though the content specifically met Wikipedia's copyright guidelines (similar to existing material, but written by the same author). The admin responsible deleted my attempts to discuss it on his user page without a response. I'm very disappointed.
The other one was about a kid who befriends a neighbor working in 4-D stuff. The kid (because he's young and has an open mind or something) learns to move about in that dimension as well, and communicate with creatures living in other dimensions. Don't remember the title of that one, though.
I think I remember this one. The neighbor is creating speakers that will project sound into the fourth dimension, and attracts the attention of creatures that live considerably "dup" of us. The kid figures out how to actually see in the fourth dimension, and describes the creatures approaching. One of the creatures accidentally knocks a wall out of alignment with our three dimensions with its "elbow" before peeling the kid out of our normal three dimensions. It was an interesting short story, but I don't remember the title either.
I think that's exactly the point, Kaffiene. These languages are dying because they don't belong to anyone any more. You could find people who are descendants of the original speakers and teach it to them, but they'd just be playing dress-up. They live in a different world and have a language that better suits their needs, otherwise they'd still be speaking the old one. The languages have outgrown their value, and the speakers have moved on.
Thinking that culture has value just because it's culture is like people who think that old furniture is valuable just because it's old. That's not enough. It has to be well built, durable, and show a kind of flair that you don't see in current furniture in order to be valuable. Culture is the same way. Those that are well built and show interesting flair will persevere, but most of them will perish like the barely crafted knockoff furniture that is definitely not antique.
When I look at statements like this, I feel like I'm looking at an Onion article.
"Dwayne Snickworth of Boyse, Idaho goes to his death taking a lifetime of experience with him"
Certainly the analysis of a language would hold many fine insights into the world we live in, but the vast majority of those insights are redundant or trivial, and I doubt any of them are untranslatable. The primary thing we lose when a language dies is the history that went into the creation of that language, left on its structure like a million bird-tracks in the sand. Histories are cheap, though, and we'll get over it. I have more important things to concern myself about.
Federalists passed something called the "Alien and Sedition Act" in 1798 which allowed prosecution of anyone who said bad things about the current government. This particular governmental power was hastily repealed in 1802 when it became likely that Thomas Jefferson (a staunch opponent of the act and those who passed it) would win the next presidency.
Politics is like football. We've been at it so long that we forget that fitness was the original purpose of the game, and just care about winning.
Ok, it just took a little re-reading to interpret that, but that was my first impression of the title.
Alas, this is the case. The fact that they composed the coupon, and that it contains an ordering of content that it has an ordering and/or layout of content that is original to that coupon is enough to make it coverable by copyright.
Does anyone know what happened with the British copyright case where one guy was claiming that three minutes of silence was sampled from his album of thirty minutes of silence?
God = Magic.
Don't understand it? Must be magic.
Many people's concept of aliens involve creatures just a little bit more advanced than we are flying in on chunks of hardware and occasionally crashing. If there are aliens out there, then their technology would be sufficiently advanced that we wouldn't even recognize it as technology, any more than someone 200 years in our past would be able to puzzle out the purpose of a microchip.
One of the most fascinating (and mathematically sound) predictions about the future of technology involves the exponential advancement of our capabilities (think Moore's Law). Once computers hit the level of human processing capability, the exponential rate has the potential to increase exponentially as those who are designing the next breed of thinking machines get exponentially smarter. This could very well result in processing power that would provide every human on the planet with more thinking capacity than all of mankind currently has, and it could result in it well before 2100.
There are many avenues that mankind could reach once that hits. It's not impossible that any mechanism capable of producing intelligence that powerful is incapable of being un-ambitious enough to self destruct. As our intelligence increases, so does the destructive power of the individual. Right now a couple of ambitious individuals can kill a few hundred with ease. What happens when we become smart enough to design viruses that can kill people and not just computers? If we limit the technology to a select few, how do we prevent those select few from succumbing to in-fighting, with the unselected as both prizes and pawns?
Another avenue involves transcendence. Having the capability to understand everything down to its tiniest particle, a universe without surprises may very regularly result in any race that achieves intelligence transcending beyond the physical world.
There are many, many ideas of what might happen when our intelligence is boosted well past our own, but none of them involve us seeking out new civilizations to share our new found godhood with. Call it two hundred years between when we understand the concept of other star systems and when we no longer find other star systems interesting. The probability of two such civilizations peaking out at the same time is phenomenally small.
Isn't it a little naive to think that such an alien species might be spewing out massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation, just in case someone's listening? I mean, yea, we speak to our plants every now and then but we don't expect them to hear and understand, much less reply.
There is a complete failure to do deeper analysis here. The dotcom bubble occurred because of the creation of a technology that could produce an immense competitive edge. That technology was the web-based storefront, which allowed companies to save immense amounts of money by not having to pay for a physical outlet for their products. What was then costing companies thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year was becoming something that anyone with $35 and a little skill with HTML could set up in a week. There was a huge rush to be the first to grab a niche in this new environment, and poor understanding of the dynamics of that environment.
There is no such obvious competitive edge with Web 2.0. There wasn't anything near that kind of edge with CD-Roms. There certainly is not a flood of poorly informed investors willing to pour cash into anything that sounds vaguely marketable. Web 2.0 may be slightly over-invested, and the investors may suddenly realize that their new golden boy isn't as golden as they thought it was. Buzz words come and buzz words go, but nothing has had the all-pervasive influence of the birthing of the internet. We do not have insanely inflated stock values, and neither is there a huge glut of tech jobs.
I'm sorry, Mr. Dvorak, but I think that in this case you're leaping before you look.
I'm glad they posted this one in the humor department. I'd actually like to see a study that measures the mean time to divorce based on intelligence.
My personal suspicion is that, above a certain intelligence threshold, the world in general has a lot to offer people before the hormones kick in. We spend a lot of time and effort seeking out and examining all of the cool stuff and build up momentum that makes a mess of us when the hormones kick in. Below that threshold, people spend their younger years trying to figure out the aesthetics without bothering to wonder what's under the hood. It's just convenient for them that aesthetics tend to be what get people laid, especially early in life.